Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  “That goes for my girls and me, too,” Haley said, glancing around the room. “Our 401(k) program is tied up with OFM. That’s why I’m sure Dan couldn’t possibly have been mixed up with whatever Mr. McKinzie was pulling. Most of us have worked here for years. Dan wouldn’t have knowingly betrayed us like that, and if he had seen any of this coming in advance, surely he would have given us a chance to pull our money out of harm’s way.”

  Ali knew that, with bankruptcy clawback provisions in place, early withdrawals from the funds wouldn’t have helped. She suspected that Haley had no idea that was the case.

  “You seem to think Dan was a good guy.”

  Haley nodded. “The best.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  Ali saw at once that she had touched on a difficult topic. Haley’s eyes immediately filled with tears.

  “I’ve worked for both Dan and Millie for the better part of twenty years,” she said. “They were far more than just employers. They were the best, and I loved them both. Even though I spent some time this morning working on making funeral arrangements, I still can’t believe they’re gone.”

  “Wait,” Ali said with a frown, “are you saying you’re in charge of their final arrangements?”

  Haley nodded. “I’m the executrix of their estates. There’s no one else.”

  “So you must have been very close.”

  “We were,” Haley agreed quietly, “although not so much the last six months or so. OFM hired a new personal assistant for Dan down in Phoenix, and she’s been handling most of the day-to-day stuff I used to do.”

  “What’s the new PA’s name?” Ali asked. “We should probably talk to her.”

  “Jessica Denton.”

  “Do you have any contact information on her?”

  “Back at my desk,” Haley said. “With the corporate offices closed, her work extension won’t be in service anymore and most likely not her company e-mail address, either, but I think I have some of her personal information. Let me go check.”

  “Jessica Denton isn’t exactly my cup of tea,” Carol Hotchkiss put in once Haley was out of earshot.

  “You know her?” Ali asked.

  “She came by the house last night, crying her eyes out because Dan and Millie were dead. If you ask me, Haley had far more reason to cry than Jessica did. Then this morning, when Detective Drinkwater came by the house, he said they were still looking for next of kin. The whole thing just doesn’t sit right.”

  Haley returned with a piece of paper, which she handed over to Ali. “That’s all I have for Jessica’s nonwork contacts—her e-mail and cell phone. No landline.” Haley turned to her grandmother. “What didn’t sit right, Gram?”

  “The way Jessica Denton came over to the house last night, boohoohing about Dan and Millie. How could she know they were dead when nobody else did?”

  Haley gave her grandmother a fond smile. “Come on, Gram,” she said. “You’re just prejudiced because I’ve complained about Jessica so much. Maybe she talked to one of the girls here. They all knew because I called and told them.”

  “Complained why?” Ali asked.

  “Because it felt like she was edging me out,” Haley answered. “She was doing things for Millie and Dan that I used to do—picking up their prescriptions, dropping off dry cleaning, making restaurant reservations. She’s also drop-dead gorgeous, so I guess I was a little jealous. Naturally Gram is in my corner on that score.”

  Ali nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go back to Monday. Did your computers go down at the same time OFM’s did?”

  “No. Mr. McKinzie kept suggesting that we should switch over to his network. He said it would save money in the long run, but Dan wasn’t interested. That’s probably why the SEC needed access to our files and computers.”

  No, Ali thought, they wanted your files because they had already figured out that the ones at corporate headquarters had evaporated, and they wouldn’t be able to get them back.

  “They came by yesterday, boxed everything up—our files and our computers—and dragged them down to Phoenix,” Haley was saying. “They sent them back this morning, so I guess they found whatever they needed. But that’s what all this mess is about—trying to put things back away where they belong.”

  “On Monday,” Ali said, “how soon did you know that the network had crashed?”

  “Sometime after it happened,” Haley answered. “Someone from here—Susan, I think—called down there trying to get information for a client here in town. The office was in an uproar because of the computer snarl. They told Susan to call back later because they were trying to reboot. Before she had a chance to do so, an agent from the SEC showed up here, ordered us out of the office, and locked the place down.”

  “The agent’s name?”

  “Ferris,” Haley answered at once. “Agent Donald Ferris.”

  “When he showed up, did he mention what exactly he wanted?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Haley said. “Agent Ferris was less than forthcoming. He treated us like a bunch of criminals and warned us that if we tried to smuggle anything out of the office in our purses, it would be confiscated.”

  “He was worried that you might smuggle something out? That makes it sound as though he was looking for something very specific.”

  “He mentioned thumb drives, didn’t he?” Carol Hotchkiss piped up from the sidelines. “What about that one Millie had—the one she showed you last week?”

  Ali caught the withering look Haley shot her grandmother. Ali also noticed the slight flush that colored Haley’s cheeks. It was clear something important had just happened, although she wasn’t sure what it was.

  “What thumb drive?”

  For an answer, Haley slid one hand into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the adapter holding the tiny wafer. As soon as she held it up, Ali recognized it as a microSD card.

  “What’s on it?” Ali asked.

  “I have no idea,” Haley answered. “I tried opening it, but it’s password protected, and not with one of Dan’s passwords, either.” With no further prompting she simply handed it over to Ali.

  “You’re giving it to me?” Ali asked, looking down at it in disbelief.

  “That’s what High Noon does, isn’t it?” Haley asked with a shrug. “Don’t you specialize in cybersecurity issues?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Millie told me on Friday that Dan had insisted she make a special trip home that morning to put this in their safe-deposit box because he didn’t want it ‘falling into the wrong hands.’ I think this memory card may have something to do with the reason Dan and Millie are dead. They put it in the safe-deposit box, one to which they had previously given me access. Since they trusted me with access to the box, that means they also trusted me with whatever was inside it. You already told me that High Noon is trying to retrieve whatever money Jason McKinzie may have stolen. I’d like to believe that’s what Dan was doing, too. And maybe that’s what this memory card is all about—stopping Jason McKinzie. If so, by giving it to you, I’m hoping I’ve just kept it out of the wrong hands and placed it in the right ones.”

  Taken aback, Ali looked down at the tiny memory card and wondered if Haley was right. Did that postage stamp–sized device hidden inside a USB adapter hold the key to all of this, and was it motive enough for four separate murders?

  “Thank you,” Ali said quietly. “Thank you very much. If you don’t mind, I’ll have Cami here rush it to High Noon’s campus in Cottonwood. Someone there should be able to unlock it. As I said earlier, High Noon’s goal in all this is to go after Jason McKinzie’s store of cash. If the memory card contains information that will help us locate his hidden assets, that’s how we’ll use it—to retrieve assets. On the other hand, if what’s here turns out to be connected to the homicides, we’ll have to turn the information over to the proper authorities.”

  “What happens if it’s neither?” Haley asked. “What if the inform
ation turns out to be strictly personal?”

  “Then we’ll bring it back to you,” Ali answered. “Fair enough?”

  “Yes,” Haley said. “That’s more than fair.”

  45

  The words “memory card” shot through Jessica’s consciousness like a bolt of electricity. Listening intently, she realized the old woman had to be the one who had first mentioned the memory card. And now, a piece at a time, she learned the rest of the story.

  After copying the files, Dan had handed the memory card over to Millie, who had driven to Sedona and placed it in the safe-deposit box. Even under the threat of death—with Alberto and Jeffrey holding the two of them at knifepoint—neither Millie nor Dan had caved and given up the location of the damned memory card.

  Jessica was surprised at that. Shocked, even. She’d worked closely with Dan and Millie for months, all the while despising them. It had never occurred to her that either of them, under the threat of death, could be that tough or display that kind of fortitude. How could she have misjudged them so badly?

  Clutching the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip, she listened as the situation went from bad to worse.

  “. . . you don’t mind,” the woman who called herself Ali was saying, “I’ll have Cami here rush it to High Noon’s campus in Cottonwood. Someone there should be able to unlock it . . .”

  Jessica had been on edge from the moment the new arrivals had mentioned the involvement of High Noon Enterprises. But the idea that the memory card was now in the hands of a High Noon operative was utterly unthinkable. A disaster. A catastrophe. And if the card made it from the Village of Oak Creek to the High Noon office in Cottonwood, Jessica suspected all was lost. Somehow—some way—Jessica Denton had to keep that from happening.

  Steeling herself for the challenge, she tuned back in to the voices in her earbuds.

  Until that very moment Jessica had had no idea that High Noon was based anywhere nearby. As for Cottonwood? She had heard the town mentioned from time to time, but she was unaware of its exact location. It had to be somewhere nearby, but where?

  With the memory card no longer in Haley’s possession, Jessica had just lost her eyes and ears. Her planted listening devices were useless now, and so was the GPS tracker on Haley’s car. The luxury of following a target from a distance was no longer an option. She briefly considered trying to move the locater from Haley’s car to one of the others, but she didn’t know for sure which was which. And besides, where the hell was the “High Noon campus”?

  Opening her browser, it took her less than a minute to find it. Once she did, she studied how to get there. There were two routes, but if you were in any kind of a hurry to get from the Village of Oak Creek to Cottonwood, there was really only one route that made sense—Highway 179 south and then right onto Beaverhead Flats Road. That way took twenty-eight minutes as opposed to a thirty-eight-minute trip back through Sedona.

  Jessica was confident that whoever was carrying the drive would go that way, but she didn’t leave the parking lot just then. Much as every fiber of her body ached to take action and move, she watched the office door through a pair of binoculars and forced herself to wait. She needed to know for sure which vehicle was which. It seemed reasonable to think that the lady in the Cayenne was the head honcho and the one in the red Prius the underling, but Jessica didn’t dare assume. The stakes were too high. She had to be absolutely certain.

  At last, after what seemed like hours of pointless chatter, the two women finally emerged from the office and stood outside on the sidewalk, conferring. The blond woman looked at her watch and said something. The smaller woman, the dark-haired one, nodded and replied before turning toward the Prius. That was Jessica’s signal to move. Dropping the binoculars, she put the VW in gear. For this to work, she needed to be ahead of her target, not behind her.

  When the Cayenne merged into the traffic in the opposite direction on 179, toward Sedona, Jessica headed the other way. The red Prius was the target. As she had anticipated, there were far too many vehicles on the highway for her plan to work. Once she turned on to Beaverhead Flats Road, she hoped it would be a different story. Between that turnoff and the tiny town of Cornville, there appeared to be several miles of relatively deserted highway.

  Somewhere between those two critical points, Jessica Denton planned to make her move.

  46

  Several message announcements had buzzed on Ali’s phone during the time they had been inside the Frazier Insurance Agency. Now, driving in slow traffic, in the Cayenne, she checked them. Two were voice mail messages, one from Stu and the other from Dave Holman. The third was a text from B., giving her a street address on Camelback for her 3:00 p.m. appointment with Eugene Lowensdahl.

  She knew the number in the 3200 block of Camelback meant that the office had to be in the general neighborhood of Biltmore Fashion Park. Despairingly, she examined the jeans and casual sandals she’d donned early that morning when she had gone to visit her parents at Sedona Shadows. Jeans and sandals may have been fine for whatever she’d done so far today in Sedona and Cottonwood, but her next task was to dazzle a Chief Restructuring Officer. Unfortunately, one of his near neighbors turned out to be none other than a Neiman Marcus store. No, in that kind of upscale enclave, what Ali was wearing right now simply wouldn’t cut it.

  With a sigh, she headed home to change clothes. Realizing B. was probably on his way to the airport by now, she was about to dial her husband’s number when her phone rang with Dave Holman on the line.

  “Thanks for throwing me under the bus with E.D.,” he said. “He’s pissed. You actually called him that to his face?”

  “The devil made me do it,” Ali answered with a chuckle. “Besides, we solved his cases for him, and that’s all the thanks we get?”

  “Drinkwater’s cases may be solved,” Dave replied, “but mine aren’t. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  “Just to be clear, are we going to be discussing an ongoing case?”

  “Apparently,” Dave said, “because I’ve turned up a direct connection between one of my dead guys and Dan Frazier.”

  “Really?” Ali managed. “You’re saying all four cases are connected?”

  “Yes. Alberto Joaquín was the yard guy at Dan Frazier’s house in Paradise Valley. The owner of the landscaping truck, Alejandro Joaquín, was Alberto’s employer, but he’s also his brother.”

  “Our facial rec provided enough identification for you to do a next of kin notification?”

  “I don’t believe in throwing people under the bus,” Dave said pointedly. “I used the victims’ driver’s license photos for those. Alejandro told me that Alberto didn’t show up for work on Tuesday morning, and neither did his company truck. Alejandro didn’t report the truck as missing or stolen at the time because he knew a charge like that would violate Alberto’s probation and send him straight back to the slammer. Alejandro thought Alberto was out tying one on and that, when he sobered up, both he and the truck would be back.”

  “Being in jail would have been better than being dead,” Ali said.

  “I mentioned to Alejandro that there was a possibility Alberto might have been involved in two homicides up in Sedona. As soon as he heard Dan Frazier’s name, the poor guy almost had a stroke. Went all pale and short of breath on me. I thought he was going to croak out on the spot. Eventually he came around, though, and that’s when he told me. A.J. Landscaping has crews working all over the valley. They’ve handled the landscaping on Dan’s Paradise Valley house for the past three years.”

  “So, Alberto was part of the work crew?”

  “He was the work crew.”

  “But why?” Ali asked. “Why would he turn on his employer like that, to say nothing of betraying his own brother? And what’s Jeffrey Hawkins’s connection to all this? Did he work for Alejandro, too?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Dave answered. “At one time, Alberto and Jeffrey were cellmates at a private prison up by Kingman. They were
both out on parole and evidently hooked up again, maybe just for old times’ sake, or maybe for this job. I can’t tell.

  “At any rate, Alejandro told me that Alberto spent a lot of time at Wheels Inn, one of the rougher biker bars on 43rd Avenue. He liked going there because it was within walking distance of where he lived, three blocks from his rented mobile home. Alejandro said Alberto walked back and forth because he couldn’t risk having another DUI on his record.

  “I checked with the bar,” Dave continued. “The bar manager showed me the security footage for Friday. Turns out Alberto was there most of the evening. Early on it was business as usual, with him just sitting alone at the bar, guzzling one beer after another. Then he left for a while—9:58. When he came back into view at 10:35, guess what happens? All of a sudden, Alberto morphs into Mr. Gotbucks, flashing a fat roll of bills and buying rounds for the house.”

  “So somebody gave him a fistful of cash,” Ali breathed. “Do you think the money was a down payment, and it really was murder for hire?”

  “I do indeed,” Dave said, “and one with a fairly short timeline. Alberto makes the deal on Friday. On Monday evening, he and his pal Jeffrey somehow gain access to Dan’s home in Paradise Valley. According to Paradise Valley PD, there was no sign of forced entry. Evidence suggests that they overpowered Dan. There were signs of a struggle inside the house, and it’s clear the place had been ransacked. Maybe it was just a robbery, but the detective I spoke to said that what he saw suggested it was more likely the intruders were looking for something specific.”

  “Which they must not have found,” Ali interjected.

  “Correct, at least they didn’t find it there. By Tuesday morning I’m thinking the bad guys admit defeat. Since whatever it is they’re looking for isn’t in the Paradise Valley house, they load Dan into the truck and head off for Sedona, hoping to find it there. According to E.D., there’s some evidence of a search there, too, mostly before the deadly altercation in the kitchen. Once that happened, the killers took off in one hell of a hurry—with or without what they wanted—probably because of your dad’s unexpected arrival on the scene. By midafternoon that same day Alberto and Jeffrey are shot dead in the gravel pit.”