Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  “In other words, as soon as Alberto and Jeffrey made good on the hit, whoever hired them took them out, too.”

  “Not a lot of evidence to back up that theory so far,” Dave said, “but that’s how it looks to me.”

  Ali thought about that. “Did Alberto walk to the bar Friday night?” she asked.

  “Yes. The security footage shows him arriving and departing on foot.”

  “From what you said about the time stamp on the video, he wasn’t gone long enough to go very far. Do you think he met up with someone in the parking lot?” Ali asked.

  “I think that’s likely, but whoever it was parked well beyond the range of the bar’s security cameras.”

  “What about traffic cams?”

  “We’ve asked for help in getting a look at those, but the bar is inside the Phoenix city limits. We’re from out of town. In other words, our request isn’t exactly a top priority.”

  “Which traffic cameras are we talking about?”

  “The ones at the intersections of 43rd and McDowell and 43rd and Osborn.”

  “I’ll ask Stu.”

  “He can access other jurisdictions’ traffic cameras?”

  Ali knew for a fact it was true, but she didn’t want to say that straight-out. “It’s possible,” she hedged.

  “Well, then,” Dave said, “any help you guys can give us in the traffic cam department will be greatly appreciated.”

  Dave had just gifted Ali—and trusted her—with a good deal of confidential information he’d been under no obligation to share. He hadn’t asked for anything in return, but she felt she owed him something all the same.

  “We found a memory card earlier today that may throw some light on all this,” she said quietly.

  “Found?” Dave asked.

  “We didn’t actually find it,” Ali allowed. “Haley Jackson, Dan Frazier’s office manager in Sedona, found it, and she’s the one who gave it to us. According to Haley, Dan sent Millie on a mission to deliver the card to their safe-deposit box in Sedona on Friday morning. Even though they were both coming home to Sedona later that day, he insisted she drop the card off earlier than that, telling Millie that he wanted to ‘keep it out of the wrong hands.’ Millie evidently stopped by Haley’s office on her way to the bank—that’s how Haley knew about it. And that’s where Haley found the card this morning—at the bank in their safe-deposit box.”

  “How did she gain access to that?”

  “She’s Dan and Millie’s executrix.”

  “Tell me about the memory card. What’s on it?”

  “No idea. Haley tried to look, but she says it’s password protected.”

  “I wonder if that’s what Alberto and Jeffrey were after—the memory card,” Dave mused. “Where is it now?”

  “On its way to High Noon in Cottonwood to see if someone there can hack into it.”

  “But why would Haley Jackson hand it over to you just like that? Are the two of you friends?”

  “Not at all. I think Haley feels responsible because so many people lost their life savings with OFM. I had told her earlier that’s what High Noon is all about right now—finding and recovering as much of OFM’s missing money as possible. She suspects the card has something to do with the money, and so do I.”

  “And there’s a very good chance that the money has something to do with the murders,” Dave added thoughtfully.

  “Right.”

  “So how soon will you know what’s on the card?”

  “That depends on how long it will take for Cami to hack into it.”

  “Cami again?”

  “What can I say?“Ali returned. “The girl’s got talent.”

  “Are you sure she’s not up for grabs?”

  “Not on a bet.”

  “What about the traffic cams?”

  “I’ll ask Stu to look into that,” Ali said. “When it comes to traffic cams, he’s the one with the network of contacts.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. “Appreciate the help.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So how about if we do this?” Dave offered. “If I find something that leads in the direction of the missing money, I’ll pass it along to you. And if you run across something that might help me solve my two homicides, you’ll do the same. Deal?”

  “Didn’t we already make that deal,” Ali asked after a pause. “But it still stands. You scratch High Noon’s back, we’ll scratch yours.”

  47

  Jessica found what she was looking for barely a mile after turning on to Beaverhead Flats Road. There was a slight rise followed by enough of a curve that the two-lane roadway was posted with NO PASSING signs in both directions and divided by two solid yellow lines. Just beyond the curve was a dry wash complete with a culvert and a concrete bridge abutment.

  There was no oncoming traffic visible in either direction, so Jessica made a quick U-turn and recrossed the culvert. After yet another U-turn, she parked on the shoulder twenty yards or so on the far side of the abutment. This was old hat to her—an instinctive study in physics and geometry, because she had certainly never set foot in any of those math or science classes back in the old days in El Centro, California.

  The school district liked to refer to its schools as welcoming and diverse, but not welcoming if you happened to be a blue-eyed blonde on a campus where Hispanic gangbangers wielded far more authority than any members of the faculty.

  Jessica, named Mia Miller back then, had been fourteen years old when her Anglo mother had married a somewhat younger man, a migrant worker, and the two of them had . . . well . . . migrated. The couple had departed in the middle of the night, leaving Jessica alone in the house and totally on her own.

  The rent on their two-room shack ran out four days later. A few days after that, the landlord showed up with an eviction notice in hand and a sheriff’s deputy in tow. He had brought along a crew of workers who had emptied the place, leaving everything from inside the house—furniture, clothing, canned goods, dead appliances—out on the street, either free to a good home or else for the garbage collectors to pick up, whoever happened to show up first.

  Jessica had been there that afternoon, watching the whole process from afar and helpless to stop it. After the crew left, she had raced to the trash heap ahead of the neighborhood vultures and gathered up what belongings she could, stowing them in some stray black plastic garbage bags that had also been left in the pile. Grabbing a grocery cart pilfered from a store two blocks away, she had left the abandoned house behind, pushing the cart with all her worldly goods stacked inside it—a few pieces of clothing, some canned goods that her mother had left behind, a bedroll of no known origin, a lumpy pillow, and a frayed teddy bear that had been her only companion for as long as she could remember.

  She slept under a bridge that first night, finding camaraderie among the dozen or so homeless men and women—some older and some younger—who called the bridge home. They took her under their wings, showed her the ropes, and looked after her. They taught her where the soup kitchens were and turned her on to various homeless shelters where she could shower, clean up, and wash a load of clothes without having to answer too many questions. They taught her how to panhandle and made sure she didn’t do it on her own without being under someone’s watchful and protective gaze.

  Where they couldn’t look after her was at school—a place where the homeless couldn’t go. She was small and apparently defenseless, so they taught her a collection of self-defense moves that toughened her up and made her resilient. The next time the gangbangers came calling, she handled it. Over time, she earned the gangsters’ grudging respect along with a nickname, “La Rubia”—“the Blonde”—which she eventually shortened to Ruby.

  She went to school every day. She didn’t want to run the risk of a truant officer showing up at the address listed in her record only to discover that her family didn’t live there anymore. She checked the mailbox every day, on her way back to the camp, deftly intercepting report cards
, permission slips, and any other miscellaneous mail the school district happened to send out. She threw the report cards away, and forged her mother’s name to the permission slips. She spoke Spanish like nobody’s business and signed up for English as a second language, where the grades were easy to come by even though her blond hair and blue eyes raised a few eyebrows.

  By the time she was fifteen and with the help of her gangbanger pals from school, she had a fake driver’s license and plenty of connections in the world of forged documents—contacts that continued to serve her well all these years later. By age sixteen, she was earning a reasonable living as a car thief. A friend of a friend had hooked her up with a guy running an insurance scam. A guy inside the insurance company targeted high-end cars. Ruby’s job was to steal the cars and wreck them in a believable enough fashion that the insurance adjuster (also in on the deal) could total them, and send the mangled remains off to a cooperating wrecking yard.

  The whole idea was to leave as many salvageable and undamaged parts as possible. When it came to that, La Rubia was the best. As for grand theft auto? For a minor faced with trying to get by on her own, it paid a hell of a lot better than standing around panhandling on a street corner.

  The guy who had pulled her into the racket had taught her the importance of leaving behind no evidence, so she was careful. When she went on jobs, she kept her hair tied back. She always wore latex gloves. And she was fine. Until the day she wasn’t. That was the day a guy came running out of his house and caught her in the act of stealing his car.

  She had pulled out her 9mm Beretta—a gift from the head honcho of the insurance scam—and plugged the son of a bitch. Then, leaving behind both the dead man and his unstolen vehicle, and unbeknown to her a single stray scrunchie, she had melted into the night. The guys under the bridge—the ones who had looked after her when she was begging at intersections—would have been shocked to learn that their “little girl” had turned into a stone-cold killer.

  In the years since, she had left La Rubia far behind. She’d gone by more names than she could remember, but she hadn’t forgotten the basic components of grand theft auto. Sitting there on the shoulder of Beaverhead Flats Road, Jessica carefully calculated the times and distances involved. She estimated exactly how fast she’d need to be going when she hit the bridge abutment—fast enough to deploy the air bags, but not fast enough to hurt her. And once the air bags collapsed, she had a fair idea of how much time she’d have in which to draw her weapon and have it at the ready before a certain passing Good Samaritan stopped and came to her aid.

  Yes, when the lady in the red Prius stepped forward to see if Jessica needed help, she would be ready and waiting. Her primary goal was retrieving the card, but as the minutes passed, she realized that taking down a High Noon operative in the process would automatically create a whole new firestorm of problems. It also meant that her original plan of lying low in Peoria for a number of days was out the window. She and Jason needed to leave the country now. Tonight.

  That meant making a whole new set of arrangements on the fly, something Jessica couldn’t do on her own while driving back to Phoenix. She would need a chauffeur to make that possible, and it so happened that Ms. Prius was it.

  Grabbing the garage door opener off the visor, Jessica stuffed that inside her computer bag before fastening the bag shut and belting it securely into the front passenger seat. Now she could be sure that she’d be protected by the exploding air bags, and so would her computer and listening equipment.

  She checked her rearview mirror. She was ready now. She was a little disappointed that she wouldn’t be taking Ms. Prius out immediately, but for the time being, she could handle a bit of delayed gratification.

  48

  Pulling away from Haley’s office, Cami was over the moon. As far as she was concerned, this was the best day of her life. The investigation she had undertaken all on her own earlier that morning had paid off big-time. Her solo efforts had made it possible to identify Dan Frazier’s killers. Well, maybe she hadn’t done it entirely on her own. Stu’s enhancing techniques and his facial recognition software had put the final nail in the coffin, but without her finding something for him to enhance, none of it would have been possible.

  She was still patting herself on the back when her phone rang. Once she saw who was calling, she almost didn’t answer. What was it about her mother? She had an uncanny ability to rain on Cami’s every parade. In this instance, however, the dutiful daughter won out.

  “Hi, Mom,” Cami said. “What’s up?”

  “Your grandfather’s birthday is coming up next month. We’re having a party at the restaurant. Are you coming or not?”

  Yes or no. That was Sue Lee, of course. Nothing at all subtle about the woman. She always came across in full frontal attack mode.

  “I haven’t worked here long enough to have any vacation time due me,” Cami said, hoping to dodge the bullet.

  “That’s why I told your grandmother the party has to be on the weekend. You do have weekends off, don’t you? If not, you need to quit working for those people and find a job with decent benefits.”

  The truth was, Cami worked around Stu’s schedule, and he almost never took any time off. He was more than happy to work 24/7. No one at High Noon had ever implied that Cami was always required to be in attendance when Stu was. She took her days off as needed, always clearing them in advance. But taking time off and flying to San Francisco, where she was bound to be interrogated by a roomful of relatives who collectively disapproved of her career choices, was not something she needed right now. At all.

  “He’s turning eighty, you know,” Sue added pointedly. “There’s no telling how many more birthdays he’ll have left after this one.”

  “I’ll send flowers, Mom. I promise,” Cami said, knowing it wasn’t good enough.

  “I don’t know why you have to be so damned stubborn,” Sue said.

  Cami stifled an urge to mention that she was a chip off both of her parents’ old blocks. She knew from previous discussions like this that her mother was happy to tell everyone within earshot that her husband was impossibly stubborn, while failing to see any trace of her own bullheadedness. Cami, on the other hand, was painfully aware of the presence of streaks of stubbornness on both sides of her DNA.

  “And I don’t know what’s so important about this job of yours that you can’t take some time off,” Sue Lee continued.

  Cami had turned on to Beaverhead Flats Road. Her good mood had evaporated.

  “We’re taking down bad guys,” she said. “Virtual bad guys.”

  “Well,” her mother sniffed. “I hope you’re not putting yourself in any danger.”

  At that point Cami’s Prius topped a short rise and rounded a curve. Several hundred yards ahead of her, she saw a yellow car parked on the shoulder of the road. At least that was her first impression—that it was parked. Suddenly it slammed into something, hard. The rear end of the vehicle bucked into the air, and then came down again, hard. A cloud of steam shot skyward.

  “Mom,” Cami said into the phone. “Someone just got into a wreck. I’ve got to go.”

  Ending the call, she pulled over and rammed the Prius into park on the shoulder directly behind the wrecked vehicle. Leaping out onto the pavement, she ran forward in time to see someone—a woman—clawing her way out from under a layer of deployed air bags.

  “Are you all right?” Cami demanded, coming up on the driver’s side of the vehicle. “Are you hurt? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

  And that was when she saw the gun, pointed directly at her. “No ambulance,” the woman inside said. “And unless you want a bullet in your gut, you’ll do exactly what I say.”

  Cami froze where she was, staring at the only thing visible in her universe right then—the gaping mouth at the end of a gun barrel. Not a virtual gun barrel by any means, one that was all too real and less than three feet away from her.

  “Throw the phone away,” the woman ordered. �
�Now. Toss it out into the brush, as far as you can throw it. Then step away from the car door.”

  Cami did as she was told. She threw the phone away and moved back onto the pavement, glancing up the highway as she did so. Unfortunately, no vehicles were visible—none at all. She and the woman getting out of the car might well have been the only people on the planet.

  “Any other weapons?”

  Cami shook her head. That wasn’t exactly true. She had a Taser. After the events in Bisbee, Ali had insisted that Cami carry a Taser, but not a handgun. Not yet. She had spent some time at a shooting range, but she didn’t feel proficient enough to apply for a concealed carry. As for the Taser? It was in her purse on the floorboard of the Prius, just behind the driver’s seat. That meant it was out of reach right now—completely out of reach.

  During the confrontation, Cami’s limbs somehow had turned to Jell-O. Both her childhood kung fu master and Amir Silberman, her current Sedona-based coach, who was training her in the art of Krav Maga, an Israeli form of self-defense, would have told her that a lightning-fast kick could disarm her opponent, but not right then—not with Cami’s legs trembling and threatening to collapse beneath her. There was no way for her to launch an effective counterattack right that minute.

  “We’re going to get back in your car,” the woman ordered. “You’re going to turn around and drive toward Phoenix. You will drive at or beneath the speed limit. If you do anything at all to attract attention, you’re dead. Understand?”

  Nodding, Cami stumbled toward the Prius. As she did so, she heard the faint ringing of her phone, plaintively calling to her from somewhere off in the brush. She couldn’t see the caller ID, but she knew who it was—her mother. That was who it had to be, not that it would do any good. When Cami didn’t answer, Sue Lee wouldn’t actually do anything about it. She’d just be pissed that Cami had turned off her phone and wasn’t picking up.