by J. A. Jance
“To manslaughter,” he agreed, “but only if I can get the prosecutor to drop all charges against Lynn. She’s the one good thing that has happened to me in a very long time. I’m not going to let Gemma destroy her, too.”
“Who is James Sanders?” Ali asked.
Chip blinked. “Who?”
“James Mason Sanders is a small-time crook whose body was found in the same general area as your former wife’s body. I’m trying to figure out if there was any connection between them.”
Chip Ralston shook his head. “It’s not a name I recognize, but Gemma wasn’t exactly forthcoming about her pals and her relationships. It’s come to my attention that she engaged in a good deal of risky behavior, including signing up for any number of dating websites both before and after she filed for a divorce.”
“You have reason to believe she was unfaithful?”
“Are you kidding? I don’t believe she ever was faithful,” he replied. “I just didn’t know it at the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I always wanted to have kids,” he said. “I thought I’d make a great dad, and I wanted us to have kids. She claimed she did, too, at least at the beginning. Once I got through medical school, we tried for years to get pregnant, and it didn’t work. We both went for tests. My sperm count was fine. She told me that her doctor said she was the one with the fertility problem, but she wasn’t willing to do anything about it.
“I suggested in vitro. She said no dice. I said, ‘Fine, let’s adopt.’ She said no, that if we were supposed to have kids, it would happen, but it didn’t. Later, I found out that she was on the pill the whole time. I wasn’t meant to find that out, you see. After she moved out of the house, someone in her doctor’s office screwed up and mailed me a copy of her prescription renewal. After that, HIPAA be damned, I went looking for her prescription records. I found out she’d been taking the pill for years-for as long as we’d been married.”
Ali looked at him and said nothing. She had suffered through a series of betrayals at the hands of her second husband, Paul Grayson. In Paul’s case, his faithlessness had resulted in the out-of-wedlock birth of more than one child-something Ali had discovered only after the man’s death. In Chip Ralston’s case, he had no children at all to show for Gemma’s betrayal. Ali understood, however, that the hurt was much the same.
“You might think I would have been pissed about that, but you know what?” Chip Ralston asked. “I ended up being grateful. It turns out Gemma was right not to have kids. She would have made a terrible mother.”
“What about you?” Ali asked. “Did you have affairs?”
Chip shook his head. “Never. I didn’t meet Lynn until long after Gemma had already flown the coop.”
“Lynn said that even after the divorce, Gemma stayed friends with both your mother and your sister.”
“Look,” he said, “when it comes to families, I believe in live and let live. My mother always thought Gemma was terrific, and I never tried changing her mind. When Lynn showed up on the scene, I made it clear to my sister that I expected her to be civil. The one time she and Lynn met in public, Molly was polite, which is more than I can say for my mother.”
“Did you object to your mother remaining on friendly terms with Gemma?”
“That was her business, not mine.”
“Do you know of anyone who wished Gemma ill?” Ali asked.
“You mean other than yours truly?” Chip asked.
In spite of herself, Ali liked the guy. She was surprised to realize that, plea bargain or not, she more than half believed that he hadn’t had anything to do with killing his wife. “Yes,” she said. “Other than you.”
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea. If I did, I’d tell you.”
“All right, then,” she said, pushing back the molded plastic chair and standing up. “Thank you for agreeing to speak to me.”
She watched him put down his handset. The county attorney had assumed that the plea bargain offer would cause the two suspects to start pointing accusing fingers at each other. Instead, Chip Ralston had thrown himself under the bus.
Unsure what to do about this unexpected turn of events, Ali left the visitation room, collected her weapons from the lockbox, and waited until a guard let her back outside. Determining guilt or innocence wasn’t in Ali’s job description.
Once on the street, Ali dialed B.’s number. “I’m on my way to Phoenix,” she said. “I’ll probably end up spending the night.”
“Would you like me to join you?” B. asked.
Yes, that was what she wanted, but she hadn’t wanted to say it in so many words.
“What about your work?” she asked. “Can you afford the interruption? Besides, you already spend so much time in hotels. .”
“Not in hotels with you,” he countered. “Besides, through the magic of telecommuting, I can work anywhere. It would give us a chance to revisit the Ritz,” he added. “Return to the scene of the crime, as it were. With any kind of luck, maybe when you’re finished working, we could grab a late dinner at Morton’s.”
The Ritz-Carlton at Twenty-fourth and Camelback was where B. and Ali had spent their first full night together, and Morton’s, next door, was where they had shared a very romantic dinner.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered,” B. said. “Now, is there anything you need me to bring?”
It was close to four in the afternoon. The idea of driving directly to Phoenix without having to drive the eighty miles back to Sedona had some real appeal.
“Ask Leland to pack an overnight kit for me,” she said. “Actually, ask him to make it for two nights, in case I have to stay longer.”
Ali knew from experience that Leland would pack for her as well or better than she would herself. The thought that at some point she would have to learn to get along without the faithful service of her aide-de-camp was one she quickly put aside.
“All right,” she said. “You go straight to the hotel. I’ll meet you there.”
And I’ll go track down James Sanders’s grieving wife and son, she thought. Going to see them was the last thing she wanted to do, which was enough to move it to the top of the list. That was always one of Ali’s mother’s watchwords: Do the tough things first.
16
Not wanting to call undue attention to what they were doing, A.J. and Sasha decided that they wouldn’t head north until after school got out. Ditching their afternoon classes wasn’t the way to go unnoticed. A.J. called work and told them that he wouldn’t be in due to a family emergency. Then, leaving the Camry in the school parking lot, they took off in Sasha’s BMW. Unlike A.J., she had access to her father’s credit card and didn’t have to hoard every ounce of gas. When they stopped to fill up, she paid for fuel and for a pair of immense sodas. Later, when they stopped at Ace Hardware to buy a new shovel, she whipped out her credit card again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Daddy never checks, but if he asks me about it, I’ll tell him it’s for Christmas.”
Nodding, A.J. went along with the program. He was too worried and conflicted to argue about any of it. He was worried about returning to the crime scene. He was worried that there would still be cops there. Most of all, now that he had told Sasha everything, he was worried that the money wouldn’t be there-that Sasha would see right through his father’s lie and know that A.J. was stupid beyond words. Finding money under a rock was like the Tooth Fairy leaving money under a pillow-not gonna happen.
For a time, they drove north without speaking. It was only when Sasha spoke that A.J. realized that she, too, was chewing over what he had told her.
“So those are really the only times you remember seeing your father, at the store? That once and later when he bought you the car for your sixteenth birthday?”
A.J. nodded numbly.
“And he really did go to prison for counterfeiting?”
A.J. nodded again.
>
“Why didn’t he come back home after he got out?”
“I have no idea,” A.J. said. “That’s one of the things I would have liked to ask him.”
“I’m sorry you can’t,” Sasha said.
A.J.’s eyes filled with tears. “Me, too.”
Traffic was slow leaving the city. It seemed to take forever to get to the turn-off, but at last they reached the General Crook Trail exit. As A.J. got out to open the gate, he scanned the horizon to see if there were any vehicles parked at or near the crime scene. He saw nothing. Sasha babied the BMW along the rutted road. When they reached the spot where the green-eyed woman had died, the place was marked with a series of streamers made up of bits of yellow crime scene tape blowing sideways in the wind.
“That’s where I found the woman,” he said, nodding toward the tape, “but keep going. When the mileage marker on the odometer hits six tenths of a mile, stop. You stay with the car and turn it around. That way, if I do find anything, we’ll be able to take off in a hurry. I want to get out of here before someone sees us.”
That was what A.J. told her, but the truth was, he had another reason for leaving Sasha in the car. He didn’t want her to witness his humiliation when his shovel search came up empty. During the long slow drive from Phoenix, A.J. had convinced himself that the entire undertaking was beyond stupid. His father was a crook and a liar. There wasn’t any hidden money and never had been. A.J. had spent much of the trip berating himself for telling Sasha about it in the first place. If only she hadn’t insisted on coming along. If only he hadn’t let her.
Sasha stopped the car next to another area that had been marked off with crime scene tape; here, most of it was intact. Feeling almost sick to his stomach, A.J. got out and stood looking at the spot where his father must have died. His mother had said his father had been shot. For a moment he stood there with his hand shading his eyes, peering around, more than half expecting to see a rough chalk outline of where James Sanders’s body had been found. To his immense relief, there was no visible sign of bloodstains.
Glancing back over his shoulder, A.J. noticed that the place where the green-eyed woman had died wasn’t visible from here. There was a slight rise between the two spots and a place where the road twisted sharply left and right, following a streambed. So although the two victims-his father and the green-eyed woman-hadn’t died in exactly the same place, it had been close enough that even James Sanders’s son had to confront the possibility that there was some terrible connection between them.
What if this money-the unexpected windfall from his father-had something to do with the murder of the green-eyed woman? What if his father was really a contract killer and the money he had promised A.J. was ill-gotten gain? A.J.’s mother had insisted that James would never be violent-that he’d never hurt someone-but how much did she know? As far as A.J. knew, his parents had never even lived together. Why was that? Had his mother understood what James was really like, and that was why she had avoided living with him once he got out of prison?
Turning away from both crime scenes-the one he could see and the one he couldn’t-A.J. tried to shake off the dread-induced lethargy that had overtaken him. Only when Sasha pressed the trunk release and the lid flipped open did he snap out of it. Marching determinedly to the back of the BMW, he retrieved the shovel.
This area, like the spot where A.J. had found the dying woman, had been cleared of both scraggly vegetation and rocks and turned into an informal and illegal trash-dumping ground of long standing, with layers of general garbage along with abandoned mattresses and appliances littering the desert landscape. What rocks remained-boulders, really-were on the far perimeter of the clearing. With the shovel balanced on his shoulder, feeling like one of Snow White’s dwarves, A.J. marched purposefully in what seemed to him to be the direction of due north, to the boulder where his father had claimed he had left a heart to mark the correct spot.
With every step he took, A.J. told himself that he shouldn’t be disappointed when the designated heart wasn’t there. But as soon as he came to the first boulder, there it was. The heart, tiny though it was, stood out because it was bright and recent and painted in what appeared to be nail polish. On either side of the glowing heart, scratched on the rock’s rough surface and faded almost to invisibility, were two sets of barely legible initials. The first one was clearly J.S. The second one might have been an S and some other letter-a P or a B. A.J.’s mother’s name was Sylvia. Her maiden name had been Bixby, so maybe the faded second letter was a B.
For a moment A.J. stood transfixed and staring at this artifact that testified to a time in Sylvia Sanders’s far-distant past, back when carving their initials on a rock had been a way of declaring their love. A.J. was struck by the fact that his mother and James Sanders must have been about the same age then as he and Sasha were right now. If all that was true, if this had been a place of some teenage assignation, was that why James had summoned his son here, as a way of making amends for never having lived up to the demands of fatherhood? Was that what this was all about?
A.J. glanced back toward the idling BMW. Following his directions, Sasha had maneuvered the car into a deft U-turn and sat with the driver’s window open, watching him with interest.
Forcing his limbs to move, A.J. walked all the way around the boulder, studying the terrain. On the far side of the rock, he found evidence that the hard-packed dirt and smaller rocks had been disturbed. The ground nearby was all rock-hard caliche, but when he pushed the blade of the shovel into the earth at the base of the rock, it sank in easily. Four or five inches down, he hit something solid that sounded like metal.
He cleared out five or six heaping shovelfuls of dirt. Then, falling to his knees, A.J. dug with his hands alone, stripping away the dirt and sharp rocks from the surface and from around the sides of a rectangular metal box. As soon as he lifted it, A.J. realized that his mother had a metal box similar in size and shape to this one. She had told him that if anything ever happened to her, that was where he’d be able to find the important documents-things like birth certificates and insurance policies.
Once the box was out of the hole, A.J. hurriedly used the shovel to scrape the loose rocks and dirt back into it. Then, taking both the box and the shovel, he made a run for the car. Sasha opened the trunk as he approached. Dumping the shovel in, A.J. leaped into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. Once seated, he had to struggle to fasten his seat belt around the filthy box, which he held clutched to his chest.
When he looked at Sasha, she was grinning at him triumphantly. “See there?” she said. “You found it. What’s in it?”
“I haven’t had time to look,” he said. “Let’s get out of here first. Drive.”
He carried the box with him when he got out of the car to open and close the gate to let them back onto the freeway entrance. Earlier, he had been awash in doubt. Now that he had found the box, he worried about what he’d find inside.
“Well,” Sasha said impatiently, “are you just going to sit there, or are you going to open it?”
By then they were back on the freeway, speeding south at seventy miles an hour. With his fingers shaking, A.J. fumbled open the lock. Reaching inside, he pulled out a bright red clay disk and held it up so he could read what was printed on it. On one side were the words MGM GRAND. On the other, the printed number $1,000.
“What is it?” Sasha demanded.
“I think it’s a gambling token,” A.J. murmured. “It says it’s worth a thousand bucks.”
“A thousand bucks,” Sasha repeated. “Are you kidding? How many of those are there?”
A.J. felt the inside of the box, sifting the tokens through his fingers. “I don’t know,” he said. “A lot.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Sasha said. “You need to count them.”
A.J. did so, dumping the contents onto the floor and then counting them back into the box one at a time. The whole time, he was remembering what his mother had said about the gas
and insurance money James had handed over along with the title to the Camry. “Is this even real?” If his father had gone to prison for counterfeiting U.S. currency, what were the chances he might try counterfeiting gambling tokens?
“Two hundred and fifty,” he said at last.
“Whoa!” Sasha exclaimed. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”
A.J. nodded.
“That means you’re rich,” she said with a laugh.
Coming from Sasha, whose family really was rich, that seemed weird, and A.J. didn’t bother mentioning his niggling worry that the tokens might be fake.
“He wanted me to use the money to go to school. He said this way I wouldn’t have to get student loans or a job-I’d be able to concentrate on studying.”
“How do you turn it into real money, so you can take it to a bank?” Sasha asked.
“I guess you have to take it back to the casino,” A.J. said. “He told me in the note that I’d need someone of age to cash them in.”
“Your mother?”
“No,” A.J. said, shaking his head. He closed the box again and latched it. “I don’t think my mother would be the one doing it.”
“Are you going to tell her about this?”
A.J. thought about that. “No,” he said finally. “You’re the only one who knows. I don’t want to tell anyone else, especially my mother.”
There was an injury accident at the junction of I-17 and the 101. Both before and after the accident, traffic crawled along. By the time Sasha dropped A.J. back in the school parking lot, it was almost seven-far later than he should have been, even if he’d gone to work. He hoped his mother hadn’t called Maddy to check on him.
Once Sasha left him, A.J. put the strongbox in the trunk of his Camry and covered it with a bag of discarded clothing that his mother had asked him to drop off at Goodwill two weeks earlier. After closing the trunk, he happened to look down at the clothing he was wearing. The jeans weren’t bad, but his shirt was a grimy mess. The reddish-brown dirt from the strongbox had been ground into the material; and no amount of wiping would remove it.
