Web of Evil

by J. A. Jance

  “Barely.”

  “Nine-one-one,” the operator responded. “What are you reporting?”

  “Someone’s fallen,” Ali found herself yelling into the phone. “She’s fallen down a flight of stairs.”

  “Is she conscious?” the operator asked.

  “No! She’s barely breathing. Send someone. Hurry.”

  “Units are on the way,” the operator said. “They’ll be there soon.”

  Not soon enough, Ali thought. Not nearly soon enough.

  “And your name is?”

  “Ali,” she answered. “Alison Reynolds.”

  “You just stay on the line with me, Ms. Reynolds. Help is on the way.”

  { CHAPTER 8 }

  Ali remained on the phone with the emergency operators while Dave stayed with Monique. Edie was dispatched to the upstairs bedrooms for a blanket to cover the injured woman. While she was at it, she searched through the rest of the house to see if anyone else was home.

  “No one’s here,” she reported. “No one at all.”

  “Not even the cook?” Ali asked. “Did you check the kitchen?”

  “I looked everywhere,” Edie replied. “The whole house is empty.”

  The EMTs arrived within minutes. As they worked to shift Monique onto a board in order to load her onto a gurney, Ali spotted a cell phone and a key ring lying on the floor. She grabbed the phone, opened it, and hit the “redial” button. The words “April Cell” appeared on the screen.

  “Where will you take her?” Ali asked one of the EMTs.

  “The ER at Cedars-Sinai,” he said.

  Ali pressed the “talk” button and was disappointed when, instead of being answered, her call to April went straight to voice mail.

  “April,” Ali said urgently. “It’s Ali Reynolds. Call me back as soon as you get this message. Your mother has fallen down the stairs. The EMTs are taking her to Cedars-Sinai. You may want to meet us there.”

  When she finished the call, Ali slipped the phone into her pocket.

  “You shouldn’t have touched that,” Dave observed.

  “Why not?” Ali asked. “I needed to get hold of April to let her know what’s happened.”

  “If this turns out to be a crime scene, you’ve contaminated some of the evidence.”

  “A crime scene?” Ali repeated. “What crime scene? She fell.”

  “After she and her daughter quarreled,” Dave pointed out. “You should put it back.”

  Ali looked around at the field of debris being left behind by the EMTs. The crime scene was contaminated, all right, and not just by her.

  “I’m not putting it back,” Ali insisted. “I told April to call me back on this number when she gets the message.”

  Dave shot her an exasperated look and then went to greet the pair of uniformed police officers who had arrived on the scene as the gurney was being wheeled out the front door.

  Ali was still holding her car keys. She thrust them into her mother’s hands. “I’m going to the hospital,” Ali said. “Once Dave finishes with the cops, the two of you can come to the hospital in my car.”

  “But how do we get there?” Edie wanted to know.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Use the GPS. You should be able to key Cedars-Sinai into it, and it’ll lead you straight there.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Mom,” Ali returned. “I’m going.”

  By the time she got outside, the doors on the ambulance had already slammed shut. Knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to ride in that anyway, Ali went looking for an alternative. By then a fire department supervisor had arrived on the scene. After some persuading, Ali managed to convince the driver to take her along to the hospital.

  “You’re a relative?” he asked.

  Mentally Ali thought through her actual connection to Monique Ragsdale: “the mother of my murdered husband’s pregnant girlfriend.”

  That would sound more than slightly suspect. “Yes,” Ali said. And let it go at that.

  By the time Ali arrived at the entrance to the ER, Monique had already been wheeled inside and out of sight. Ali started toward the registration desk and then stopped. There was no point in even talking to those people. She knew nothing—no social security numbers, no insurance information. Saying she was a relative might have been enough to bum a ride to the hospital, but it wasn’t going to wash with some sharp-eyed receptionist whose main purpose in life was to ascertain who would be responsible for authorizing lifesaving treatment and/or paying the bill.

  Walking to one of the few unoccupied chairs in the room, Ali took Monique’s phone out of her pocket and once again hit “redial.” Still April didn’t answer.

  Where the hell are you? Ali wondered in frustration. Why don’t you answer?

  Gradually, the sights, sounds, and, even more, the smells of the waiting room assailed her. She had been pregnant the whole time Dean was sick. While he struggled with cancer, she had struggled with morning sickness, sitting in ER and hospital waiting rooms and clutching her own barf bucket. Being there brought all the memories back with awful clarity.

  Around the room people sat huddled in their own private miseries. An older woman, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, sat with her eyes closed while the old man next to her periodically patted her hand. A few feet away from Ali, a feverish-looking toddler wailed inconsolably while his young mother, speaking in Spanish, tried in vain to comfort him. Then, with no warning, the anguished wail suddenly devolved into a spasm of projectile vomiting.

  Ali knew that active puking or bleeding was the key to getting ER attention, and this was no exception. A nurse appeared from behind a curtained doorway, collected the sick baby and his mother, and then disappeared again. In less than a minute, a janitor, wearing gloves and a face mask, was there to clean up the mess. Meantime, a hugely pregnant young woman, also Hispanic, walked into the lobby on her own. At the receptionist desk, though, she was hit by a contraction that brought her to her knees. Someone grabbed a nearby wheelchair and whisked her away as well.

  Living and dying, Ali thought. Coming and going. That’s what hospitals are all about.

  She tried April’s number again, with the same result, then Ali closed her eyes and tried to shut all this out; tried to make it go away. But it didn’t work. She was back in Chicago, lost in that awful time more than twenty years ago. Back in her own peculiar version of hell.

  “Ms. Reynolds.” A voice from far away pierced her reverie. “Ms. Alison Reynolds. Would you please come to the registration desk?”

  As Ali rose to answer the summons, a phone rang. It wasn’t her ring and so at first she didn’t realize it was for her. Then Monique’s phone began to vibrate as well as ring.

  “Mom?” April asked.

  “It’s not your mother,” Ali interjected. “It’s me. Ali. Where are you? Did you get my messages?”

  “I went for a drive. I had to get away for a while. The walls were closing in on me. I couldn’t stand to be in the house a minute longer. But what are you doing on my mother’s phone? I saw that she had called three times. I didn’t bother listening to the messages. There’s no point. She’s always bossing me around and saying the same thing, over and over.”

  “The messages weren’t from your mother,” Ali said firmly. “They’re from me, April, all of them. Your mother’s been hurt. She’s in the ER at Cedars-Sinai. You need to get here as soon as you can. Where are you?”

  “Hurt? What do you mean, hurt?”

  “She fell down the stairs at the house. She must have hit her head, either on the way down or on the tile floor at the bottom of the staircase.”

  There was a pause—a long pause. “Is it like, you know, bad?” April asked.

  “I don’t know how bad it is,” Ali returned. “Since I’m not a blood relative, the people here at the hospital won’t tell me anything.”

  By now Ali had reached the registration desk, where a woman seated in front of a computer terminal glared at Ali impatiently, waiti
ng for her to finish the call.

  “You brought Ms. Ragsdale in?” the receptionist asked. “We’re going to need some information.”

  Ali thrust Monique’s cell phone in the woman’s direction. “There’s no point in talking to me because I don’t know anything. This is April Gaddis, Monique Ragsdale’s daughter,” she added. “You should probably talk to her.”

  The receptionist took the cell phone and handed it over to the same nurse who had come to collect the puking toddler. About that time two uniformed LAPD officers—a man and a woman—made their way into the ER. Ali recognized them at once. They were the same officers Ali had passed as she sprinted out of the house on Robert Lane intent on hitching a ride to the hospital. Unfortunately, three other people followed the two cops. Two of them carried cameras—one still and one video. The reporters were still on the hunt, and this trio had just gotten lucky.

  The officers spotted Ali standing near the reception desk and hurried toward her. “Ms. Reynolds?” the female officer asked. “Could we speak to you for a moment, please?”

  The flurry of activity that marked the arrival of the cops and the cameras caused every head in the waiting room to swivel curiously in Ali’s direction. The room went totally silent as everyone strained to hear her answer.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “How can I help?”

  “I’m Officer Oliveras. We understand you’re the person who found Ms. Ragsdale at the bottom of the stairs?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Ali answered. “That’s correct.”

  “Can you tell us how you came to be there?” That question came from Officer Oliveras’s partner, one Dale Ramsey.

  “Monique’s…that is, Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, April Gaddis, sent a message to me and asked me to come there—to the house. April said she needed my help.”

  “With what?” Ramsey asked.

  “With making funeral arrangements,” Ali began, then she paused and looked around the room. All ears seemed to be cocked in her direction. “It’s all rather complicated,” she added.

  Officer Oliveras didn’t smile. “Maybe you’d rather speak to us in a somewhat more private setting,” she offered. “Our squad car is right outside.”

  The idea of being closeted in a vehicle with two more inquisitive cops didn’t sound all that appealing, especially if there were photographers here ready to capture each and every vivid detail on film.

  “No,” Ali said quickly. “This is fine. I was sitting over there in the corner. Maybe we could do this there.”

  She led the cops into an area where the distinct odor of puke, barely covered by some astringent cleaning solution, still lingered in the air. Officer Oliveras followed Ali while Officer Ramsey rounded on the reporters.

  “All right, you bozos,” he said. “Enough! Get the hell out of here. Can’t you see there are sick people here? You’re botherin’ ’em.”

  “So,” Officer Oliveras said to Ali. “We’re given to understand that the house where this happened, the house on Robert Lane, actually belongs to you?”

  “Supposedly,” Ali said. “But all that’s pretty much in a state of confusion right now. You see, my husband died the night before last. Because our divorce hadn’t been finalized and because his will hadn’t been changed, the house evidently comes to me.”

  “And Ms. Ragsdale is the mother of your ex-husband’s intended bride.”

  “Yes,” Ali said. “That’s correct.”

  “And you know her?”

  “We’ve met,” Ali admitted. “Only this morning. We were at a meeting together there at the house—a meeting with our several attorneys.”

  “Where you discussed this will situation—where your husband left everything to you and nothing to Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, the mother of your husband’s baby?”

  “Yes,” Ali said, although her answer was barely audible. It was difficult to speak when what she was hearing loud and clear in her head were Victor Angeleri’s words: “What part of ‘whatever you say’ don’t you understand?”

  “Should I have an attorney with me when I’m answering these questions?” Ali asked.

  Officer Oliveras’s face darkened. “It’s up to you,” she said. “If you feel you need one, that’s fine, but at this point, all we’re trying to do is get a handle on who all was there at the house this morning and why.”

  “We gathered there for a reading of my husband’s will,” Ali answered after a pause. “I was there along with April Gaddis, my husband’s fiancée; Ms. Ragsdale; and then four attorneys. No, wait. There were five attorneys actually, counting Ms. Ragsdale’s.”

  Ali reeled off each of the several attorneys’ names while Officer Oliveras took notes.

  “You say this last one, Mr. Anderson, is Ms. Ragsdale’s attorney?” Oliveras asked. “Why would she need one? Is she a beneficiary under the will?”

  It didn’t seem wise to mention the possibility of a postmortem divorce. That wasn’t necessarily lying. “No,” Ali said finally. “Mr. Anderson was there ostensibly to protect the rights of the unborn baby. My understanding is, however, that regardless of whether or not the baby is named in the will, she’ll still benefit from it.”

  “The baby?” Oliveras asked.

  Ali nodded.

  “You already know the baby’s a girl then?”

  “Yes.”

  Officer Ramsey sighed and shook his head impatiently, as though all the marital back-and-forthing was boring him to tears.

  “If you and Ms. Ragsdale met just this morning, it’s fair to assume you didn’t have any particular bone of contention with her?”

  “No. None at all.”

  “Was anyone else there?”

  Ali did her best to recall everyone else—the cook; Jesus, the gardener; Tracy McLaughlin and the Sumo Sudoku people along with the accompanying film crew. Of those the only name she knew for sure was that of the interviewer, Sandy Quijada.

  “All right now,” Oliveras said. “Tell me again why was it you went back to the house this afternoon.”

  “April called and invited me over. Or rather, she called Ted Grantham’s office and left a message asking me to come over and help her work on making funeral arrangements.”

  “For your ex-husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have a pretty cordial relationship with your husband’s fiancée,” Oliveras observed. “It seems to me she would have asked someone else for help with that kind of thing—her mother, for example.”

  This was exactly what Dave had said when he had warned Ali to stay away. And, as he had predicted, things were indeed going to hell.

  At that moment April herself came charging through the ER’s automatic doors. Her eyes were wide, her skin deathly pale. Panting, she raced up to the receptionist, who, after only a few murmured words of conversation, immediately summoned the nurse who was still holding Monique’s cell phone. With no more formalities than that, April was handed the phone and then ushered through the curtains and back into the treatment rooms.

  Across the crowded waiting room another baby started to cry. An ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, and discharged a new gurney along with a new set of stricken relatives into the mix. But Ali paid almost no attention to any of that. She knew without having to be told that Monique Ragsdale’s condition had to be grave at best. The only thing that rushed anyone past loyal ER gatekeepers was the reality that someone in one of the back rooms was hanging by a thread between life and death.

  “I guess,” Ali said vaguely. “She was probably just feeling overwhelmed. That was April, by the way—the woman they just took back into the treatment rooms.”

  Officer Oliveras exhibited no interest in April, however. She was still focused on Ali, until there was yet another flurry of activity near the front door. To Ali’s immense relief, Victor Angeleri barged into the room and stopped just inside the door. With a graceful pivot that belied his size, he took in the entire room at a glance and then strode toward the corner where Ali was huddled
with the two cops.

  “What’s going on here?” Victor Angeleri demanded.

  Once again the accidental audience in the ER subsided into a spellbound silence.

  “How did you get here?” Ali wanted to know. “Who called you?”

  “That’s immaterial. The point is, what’s going on with these officers? What kinds of questions are they asking you, and did they read you your rights?”

  “You’re Ms. Reynolds’s attorney, I assume?” Officer Ramsey inquired. The two men were about the same height, but Victor outweighed the younger man by a good third.

  “Yes, I’m her attorney,” Victor declared forcefully. “And until I have a chance to confer with my client, this discussion is over.”

  Somewhere a flash went off. Ali had no doubt that every word of the conversation was being recorded for posterity—or, more likely, for the evening news.

  Edie Larson and Dave Holman rushed through the ER doors and joined the mix. “Sorry it took us so long to get here,” Edie said. “I just couldn’t figure out how to make the GSP thingy work.”

  But seeing her mother’s face answered at least one of Ali’s questions. No doubt Edie Larson had been the one who called Victor Angeleri into the fray. Some other time, Ali might have reacted badly to this kind of parental interference. This time she was simply grateful.

  April staggered through the curtains and reentered the waiting room. She seemed dazed and uncomprehending. Excusing herself, Ali hurried over to her. “Are you all right?”

  “They’re taking her to surgery,” April managed. “The doctor said she hit her head. Her brain’s swelling. If they can’t relieve the pressure, she may die.”

  With that, April buried her head in Ali’s shoulder and began to weep. “How can this be happening on top of everything else?” she sobbed. “I can’t believe it!”

  “This would be Ms. Gaddis then?” Officer Ramsey asked, sidling over to them.

  Ali simply looked at him. “Yes,” she said, “but as you can see, this is not the time to speak to her. What do you want to do, April? Go to the surgical floor waiting room? Go home? What?”

  “The surgery will take hours,” April managed. “I think I need to go home.”