by J. A. Jance
“Yes,” Ali said. “I am glad to be back in Arizona, but this isn’t about me. Sheriff Maxwell has asked me to help out in media relations on a temporary basis, and that’s what I’m doing. So if there are no other questions about tonight’s incident—”
“How long is temporary?”
“I would imagine that depends on how well I do.”
“To say nothing about how long it takes for Internal Affairs to finish looking through the situation with Deputy Devon Ryan. Isn’t he still on paid administrative leave?”
“Look,” Ali said firmly. “I’m here tonight to discuss this specific incident. How about if we stick to that? Now, are there more questions about the fire?”
Eventually the lights went off and the cameras disappeared. Several people stopped long enough to give Ali their contact information before disappearing into their separate vehicles, where they’d be able to write and file their stories using wireless uploads.
As Ali turned back to the scene of the fire, Sheriff Maxwell appeared out of the darkness. She had no idea when he had arrived or how long he had been standing there listening.
“Good job,” he said.
“You were watching?” Ali asked. “Why didn’t you come talk to them?”
“Because I wanted to see how you’d handle yourself,” he replied. “You did fine.”
“About that ELF stuff,” she continued. “I didn’t know anything about that previous fire. The one up near Prescott.”
Maxwell nodded. “Right,” he said. “That happened several years ago. They burned down a Street of Dreams project. Four nearly completed houses, each of them worth more than a million bucks. They were supposedly being built with all kinds of green technology inside. Why ELF went after them is more than I can understand. I mean, green is green, right?”
“What about these houses?” Ali asked.
“With the current housing crisis, they’re not worth nearly that much. Probably three fifty to four hundred thou. Maybe ELF has decided to go downscale rather than up.”
“What about the wall?” Ali asked. “The one with the ELF tagline.”
“That’s still standing,” he said. “Once the sun comes up tomorrow morning, anybody with a pair of binoculars will know this was arson. We know it, too, thanks to Camp Verde’s accelerant-sniffing dog.”
“I saw Sparks,” Ali told him, but the sheriff’s comment left Ali second-guessing her actions. “Should I have announced it was arson tonight?”
“Hell, no. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. I’ll make the arson announcement myself first thing tomorrow. Let’s say nine a.m. on the courthouse steps in Prescott. If you could send out a notice about that between now and then, I’d appreciate it.”
“I’m still not sure why we didn’t make the announcement tonight.”
“That’s easy,” Sheriff Maxwell said with a sardonic smile. “You can’t hand over every little detail all at once. Got to dribble it out a little at a time and give those yahoos reason to come back. That also gives them a reason to write two stories instead of just one. That’s good for them and good for us. How else am I going to keep my name out there in public?”
He started to walk away, then paused. “By the way,” he added, “the guy who asked about the ELF thing is named Kelly Green.”
“What kind of a name is Kelly Green?” Ali asked. “Is that some kind of joke?”
“His real name was the joke. His given name was Oswald. He changed it to Kelly a few years ago.”
“I guess I would have changed it, too,” Ali said.
“Mr. Green likes to think of himself as the Arizona Reporter’s star investigative reporter. He’s also a royal pain in the butt, but he was one of Devon’s favorites, so watch your back around him.”
“Favorites?” Ali asked.
“As in feeding him scoops before information went to any of the other media outlets.”
“Got it,” Ali said.
Gordon Maxwell walked away then. Watching him go, Ali understood a whole lot more about Sheriff Maxwell than she had before. He was a politician and a canny operator. Yes, the man was caught in a war between rival union factions at work, but he was also an elected official who, in order to win reelection, needed to show the workings of his department in the best possible light. Sheriff Maxwell was using Ali Reynolds as part of his own charm offensive in the same way Edie Larson used her sweet rolls.
Dave Holman drove up behind her, stopped, and came over to where Ali was standing. “How’d you do?” he asked.
“All right, I guess,” she said. “Sheriff Maxwell seemed pleased.”
“You aren’t?”
After a short-lived romance, Ali and Dave had fallen back into their longtime friendship. It was nonetheless disconcerting for Ali to realize that Dave sometimes knew her better than she would have liked.
“One of the reporters nailed me with a gotcha question about an ELF-related fire up near Prescott a few years ago. He acted like I should have known all about it.”
“I remember that one,” Dave said. “It happened right after I came back from deployment—a fire that turned a Street of Dreams into a Street of Nightmares. The houses—expensive one-of-a-kind homes—were close to completion when they were burned to the ground. What the insurance settlement paid wasn’t enough to make the developer whole, and he ended up going bust. The poor guy walked away, and the project was abandoned.”
“What happened then?” Ali asked.
“They brought in an army of bulldozers and front-end loaders and carted away the debris. As far as I know, the property sits empty to this day. The trees were cut down to make way for construction. Now the trees aren’t there and neither are the houses. I believe ELF did claim responsibility for the fire, but no one was ever charged or arrested, to say nothing of tried and convicted.”
“In other words,” Ali said, “what ELF got for their trouble is one poor guy who’s been driven out of business and a beautiful piece of real estate that’s permanently wrecked.”
“That’s right,” Dave agreed. “It also means the terrorists won that round.”
“So far,” Ali said. “Maybe this time we’ll catch them.”
“We?” Dave repeated with a smile. “That sounds like you’re taking this investigation personally. I’m not so sure that’s just a consultant talking.”
Ali laughed. “I’m not so sure, either. Now, tell me about the victim. Do we know anything?”
Dave’s smile disappeared. “Before they hauled her away in the ambulance, I talked to Caleb Moore, the guy who brought the burn victim out. He’s really broken up about it. He says she’s badly hurt and isn’t likely to make it.”
“He has no idea who she is?”
“None, but I doubt she was the one setting the fire,” Dave said. “For one thing, she was stark naked and trapped on a stack of drywall piled in the middle of a sea of flames. I’ve come up against arsonists from time to time, but never one who went around setting fires buck naked.”
“A vagrant then?” Ali asked.
“Could be, but not likely,” Dave answered. “Even though it’s May, it can still get plenty cold overnight. These houses were under construction. That means there was no heat inside, and it makes no sense that she’d be there without any clothes on.”
“Young or old?” Ali asked.
“Caleb said he couldn’t tell exactly, but an older woman—mid-sixties to seventies. It’s unlikely that a grandmotherly type like that would be going around setting fires.”
A radio transmission came through summoning Dave back to the scene of the fire. Shaking her head, Ali climbed into the Cayenne and headed home.
Once the remodeling process on her own home had been completed and there were no longer workers coming and going at all hours, Ali had installed an electronically operated gate as well as an intercom at the bottom of the driveway. The gate closed automatically at 6 p.m. She and Leland both had gate openers in their vehicles. Overnight, anyone else had to cal
l and ask for permission to enter.
When Ali came up the driveway, she noted that the lights were off in Leland’s fifth-wheel trailer, parked on the far side of the house.
“I don’t see why you don’t move back inside now that the house is finished,” Ali had said to Leland Brooks. “You’re more than welcome to stay in your old room.”
Leland had lived in the house for years, looking after both the troubled Arabella Ashcroft and her mother. He had moved into a fifth-wheel during the long months of remodeling.
“I’m quite accustomed to having my own place now,” he had responded cheerfully. “It’s tidy and small, and it gives us both some privacy.”
In case either of us ever needs any, Ali had thought.
Her brief romance with Dave Holman had ended even if their friendship hadn’t, and Leland’s long-term relationship with Yavapai County Superior Court judge Patrick Macey had also run its course.
Ali had let Leland’s housing decision stand without any further discussion, and in truth she was enjoying having the house all to herself. She had loved having Chris around in the house on Andante Drive, but it was also nice to be completely on her own and in her own place. There had been no question that the Beverly Hills mansion where she had lived with her second husband, Paul Grayson, had been his before she arrived, while she lived there, and after she left. And in many ways, the house on Andante Drive still bore the stamp of Ali’s aunt Evie, who had bequeathed it to her niece.
This home was Ali’s. It was far smaller than Paul’s but larger than Aunt Evie’s. That went for everything from furniture to appliances to the radiant heat in the floors.
Ali parked in the garage and then let herself into the house through the kitchen door. She wasn’t completely on her own, however; Sam showed up immediately, wrapping her body around Ali’s leg and complaining vociferously, as only cats can, for having been abandoned. This was all a lie, since Ali knew without a doubt that Leland would have fed Sam much earlier in the evening.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Ali told the cat aloud. “I know good and well that you’ve already been fed, and I’m not falling for your phony claims to the contrary.”
Ali was tired, but she was also wound up from her long night’s work. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to sleep right away, she stopped in the kitchen long enough to make herself a cup of hot cocoa. While there, she wrote a note for Leland.
“Have to be in Prescott between eight-thirty and nine,” she told him. “Don’t worry about breakfast.”
Once in her bedroom, she pulled off the clothing she had worn and wasn’t the least surprised that it smelled of smoke. A closer examination showed several places where falling embers had charred the material. The pantsuit had been expensive when she bought it and now it was ruined. She dropped it on the floor in front of her closet.
Maybe I should ask Sheriff Maxwell for a uniform allowance, she thought.
On that note she headed into her spacious marble-tiled bath for a luxurious shower. Afterward, dressed in a nightgown and robe, she took her cocoa and her computer into the small study next to her bedroom.
Time to do some homework, she told herself.
Opening her computer, she added the new names and addresses to her media contact list and then sent out an announcement about the press briefing scheduled for the courthouse steps the next morning. She intended to do some background studying on the Earth Liberation Front, but soon found herself nodding off over her computer keyboard.
Finally, without even finishing her cup of cocoa, Ali gave up. She closed her computer and crawled into bed. It took no time for her to fall asleep. Not surprisingly, while sleeping, she had one recurring nightmare after another. They weren’t all exactly alike, but they were similar.
In each one, Ali was trapped in a locked room—a room with no windows or doors. Sometimes the room was familiar, sometimes not; but in each dream, one thing was the same: someone—some unseen person—was coming after her, intent on doing her harm. In each instance she knew her attacker was armed and dangerous. She also knew there was no escape.
CHAPTER 5
The ICU nurse picked up the phone and called out to the nurses’ station. “The patient seems to be stirring,” she said in a voice inaudible to the woman lying in the bed on the far side of the room. “Let Sister Anselm know.”
The patient struggled awake, emerging from the horrible nightmare of being caught in a fire, but found that even though the dream was gone, the heat was still there. She was drifting in a cocoon of pure pain. Excruciating pain. Agonizing pain.
She tried to move her head but could not. She tried to move her lips to cry out, but she couldn’t do that, either. She was unable to speak or move, but she could see, and she tried desperately to make sense of what she was seeing.
Gradually she became aware that there were people moving around her—people who spoke in hushed voices, with the sounds of their words barely audible above the steady beep, beep, beep of some kind of machine that was just outside her line of vision. The sound resembled the warning backup beep on a piece of heavy equipment, but that made no sense. How could there be something backing up in here? It was clear that she was inside a building somewhere—inside a brightly lit room.
She strained to hear and understand what the voices were saying. A man’s voice said something about damage to lungs and something about keeping up the … something that seemed to start with an O. Osmosis, maybe. And something else that sounded like a ringer, or maybe a wringer. What was that? Someone else spoke about keeping the morphine levels high enough to keep her from going into shock.
“We’ll do all we can, all that’s reasonable.” It was the man’s voice again. “The problem is, without a next of kin or a durable power of attorney, we can’t pull the plug.”
Who are these people, she wondered, and who are they talking about? Do they mean me? Are they talking about pulling my plug?
She tried again, desperately trying to move her lips, but no sound came out.
Someone else in the room spoke, and her welcome words were far more easily understood.
“Looks like it’s time for another dose.”
A woman—a nurse, most likely—dressed in a brightly colored flowered tunic appeared briefly in her line of vision and began working with something beside the bed. Because it was a bed, she realized, but a strange kind of bed. She was in it and the nurse was doing something to an IV tree that stood next to the bed. She seemed to be adding something to the IV drip. Maybe what the man had said at first was a lie. Maybe they were about to pull the plug and she was going to die.
Don’t, she wanted to scream aloud. Please don’t. I’m here. I’m alive and awake. Please don’t.
But she couldn’t say any of those things. She could hear herself screaming the desperate words in her head, but her lips still wouldn’t move. Her voice was lodged somewhere deep in her chest.
Gradually, the appalling pain seemed to lessen. The brightly lit room dissolved around her, and so did the voices. As she drifted away into nothingness, she hoped the dream wouldn’t come again, but she knew it would.
She understood that the moment she closed her eyes, the flames would be there again, waiting to consume her.
By the time Ali made it to Prescott the next morning, Gurley Street, from the sheriff’s department to Whiskey Row, was full of news-media vehicles. The arson story, confirmed or not, complete with suspected ELF-involvement (officially unconfirmed ELF-involvement), was evidently out in the world in a big way. News outlets from all over the state, and some national outlets as well, were apparently paying attention and in attendance.
Welcome to the three-ring circus, Ali thought as she searched for a parking place. And I’m the newbie ringmaster with no assigned parking.
She finally found a spot on the street three blocks away. When she stepped out of her Cayenne, someone was waiting for her. “Nice ride,” he said admiringly.
Ali recognized the voice at once—the ELF-cen
tric reporter from the previous evening. “Thank you,” she said and then added, “good morning, Mr. Green.”
He seemed a little surprised that she knew his name—surprised and pleased. He wouldn’t be nearly as pleased if he knew she knew the Oswald part, but then again, for someone with properly moussed hair, perfect clothes, a perfect tan, and perfect teeth, that was only to be expected. It came with the territory; it was only his just due.
The man gave her what was supposed to be a disarming smile. Ali wasn’t disarmed. She wanted to ask him straight out what he needed, but she didn’t bother. She already knew the answer. Mr. Green was accustomed to receiving special treatment from Devon Ryan. No doubt he hoped to establish the same kind of cozy relationship with her.
Don’t hold your breath, she thought.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I was wondering if I could have a word.”
“Sure,” she said agreeably. “For one word there’s no extra charge.”
Pausing slightly, he blinked at that comment, then he went on. “So you get to do the whole nine yards, the lighthearted stuff and the tough stuff, the cactus rustlers and the fires?”
If this is his way of winning me over, it isn’t working.
“That’s right,” she said. “I get to do it all. I’m a one-woman media relations phenomenon.”
He smiled again, letting her know he got the joke. “I want to apologize for putting you on the spot last night about that ELF fire up in Prescott,” he continued more seriously. “Someone told me later that you weren’t even living here at the time, so it’s completely understandable that you wouldn’t know about it.”
“I know about it now,” Ali told him. “I understand they call it Street of Dreams gone bad.”
“Now the same folks are back and doing it again,” he said.
Ali saw the trap and dodged it. Kelly Green had come to her looking for more than a private word. What he really wanted was a premature arson confirmation.
“You should probably see what Sheriff Maxwell has to say on that subject.” She glanced pointedly at her watch. “If I’m not mistaken, he’s about to start.”
