Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

It was the middle of the night. Matt lay in the bed beside her, his breathing even in sleep. The moon stole in through the window, making her think of her own personal ghost. Her alter-ego, really.

  Why after all these years didn’t she trust herself? Why did she always have to have her old partner come from outside to awaken her to what she needed to think about? Could it be that he really was just another part of her own brain? The part that wasn’t literal and measured.

  The creative part of her brain.

  Maybe he was another tool, like the jigsaw puzzles.

  Yeah, Frank, she thought. You can be a real tool.

  She got out of bed and tiptoed across the Saltillo tile, feeling the slight chill on her feet. She looked out the front window. The moon sat like a pearl in the sky. She picked up her laptop, sat on the couch and powered up, resting her feet on the coffee table.

  Facebook.

  Wasn’t everything these days related to public media? To social media? No man was an island, and this era proved that.

  She found Ruby Ballantine’s page and looked at her friends. There were three rows of faces on the left-hand side. The nine faces in the box marked “Friends” were unfamiliar. She clicked on all seven-hundred-and-twenty-eight friends and scrolled down, thinking: this is ridiculous.

  Faces rolled by. She didn’t recognize any of them. Why was she wasting her time like this?

  She abandoned the whole fruitless exercise, powered down the computer, and tried to get some sleep.

  But the next morning, she found herself looking at Ruby Ballantine’s Facebook page again. She stared at the page for a moment before clicking on “Friends” again. Ruby had a lot of friends—many of them women her age. Ruby knew people from all over the country. Even her estranged husband was listed.

  She looked for Sean Perrin but didn’t see him. She thought it sad that Ruby wasn’t Facebook friends with her own brother.

  Her mind wandered. This was a total waste of time.

  She scrolled so fast she almost missed it—

  A face she recognized.

  A name she recognized: Alex Williams.

  But the face and the name didn’t go together.

  Alex Williams, Madison Neville’s friend, was a beautiful girl. An incredibly beautiful girl. But Laura knew her not as Alex Williams, but as Madison Neville.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Deception

  Her full name was Alex Madison Williams. Williams was her married name. Her maiden name was Neville.

  Laura thought: You shouldn’t have played it so coy.

  Williams should have come up with another name entirely. And she shouldn’t have “friended” Ruby Ballantine. And she definitely shouldn’t have given Laura the number for Alex Williams.

  “Thought you were cute, having me call your own phone,” Laura murmured. She had to admire the audacity: “Call my friend Alex.” Just a couple of girls having dinner, drinking too much and having a girlie gabfest.

  Then “Alex” texts Laura back—no voice to recognize—and gives Madison Neville her alibi.

  But who was real? Madison Neville or Alex Williams?

  Alex Williams.

  Laura reached Anthony—it was still early but she’d guessed correctly that he was up and about—and gave him the news.

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Was he savoring the magnitude of Madison Neville’s deception?

  Finally: “Wow.”

  “Yeah, wow.”

  “Jesus.”

  “When you pick your jaw up off the floor,” Laura said, “Will you be able to speak in complete sentences?”

  “This would make a great film.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A beautiful girl, hot but psycho. Man! You know who I could see playing a girl like that? Sofia Vergara. She would be perfect!”

  He had the screenplay already written. Laura said, “Okay, so how does this look to you? She killed Sean Perrin, right?”

  “Yeah. It fits. He plans to meet her for a moonlight hike. There’s no one else there. She walks right up and offs him. No muss, no fuss. Easy Peasy.”

  Laura agreed. “Maybe they met a couple of times and went for hikes, and the second, or third, or fourth time was the charm. Nobody around…”

  “So she pops him.”

  Laura thought about it. Thought about his eyes—shut—and just the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Not something that you could use in court, because looks could be deceiving, but it bolstered what she thought she knew. “Picture this. She calls and says she has a surprise for him. When he gets there, she comes out of the restroom, has the gun behind her back. And she says—”

  “‘Close your eyes, baby. I got a surprise for you.’ Okay, so that’s probably what happened. What’s the motive?”

  Laura said, “She’s friends on Facebook with Ruby Ballantine.”

  “It looks like a professional hit,” Anthony said. “Maybe Ruby hired her.”

  “Dumb dumb dumb.”

  “What?”

  “‘Friending’ Alex Williams,” Laura said.

  First thing they did was go back to see Joel Strickland.

  “What do you want now?” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “Just a couple more things,” Laura said. “Was there any reason you and your wife split up?”

  “Plenty of reasons.”

  “Could you elaborate?”

  He sighed, pushed his laptop away. “I didn’t like being her cover.”

  “Cover?”

  “Ruby is gay.”

  Tell me something I don’t know. “You married her knowing that?”

  “No, I found out about it later.”

  “She wasn’t honest with you.”

  “Nope. But I wasn’t honest with her, either.” He rubbed his neck. “I’m going to be honest here. I liked her a lot, we got along well, good sex—at least I thought it was good sex, at least for me—and yes, my business could have used an infusion of cash at the time we got serious about each other. I thought that might be possible. But it turned out we were mismatched from the beginning. We had an argument the first month we were married, and she told me she had a lover—a woman. I hung on for a while after that, mostly because she kept leading me on as far as helping finance my company. She’s still doing it. We decided it was better if I moved out, but we both had reasons to stay married. She kept holding the bait over my head, and I was a good cover for her.”

  “Why did she need cover?” Anthony asked. “Gay’s the new black.”

  Laura gave him a look, but he ignored it.

  “Because of her father. He was virulently anti-homosexual. She could have her store assistants or friends—whoever she was seeing at the time—and he never suspected a thing.” His face turned hard. “I don’t know what I was thinking. She used me, dangling that bait all the time, and I never got anything out of it. But that’s going to change.”

  Anthony said, “What about Sean? Would he have inherited the estate?”

  “Hard to tell. Ruby was the one who nursed the father and stuck with him. Sean didn’t seem to care about the money. He was too busy living in his own little world. But if her father ever found out about her love life, who knows what he would do?”

  “Do you know who she’s seeing?”

  “No, but she did tell me she was beautiful and young.”

  “She didn’t give a name?”

  He thought for a minute. “Seems to me it began with an ‘A’. Amy or Alice or something like that.”

  “Alex?”

  “Could be. I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I’m trying to do now is extricate myself. I’m going to cut bait while I still have some dignity left.”

  “Lovers,” Anthony said.

  “Scheming lovers.”

  “Makes sense to me. Big Sis lures her brother here where it will be easy to kill him, and Alex does the dirty deed.”

  “I was thinking she might have been a hired assassin.”

  “M
aybe,” Anthony said. “Or a hired assassin with benefits.”

  They now had Alex Williams’s driver’s license. From there Laura was able to access her address. Unfortunately, like most people her age, Alex Williams didn’t have a landline, just a cell phone.

  Anthony prepared a warrant to access her cell phone records, even though at the moment they had no way of determining which carrier she used. His motto was Be Prepared. Just in case the Heavens opened and all that info started pouring in.

  “More likely,” he muttered, “We’ll have to pry that information out with an escargot fork.”

  “You eat escargot?” Laura asked.

  “One of my favorite things.”

  “Yuck.”

  “It’s an acquired taste. Just ask us one-percenters.”

  What little evidence they had against Williams was circumstantial and insufficient. Yes, they had her Facebook friendship with Ruby Ballantine, and Joel Strickland’s claim that Ruby and Alex were lovers (which would be filed under “hearsay”), and the fact that Alex had given Laura a phony name and directed her to call a nonexistent friend. None of this rose to probable cause; it wasn’t even close.

  But Laura was sure that the calls made to Sean Perrin during his stay at the Madera Canyon Cabins were from Alex Williams.

  As Anthony said, who wouldn’t want to go on a moonlight hike with a knockout like that?

  She called her partner. “Maybe it’s time for us to rattle Alex’s cage a little.”

  “I dunno. If we’re right about her, she’s pure psychopath.” He thought about it. “But if that’s the case, it wouldn’t matter one way or another.”

  “She won’t be shaken,” Laura agreed. “But I bet she’d show us what’s behind her mask.”

  “Yeah, because she knows we can’t touch her.” He thought about it. “But at least we’ll know who and what we’re really dealing with.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Lion In Her Den

  Alex Williams lived in Tanforan Pointe, an apartment complex in midtown not far from the University of Arizona, where Williams was currently enrolled as a geology major. Beyond that, there were few public records. She’d been born in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She was married for approximately two years to a Nathan James Williams, whereabouts currently unknown. Her birthdate was May 2, 1988. She drove a late model metallic yellow Ford Focus hatchback. And apparently, she was gay. Or at least bisexual.

  Or maybe just predatory.

  “Who do you think is the brains of this outfit?” Laura asked as they drove past the apartments on Euclid, rounded the block and came at the apartments from the other side.

  “Ruby’s got the money. And she’s older, so she might be the straw boss on this cattle drive.”

  “But Alex is such a good liar.”

  Anthony nodded. “If you look like a sociopath, if you talk like a sociopath—”

  “You may just be a sociopath,” they finished in unison.

  “I’m guessing they cooked it up together. I wonder what happened first, though, the chicken or the egg? Were they attracted to each other and became lovers and then decided to off Sean? Or…”

  “Did they meet somehow because Ruby was looking for a partner? Or a patsy?”

  “I don’t think Alex could ever be described as a patsy,” Laura said. “Not the way she lies. My mother had a saying about obnoxious couples: ‘They’d spoil another couple.’ Maybe that’s the case here.”

  “Guess we’ll find out,” Anthony said.

  The apartments were located on a sleepy stretch of Euclid Avenue—a labyrinth of beige stucco boxes stacked three stories high. Pocket patios, plenty of palm trees, the glitter of a swimming pool through wrought iron fencing—the definition of generic student apartments in a sunbelt city.

  The lot was less than half-full. That was because final exams were over at the U. of A., and students were moving out, if they weren’t gone already. There were lots of units just coming empty. Alex’s Ford Focus was in a covered parking area.

  “Looks like she’s home. There’s 14C.” Laura nodded toward the apartment and then looked back at the Google satellite map just to make sure.

  They parked and got out—and were blasted by the heat. Tucson was a good-sized city now, with plenty of roads and buildings that attracted the sun’s rays. The city was a heat island.

  Laura positioned herself to the left side of the door. Anthony knocked and stepped back so his weight was on his left leg. Hand down by his side.

  They waited. Laura’s hand also hovered near her weapon. Just in case.

  Anthony knocked again.

  The door opened. Alex Williams looked like your typical college student, in short shorts and a skimpy top. Barefoot, hair caught up in a barrette that looked like chopsticks, glasses pushed up on the top of her head. “Hi there.”

  Hard not to look at that model-perfect body.

  “Can we talk to you?”

  She opened the door wider. “Oh, sure. Come in!”

  She showed no surprise that they were here on her doorstep. No surprise that they had found her under the name Alex Williams. She looked friendly … and helpful.

  She led them into a neat, spare-looking living room. No knick-knacks, just the furniture the place came with. There was a MacBook Pro on the dinette table and a big textbook—geology, Laura thought.

  The graduate student at work.

  She motioned them to the couch and said, “Did you find out who killed Sean?”

  “Not yet,” Anthony said, sitting down. It was a cheap apartment couch and he sank into it.

  Laura perched on the edge beside him, hoping to avoid the quicksand.

  The girl’s brows knitted together. “I was hoping the furniture wasn’t so crappy…” She pulled a chair from the dinette table, sat down on it, and hooked her bare feet around the legs. “…But, you know.” She shrugged. “So how can I help you?” She leaned forward, earnest and attentive and not the least bit surprised they were here.

  Anthony said, “I was wondering … could you clear up why you called yourself Madison Neville?”

  Her face turned suddenly grave. “I was worried my ex would find me. That’s why I changed back to my maiden name.”

  “He wouldn’t find you under the name ‘Madison Neville?’”

  “I know. Pretty dumb, huh? But I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to get away from him.”

  “Did you change it back officially?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know where your ex is now?”

  “Nuh-uh. I have no idea.” She looked confused and sad at the same time.

  Quite a show she was putting on. But Laura sensed Williams, Neville—whoever she was—didn’t give a rat’s ass whether they believed her or not. She gave Laura the impression that she knew she’d already won this round and she was not the least bit worried about what she said.

  Anthony took the lead. He went over Sean’s movements—the ones Alex knew about.

  “Was he interested in you?”

  “Oh, he flirted with me. But I wasn’t interested.”

  “Did you spend much time together?”

  “No more than I did with any other guest. All that lying—it’s fun for a while, and then it gets boring.”

  “Go on any hikes together?”

  “Hikes?” She looked confused. “Why would I go hiking with him?”

  Laura asked if she could use the bathroom.

  “Go ahead,” Williams said. “It’s on the left.”

  Laura looked at the bedroom, which was neat and somehow generic. She looked at the bathroom. Also neat and generic. She flushed the toilet, turned the faucet on and off.

  She came back and stopped by the waist-high bookcase. It was crammed with books.

  There were a few textbooks, some paperbacks—and a volume Laura recognized because she had it herself: Vernon Geberth’s Practical Homicide Investigation.

  “I have that!” Laura said.

  Alex lo
oked up. “Oh, you do? I guess you would. That belonged to Nate. My ex. He wanted to be a homicide cop.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He made it through the Academy but as far as I know he never made detective.”

  Laura would track down Nathan Williams and find out if that were true. She was beginning to suspect everything that came out of this girl’s mouth was a lie.

  Anthony asked, “You’re majoring in geology?”

  “Actually, the degree I’m working on is geochemistry. That’s the reason why I was staying at Madera Canyon in the first place.”

  “I thought you said you were trying to get away from your ex-husband.”

  “Yeah, that, too. Not everything is either-or.”

  She actually pouted.

  Anthony ignored the remark and the pout. “What’s in Madera Canyon?”

  “I’m writing my thesis on the geochemistry of the Santa Rita Mountains. I’ve been collecting water samples from the watershed, trying to find out how much the leaching from the mines around there has affected the water chemistry over the last century and a half.”

  It was all Greek to Laura. She could tell Anthony was having a hard time trying to follow that, too.

  The girl went on about metamorphic core samples and geochemical watersheds until finally Anthony stopped her. “Do you own a firearm?”

  “What? No! I’m scared to death of them!”

  “So if we were to get a search warrant, we wouldn’t find a firearm?”

  The mask fell away. “You’d have to have P.C. first, and frankly, I’m not seeing it.”

  P.C. Probable cause. Either the girl was watching too many cop shows, or she’d been dipping into hubby’s Practical Homicide.

  “Your friend Sean was shot with a .22,” Anthony said. “Do you know of anyone who has a .22, either a revolver or semiautomatic pistol?”

  She held his eye. “No, I don’t.”

  Laura said, “Can you tell me the nature of your relationship with Ruby Ballantine?”

  “We’re together.”

  “Together?”

  “Let me spell it out for you. We’re lovers. We love each other.”

  “So you knew Sean Perrin through Ruby?”

  “Ruby asked me to keep an eye on him. She was worried about him.”