Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  Get another job, Ali thought. Again the accompanying posts echoed that sentiment, some of them with the added proviso of: Quit drinking!!!

  Ali found it all interesting, but more as a trip down memory lane than anything else. She really had moved on, and she wondered how long her successor would be able to keep it up before she, too, would need to hand Cutloose off to someone else—to new blood, as it were.

  Leaving Cutloose behind, Ali logged on to the virtual edition of Phoenix’s daily newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. There, in the statewide news section, she found an article on Morgan Forester’s homicide.

  Morgan Forester, age twenty-seven, wife of prominent Sedona area contractor Bryan Forester, was found bludgeoned to death on the front porch of their rural home outside the Village of Oak Creek. Mrs. Forester had been dead for some time when the body was discovered by her two young children as they returned home from school.

  The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office is investigating.

  “This is an extremely tragic situation,” said Demetri Hartfield, Yavapai County media relations officer. “We know she died of homicidal violence. At this point, however, we have no suspects and no persons of interest.”

  That’s not entirely true, Ali thought. Dave Holman definitely has a person of interest in this case.

  Neighbors up and down the lonely length of Verde Valley School Road reported seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary. The house itself is in a scheduled area half a mile from its nearest neighbor and screened from the road by a rise that would have concealed events at the house from passersby.

  “Morgan was a wonderful woman and the best friend anyone could ever want,” said neighbor Sally Upchurch. “She was a full-time mom who loved being at home and who absolutely doted on her two little daughters. She adored her husband as well. They’re just the nicest family, all of them. I can’t imagine how such a terrible thing could happen.”

  Bryan Forester and his two daughters are reportedly in seclusion somewhere in the Sedona area. Through a family spokesman, he asked that they be left to grieve in peace during this difficult time. Services for Mrs. Forester are pending and will be announced at a later date.

  The problem is, Dave Holman can imagine such evil very easily, Ali thought, and now so can I.

  Bad things really did happen to good people. Ali Reynolds herself was a case in point. Her husband had abandoned her to father out-of-wedlock children with not one but two other women. As a result, when he had been trussed in the trunk of a car and left on a railroad track to be run down by a speeding freight train, she had immediately been viewed as a prime suspect.

  But all that worked itself out eventually, Ali told herself. Dave Holman may be a less than perfect father and lover, but he’s a good detective. If Bryan Forester is innocent of murdering his wife, then Dave is the one who’ll sort it out. It’s none of my affair.

  Ali looked at the clock and was astonished to see that while she had been staring at her computer screen, several hours had zipped by unnoticed. She logged off, shut down her computer, closed it, and put it away.

  As soon as she turned out the light, Sam relented. The cat returned to the bedroom and to her spot on the side of Ali’s bed, landing on it with a soft thud. As Sam curled up and settled down, Ali reached out and put one hand on the purring cat.

  “Not our business,” Ali said aloud as she drifted off to sleep. But Sam wasn’t listening. Unfortunately, neither was anyone else.

  Sleepless, Matt Morrison lay in bed and tried to figure out what had happened. For the thousandth time that day, he asked himself the same question. Why had Susan stood him up? After all, she was the one who had come up with the idea of meeting in the first place. Susan Callison—Suzie Q in her profile—was thirty-seven years old, married, had no children, and sold real estate. She had told him in their many online encounters that her fantasy was to meet up with a guy and “do it” somewhere they weren’t supposed to be—preferably in somebody’s model home. By seven A.M. that morning, an eager Matt had been at the appointed place sixty miles south of Phoenix, parked in the driveway of one of the model homes in a new planned-living development called Red Rock Ridge.

  For someone like Matt, who had always followed the rules and kept his nose to the grindstone, Susan’s explicit online chats had made the whole idea sound amazingly daring and out there. Making love with a stranger in a strange bed or elsewhere was something totally out of character for him, which was why he had jumped at the chance. It was why he had gone. He had driven down I-10 anticipating the idea that for once in his incredibly boring life, he was about to have the kind of sex he’d read about in books and seen in movies—something that would literally knock his socks off.

  He had shown up early, a good twenty minutes before he was expected, but beautiful blond Suzie Q hadn’t showed. Anxious minutes had ticked off one by one while he waited and waited. Worried that she might have been in an accident somewhere along the way, he would have loved to call her, but she had never given him her number. “Better not,” she had counseled in an instant message. “Too dangerous.” So he hadn’t been able to call, and without his computer, he couldn’t e-mail or instant-message her. Instead, he had waited for the better part of two hours. When construction workers at some of the other houses on the street had started giving him funny looks, he had driven away.

  At first he’d had a hard time deciding where to go. Having left word at the office that he was on his way to Tucson, he couldn’t very well show back up without some kind of explanation. He couldn’t go home, either. Eventually, he’d made his way back to a truck stop in Eloy. There he’d sat at the counter and swilled several cups of coffee and thought about the call of the open road. What would life be like if he had become a trucker instead of an auditor? He tried to see himself at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler with nothing ahead of him but mile after mile of blacktop. What if he didn’t have to come home each night to a woman who barely tolerated his presence?

  Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Matt had driven back to the office and told his supervisor that his appointment had been canceled at the last minute. In the privacy of his cubicle, he logged on to his personal e-mail account. His department maintained a zero-tolerance policy on personal e-mail, so he didn’t send or open any, but he did scroll through his new mail, looking for a message from Susan. Nothing.

  After work, he had hurried home, gone into his study, and fired up his home computer, where he had been disappointed to find there was still no e-mail from Susan, and she wasn’t listed on his buddy list.

  He had immediately dashed off a quick note:

  Where are you? What happened? Did I go to the wrong place? Are you all right?

  That one seemed too brusque. Unable to unsend it, he had written another:

  I can understand it if you changed your mind. There’s no harm in that. I just want to know that you’re okay. I was afraid something bad had happened to you—that you’d been in a car accident and that you were hurt or in a hospital. Please let me know.

  And then a third:

  Please, please, please get back to me. The silence is killing me.

  Matt had sat at his desk for a long time, staring at his computer screen and hoping in vain to hear the sound of an arriving message. Finally, startled by how much time had passed, he had hurried out to the kitchen to start dinner. He had just put the chicken pot pies in the oven and was starting to fix the salad when Jenny arrived.

  “Dinner’s still not ready?” she asked. “Did you forget that I have book club tonight?”

  Matt had forgotten all about her meeting, but he had been thrilled to hear about it. If she was going out, that would give him a little peace and quiet for the evening, and maybe, with any kind of luck, a chance to hear back from Susan Callison. Just a single kind word from her, that was all he wanted.

  Now, though, it was one o’clock in the morning. Jenny was back home, asleep in the bedroom, and snoring like a steam engine. Matthew Morrison was wi
de awake. Susan still hadn’t replied.

  Monday-night shifts were usually fairly quiet in the ER. Sometimes Peter could even duck into the lounge and grab a nap. But not that night. The place was a zoo all night long, from the beginning of his shift to the end. It took some doing for him to manage to dispose of the damning needle as well as the bloodstained scrubs, booties, and hanky. Once that was done without anyone in the ER being the wiser, he felt a rush of euphoria. Soon, however, it seemed as though the nervous energy that had sustained him through the day abandoned him completely. Fatigued beyond bearing, he could barely stay focused on what needed to be done. When his shift ended two hours late, Peter scared himself by almost nodding off a couple of times on his way home from the hospital. When he got there, he did the only thing he could do: He stripped off his clothes, fell into bed, and fell sound asleep.

  By that time, a bedraggled Matt Morrison was already in his cubicle. He had never been much of a drinker, but this morning, lack of sleep had left him feeling like he’d overdosed on Captain Morgan rum and Coke. Matt felt sick to his stomach. His head ached. His ears rang. All because Susan hadn’t gotten back to him.

  By now he had sent her a dozen different messages. As each interminable moment of Matt’s workday ticked by, he knew with heartbreaking certainty what he had already known in the driveway of that model home in Red Rock—he would never again hear from Suzie Q. Susan Callison was the one good thing that had ever happened to Matt Morrison, and now she was over—completely over. For Matt, the saddest part about his erstwhile affair was that it had ended before it even started.

  Making love would have been nice. Matt would have liked the sex part, but that wasn’t the point. What he had really wanted was a connection—a honest, loving, human connection—to someone who, unlike Jenny, might somehow learn to care for him the same way he cared for her.

  For a brief time, Suzie Q had held out that tantalizing possibility. It hurt him to think that what had almost been within his grasp had disappeared from his life. Without ever actually touching him, Susan Callison had wounded him deeply and had left a permanent hole in Matt’s heart.

  Staring blankly at the wall of his cubicle, Matt wondered if he’d ever get over it. Maybe, he thought. Then again, maybe not.

  On Tuesday morning, Ali didn’t bother making coffee at home. Instead, she drove straight to the Sugarloaf Café and took a seat at the counter, where her mother, coffeepot in hand, was holding forth on the previous week’s local school board election, where her slate of candidates had won walking away.

  Edie Larson glanced in her daughter’s direction. “Ali’s here,” she called to her husband, who waved from his workstation in the kitchen. Edie hurried down the counter and filled Ali’s mug. “From the look on your face, I take it I’m in trouble again,” Edie said.

  Ali suspected that it wasn’t just the expression on her face that had alerted her mother. It was more likely Chris had stopped by the restaurant on his way to school to give his grandmother a heads-up on the engagement-ring situation. Ali tackled her mother straight on. She was glad Chris was close to her parents, but she worried that sometimes being close went too far.

  “Why would that be?” Ali demanded. “Could it have anything to do with the fact that you and Dad knew all about the engagement situation, including the ring, and never said a word to me?”

  “Chris asked us not to,” Edie said. “He and Athena wanted to surprise you.”

  “I was surprised, all right,” Ali said.

  “Chris came to your father asking for advice about a ring,” Edie explained. “Naturally, your father mentioned it to me. Evie’s diamond wasn’t doing anybody any good just lying around in my jewelry box, so I suggested he use that. End of story.”

  Ali realized that her parents had always regarded Christopher as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Things could be a lot worse. At least her parents cared, which was a lot more than could be said for Chris’s other grandparents.

  “What would you like?” Edie asked, changing the subject and writing on her order pad as she spoke. “Eggs over easy, bacon, no hash browns, biscuits?”

  Because Ali was still a little provoked with her mother, she was tempted to order French toast out of spite—just to prove her mother wrong for a change—but for today eggs, bacon, and biscuits were what she actually wanted. She loved her parents dearly, but there were times when she could have used more distance.

  Edie tore Ali’s order off her pad and slapped it on the wheel in the kitchen pass-through. After delivering someone else’s breakfast, she returned to Ali. “Have you talked to Bryan yet?” she asked.

  Ali shook her head. “No,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t really expect to. I’m sure he has plenty of other things to deal with.”

  “Dave’s on the case?”

  Ali nodded. In the old days, when Dave Holman had been an almost daily visitor at the Sugarloaf, Edie wouldn’t have needed to ask that question. She would have had the answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Now that Dave had his girls with him, he was evidently eating most of his breakfasts at home.

  “People are really up in arms about what happened,” Edie said. “The idea that someone could be murdered like that in broad daylight in her own front yard is appalling. And having those poor little girls be the ones who discovered their mother’s body…” Edie clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Sedona is supposed to be a nice place. Things like that don’t happen here.”

  Yes, they do, Ali thought. Things like that happen in all sorts of places.

  “They’re all saying Bryan did it,” Edie Larson continued. “Although how a man could do something like that to the mother of his children is beyond me!”

  “Mom,” Ali objected. “Wait a minute. What makes you think Bryan is responsible for what happened?”

  “I didn’t say I thought it, but it’s what people are saying. The husband is usually the responsible party.”

  Ali was taken aback. The article she had read online a few hours earlier had stated that investigators had yet to establish a person of interest in Morgan Forester’s death. In the meantime, the good citizens of Sedona were already declaring Bryan Forester guilty before even being charged.

  “What people?” Ali asked.

  “Cindy Martin, for one,” Edie said. “She works at the Village of Oak Creek salon. She’s the one who always did Morgan’s nails.”

  Ali sometimes forgot that her mother’s unfailing ability to see all and know all was based in large measure on the fact that Edie Larson was tuned in to an intricate network of small-town gossip.

  “According to Cindy, Morgan was tired of doing all the behind-the-scenes paperwork for her husband’s construction company and was ready to do something else. I can certainly understand that,” Edie added. “Not everyone can handle working in a family-owned business. When you spend every minute of every day with someone, it can turn into way too much togetherness. It’s not easy, you know. There are times when I think I need to have my head examined for spending my whole life putting up with your father’s foolishness on a day-to-day basis.”

  The Sugarloaf had been started by Ali’s grandmother, who had eventually handed it over to her two daughters, Edie and her twin sister, Evelyn. Up until Aunt Evie’s death, the two sisters had waited tables and managed the front of the house while Ali’s father had done most of the cooking. Edie’s current complaints notwithstanding, Ali knew that neither one of her parents would have wanted it any other way.

  “And then there’s the boob job,” Edie went on, lowering her voice.

  “What boob job?” Ali asked.

  “Morgan had one a couple of months ago,” Edie said. “When a woman signs up for a surgical enhancement, you can usually bet that she isn’t doing it for the poor dope who happens to be her current husband.”

  In southern California, where Ali had lived previously, that hadn’t been her experience. From Ali’s point of view, lots of women had breast augmentation, m
any of them with their husband’s encouragement and approval. That Morgan had joined ranks with other consumers of enhancement surgical procedures didn’t necessarily mean the Foresters’ marriage was in trouble. And it certainly didn’t seem like an adequate reason for anyone to declare Bryan a person of interest in his wife’s homicide.

  Bob Larson pounded twice on a bell in the pass-through, announcing that one of Edie’s orders was ready to be picked up. Edie shot off to deliver plates of food, leaving Ali to mull over what had been said. Yes, Ali knew Morgan Forester handled the bookkeeping part of her husband’s company, Build It Construction; she sent out the invoices, paid the bills. The neighbor had said she was a stay-at-home mom, although Ali thought she had been more of a work-at-home mom.

  Edie returned and refilled Ali’s cup. “Cindy also said that Morgan was always complaining that her husband was a workaholic—that he lived and breathed for his business. That’s not good for a marriage, either.”

  The idea that Edie Larson was disparaging someone else for being a workaholic would have been downright laughable if Ali could have found anything in this dreadful situation even remotely funny. Bryan Forester had lived in the community all his life. Ali didn’t like the idea that people were already turning against him based on nothing more than flimsy hearsay from his wife’s manicurist. Ali felt obliged to defend him.

  “One person saying it doesn’t make it so,” Ali declared. “Yes, Bryan Forester is a very hard worker, but that doesn’t mean he’s a workaholic. And it doesn’t make him a killer. Besides, most workaholics don’t have time for affairs.”

  Edie seemed taken aback by Ali’s remark. “I see,” she said, although Ali wasn’t at all sure that her mother did see. It seemed instead that this was a subject on which they would simply agree to disagree.