Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  Bob sounded the bell once again. This time Edie brought Ali’s breakfast. While Ali ate, a seemingly abashed Edie hustled up and down the counter, busying herself with other customers. When she returned, she had evidently decided it was time to change the subject.

  “About Thanksgiving,” she began. “If the new house isn’t going to be ready—”

  “Bryan’s crew is coming to work today,” Ali interrupted. “Let’s see how much they get done in the next few days. For right now I don’t want to cancel.”

  “All right,” Edie said. “Suit yourself. I hope it all comes together.”

  So did Ali. After breakfast, she drove from the restaurant to the house on Manzanita Hills Road. When she had left the night before, Bryan Forester’s Dodge Ram pickup had still been parked at the bottom of the hill. Now the pickup was gone, but vehicles belonging to other workers lined both sides of her driveway. True to their word, Bryan’s crew had turned up for work even if their boss hadn’t. The same thing went for the videographers. Their van was there, too.

  When Ali pulled into the yard, she was surprised that she had to move aside in order to make way for the departing building inspector. Yvonne Kirkpatrick had obviously stopped by first thing to sign off on that permit.

  Thank you, Billy, Ali thought. You’re getting things done after all.

  The front door of the house stood open, with workmen coming and going. Ali followed one of them inside, where she was thrilled to see that after months of seemingly no progress but the framed skeleton of a building, studs were now disappearing behind sheets of expertly installed wallboard. She found Billy Barnes in the bathroom of what would be a master suite. He was deep in conversation with one of his crew of wallboarders, walking the worker through some thorny issue.

  “Looks like you’re making good progress,” she said when he looked up and noticed her. “And I saw that the permit got signed off on after all.”

  Billy Barnes nodded. “That one took some doing,” he said.

  “What about Bryan?” Ali asked. “Have you heard anything from him—how he’s doing?”

  “About how you’d expect,” Billy answered. “I didn’t talk to him directly, but I talked to his parents.”

  “So at least he wasn’t alone,” Ali said.

  Billy nodded. “His dad said Bryan was in pretty bad shape—still in shock, couldn’t believe what had happened, and all that. I don’t blame him. I can’t believe it myself.”

  “It was great that you and your guys came to work this morning. I really appreciate it.”

  “We’re not the only ones,” Billy said, waving aside her praise. “Bryan’s other crews are doing the same thing. We’re moving forward as well as we can without him. He can’t afford for us to shut the jobs down. If he does, he’ll go broke, and so will we. If any of us could afford to work for free, we wouldn’t be here every day busting our butts, Bryan included.”

  That answered one of Dave Holman’s questions: The employees being on the job had very little to do with loyalty to their boss or with sympathy for him, either. Their showing up had far more to do with enlightened self-interest. They were working because they needed the money. Bryan’s regular paychecks fed their families and covered their bills.

  “If you have a chance to talk to him directly,” Ali said, “let him know I’m thinking of him, and if there’s anything I can do to help—”

  “Knock, knock,” someone called behind her.

  Ali turned to find that Dave Holman had followed her down the hallway. One hand held his notebook. In the other, he clutched a half-eaten doughnut. Dave glanced at Ali and then back at the doughnut. “At least I’m eating breakfast,” he said, then he turned to Billy. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Obviously, no introductions were required. From the guarded way the two men looked at each other, Ali was reasonably sure they were already acquainted—and that there was no particular love lost between them.

  Billy had been cordial enough with Ali. Now he glanced pointedly at his watch, as if to say that he did mind—a lot. “I suppose,” he allowed gruffly. “As long as it doesn’t take too much time.”

  Dave polished off the last of his doughnut. “So tell me about yesterday,” he said. “We’re trying to get a time line on Mr. Forester’s activities. He claims he was here on the job all day long. Do you happen to recall what time he showed up?”

  Ali knew better than to hang around listening to the interview. Leaving the two men alone, she went back outside and made her way over to the canopy-covered patio. Leland had started the propane heater, and the outdoor space was warmer than it was inside the house. The butler had covered the redwood table with a clean white cloth and had stocked it with several thermal carafes of freshly brewed coffee and stacks of Styrofoam cups. The spread included a selection of baked goods—a platter of blueberry muffins and a box of mixed doughnuts with one (Dave’s, presumably)—conspicuous in its absence.

  Ali was pouring herself a cup of coffee as Leland emerged from the fifth wheel with sugar, cream, and a fistful of spoons. “A good morning to you, madam,” he observed. “A bit nippy, but lovely.”

  Ali looked out at the bright, cloudless sky arching overhead. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is lovely.”

  “I see that Detective Holman is hot on the trail, as it were,” Leland continued. “He’s asking some of the same things he asked yesterday and checking our recollections for any inconsistencies.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth. I told him that Mr. Forester is usually soft-spoken and remarkably even-tempered, but that he seemed a bit out of sorts yesterday—impatient and irritable.”

  That was how Bryan had seemed to Ali as well. They fell silent as Brooks laid out the spoons, lining them up with military precision.

  “From the way Detective Holman asked his questions, I’m quite sure he believes Mr. Forester is responsible for what happened to his wife,” Leland continued thoughtfully.

  Ali nodded. “He’s not the only one. According to my mother, everyone in town has already decided he’s the guilty party.”

  Leland shook his head. “I’d hate to think he would be capable of that kind of thing. Then again, I know for a fact that you can’t always tell what someone is capable of, even if you think you know them.”

  Ali knew he was thinking about Arabella Ashcroft. Her seemingly normal appearance had belied the fact that she was a remorseless serial killer.

  Before Ali could reply, tires sounded on the driveway. She looked up to see Bryan Forester’s pickup truck come to a stop near the garage. As Bryan strode toward her, Ali hurried to meet him. Not surprisingly, the look on the man’s face was grim.

  “That’s Dave Holman’s car, isn’t it?” he asked. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Asking questions about whether or not you were here yesterday, which you were,” Ali said.

  “Great,” Bryan said. “Just what I needed, having him going around to all my jobs asking questions.”

  “But what are you doing here?” Ali asked. “Your guys are doing a great job on their own. After what happened yesterday, I would have thought—”

  “We need to talk,” Bryan interrupted. “In private.”

  CHAPTER 4

  With a discreet but understanding nod in their direction, Leland disappeared into his fifth wheel. Ali led Bryan over to the canopy-covered table. “What about?” she asked.

  Bryan sighed and ran one hand over his eyes as though he couldn’t imagine where to begin. “It’s about your cabinets,” he said.

  “The kitchen cabinets?” Ali asked. “What about them?”

  “Since it seems likely that I’m going to have to be off track for a while, I was trying to line up materials so the guys could keep on working and we can finish up the jobs that are already in process,” Bryan said. “I’m self-employed. If the jobs don’t get finished, I don’t get paid, which means I’ll probably end up firing my crews and declaring bankruptcy. With the drywall
going up, I knew it was only a matter of days before we’d be ready to install your cabinets. I noticed yesterday that they hadn’t been delivered yet, so I called to check. The person I talked to said she’d look into it. Today she called me back to say that they were never ordered.”

  “Not ordered?” Ali asked. “How can that be? I distinctly remember giving you a check. You said I needed to pay half at the time we ordered and the remainder when they were delivered and installed.”

  “That’s right,” Bryan said. “I remember that, too. You did give me a check. So did the people on the other two jobs. All three checks were deposited in the company account, but as far as I can tell, Morgan never faxed the order to the cabinet company. They have no record of it. The good news is that I have a copy of the three files on the laptop in my truck, so at least we don’t have to start over from scratch. I’ve already e-mailed the specs for each of the three jobs to High Design Cabinets. The problem is, they don’t have any record of the payments, even though the money for those three deposits is no longer in my business account.”

  “It’s not there?” Ali asked.

  Bryan shook his head morosely. “None of it.”

  “But that was a lot of money,” Ali objected. “I seem to remember the check I wrote for the cabinet deposit was well over thirty thousand dollars.”

  “Thirty-three nine, to be exact,” Bryan answered. “And the other two orders came to nearly the same amount. One was a little more and the other a little less. Altogether, it comes to right around a hundred thousand.”

  “So where did the money go?” Ali asked. “Maybe your wife simply made a mistake.”

  “I believe I’ve found the money, and it’s no mistake,” Bryan said grimly. “A couple of years ago, when Morgan’s grandmother passed away, she left her daughter a tidy little sum of money. Morgan had always been self-conscious about her figure. We agreed that she’d set that money aside in a separate account so she could use it if she ever decided to go ahead with breast enhancement surgery. Which she did. Once the surgery was over, I thought the account would be empty, but it’s not. It has well over a hundred thousand dollars in it—almost the exact amount that’s missing from the three cabinet deposits.”

  “You think Morgan was embezzling funds?” Ali asked.

  Bryan nodded. “That’s how it’s starting to look. I think she was hiding money away and getting ready to take off. It’s also what I need to talk to you about today. The money is in an account that’s in Morgan’s name only. With everything that’s happened, the bank says I won’t be able to touch a dime of it until after probate and this is all straightened out. High Design says they’re willing to start building the cabinets on a rush-order basis, but to do that, I need to send them money—money I don’t happen to have at the moment. I mean, I do have some money, but if I use that to pay the cabinet bill, I won’t be able to meet payroll. One way or the other, I’ll be out of business.”

  “So what do you need?” Ali asked.

  “I was hoping you’d go ahead and pay the second half of the cabinet bill. That would be enough to get them started building them. Hopefully, by the time the cabinets are ready to ship, I’ll be able to get the amount you’ve already paid freed up from Morgan’s account.”

  “You’re asking me to give you another check?”

  Bryan shook his head. “The way things stand, that’s probably a bad idea. I’d rather you have your bank wire the funds directly to High Design. That way, if something else happens…”

  “What something else?” Ali asked. “What more could go wrong?”

  Bryan let out a long breath. “Do you remember a couple of years ago, when we were afraid that fire was going to come down this side of the mountain and wipe out all of Sedona?”

  Ali hadn’t been living in Sedona at the time, but her parents had kept her posted with almost hourly reports. She nodded. “I remember the fire,” she said. “What about it?”

  “Our place was like a sitting duck out there in the middle of nowhere. Morgan did everything on the computer. I worried that if the house burned and took our computers with it, we’d be out of business. So I signed up with a Web-based off-site backup system. Every night at midnight, our computers log on to the Internet and backup all the files on our hard drives. I hadn’t ever had any reason to look at Morgan’s backup file. To begin with, I was just trying to figure out what happened to the missing money, so I didn’t look at all of them by any means, but I learned enough to know that she’s been playing me for a fool.”

  “More than just the money?”

  Bryan nodded grimly. “Way more,” he said.

  “She’s been cheating on you?”

  “In spades,” Bryan said. “I won’t know the whole story until I have a chance to look into the files. And I have a feeling that once I dig deeper, I’m going to find out there was a whole lot more going on that I still don’t know about.”

  Ali heard the hurt in Bryan’s voice. Betrayals that are uncovered while someone is still alive are bad enough, but at least you can deal with them. You can talk them over, or not, and then move on. When something like that surfaced after someone was dead, the survivor was left to deal with the whole thing alone. Unfortunately, Ali knew all about that kind of pain—from the inside out—and she worried about Bryan and whether or not he’d be able to handle whatever else might be hidden in his dead wife’s computer files.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ali said. “I’m not sure if you ever heard about it, but something very similar happened to me. There were things my former husband did behind my back that I never knew about until after he was dead.”

  “When it was too late and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it,” Bryan Forester added bitterly. There were tears in his eyes.

  Ali pretended not to notice. “That’s pretty much it,” she agreed. Her heart went out to the man. How could it not? And even though she expected the rest of the world would deem her a fool, she decided right then that she would trust him on the cabinet deal. Besides, he wasn’t asking for her money to go to him. He wanted Ali to pay the cabinet manufacturer directly.

  “Where do you want me to wire the payment?” she asked.

  Bryan let his breath out in a sigh of gratitude. “Thank you,” he said. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

  Before Ali could reply, her attention was drawn to the sound of raised voices coming from the open door of the house. The words, indistinct at first, became clearer as the speaker moved closer.

  “You’ve got a job to do, and so do I,” Billy insisted, his voice raised to a near shout. “I’ve wasted enough time answering questions. Now get the hell out of here.”

  Dave Holman emerged from the house a few minutes later, trailed by the two cameramen, one of whom had his camera shoulder-high and running. Obviously, it had occurred to at least one of them that, with a homicide investigation under way, their mundane Mid-Century Revival filming project may have morphed into something that might be more profitable.

  The videographers may have been filming for some time, but this was the first Dave seemed to notice. “Hey, you two,” he said. “What the hell are you doing? This is a homicide investigation. Turn that thing off.”

  The two cameramen, Raymond and Robert, were virtually interchangeable. At that moment, Ali still couldn’t tell them apart, but on this score, she was in full agreement with Dave Holman.

  “That’s right,” she told them. “This falls outside our filming guidelines. Do what he said. Turn it off.”

  Dave glanced toward Ali. When he caught sight of Bryan Forester, he stiffened. “What’s he doing here?” the detective asked.

  “Talking to my client,” Bryan answered in Ali’s place. “In case you haven’t noticed, we have a job to finish here.”

  Without another word, Bryan rose from the table. He stalked off across the driveway and strode past both the detective and the cameramen. Billy Barnes and Bryan walked into the house together. Dave, meanwhile, came ov
er to the table where Ali was sitting. “What’s he doing here?” he asked again. “What did he want?”

  “He already told you what he was doing here,” Ali corrected. “We were conferring about the best way to get my project finished.”

  Dave made no attempt to conceal his disbelief. “The day after his wife was murdered? Sure he was. It’s a lot more likely he’s making the rounds, trying to make sure his people have their stories straight about where he was and what he did yesterday.”

  “Dave—” Ali began.

  “Have you ever seen someone who’s been beaten to death?” Dave demanded, cutting her off. “Morgan Forester died a horrible death on the front porch of her own home. She was beaten to death—so savagely that her face is barely recognizable. I can’t believe those poor little girls came home and found their mother like that. Do I think this was a crime of opportunity—that some stranger just happened to stop by their place, found her home alone, and slaughtered her because he could? No way, Ali. Like I told you last night, when homicide cops see this kind of mindless fury, this kind of rage, we usually don’t have to go looking for some kind of stranger/danger perpetrator. Killers like this are mostly found a whole lot closer to home.”

  “Bryan didn’t kill his wife,” Ali asserted quietly.

  “Oh, really?” Dave returned. “How can you be so sure of that? Because he told you so?”

  “Because I know the man,” Ali insisted. “He’s a nice guy who’s worked for me for months. He just wouldn’t, that’s all.”

  “Right,” Dave said. “Billy Barnes has known Bryan since high school, and he says the same thing—he just wouldn’t. Don’t be naive, Ali. When a man’s world gets turned upside down, not even his mother knows what he might be capable of.”

  When Ali didn’t reply to that, Dave pulled his car keys out of his pocket and walked away. Since he had arrived first, his car was parked on the far side of Bryan Forester’s truck. Instead of going straight to his sedan, Dave made a slow circuit of Bryan’s Dodge Ram, peering into the bed of the pickup. Halfway around the truck, even with the far back tire, he stopped cold, leaned over, and stared. Then, pulling a pair of latex gloves out of his back pocket, he reached into the pickup, removed something, and took it with him when he drove away.