Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  For a moment Ali stood there in shocked silence. What was that? she wondered. But she knew what it had looked like—a hammer. And why did Dave take it? But she knew the answer to that, too. Dave had taken whatever it was because he thought it was evidence in his case—evidence that hadn’t required a search warrant because it had been lying in plain sight.

  “Are you all right?” Leland Brooks had appeared soundlessly behind Ali and was examining her face with some concern.

  “Yes,” she said, a little too quickly. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” he returned. With a firm hold on her upper arm, he led her back to the table. “Come sit down, then,” he said. “Let me get you something—coffee, tea, or even something a bit stronger? Perhaps a hot toddy is in order.”

  Shaking her head, Ali managed to laugh off his suggestion. She reached for her now-cold coffee. “No, thanks,” she said. “That’s not necessary. I’ll just sit here for a few minutes.”

  “Well, at least let me call and cancel your afternoon appointment,” Leland suggested. “There’s no point in going through with it if you’re not feeling up to snuff.”

  At first Ali didn’t remember what appointment he meant, but then she did. As a high school senior, Ali had been the surprised recipient of the very first Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship, an award that had made it possible for her to go on to college. Now, over twenty years later and through a series of fluke circumstances, Ali found herself in charge of administering the scholarship program that had once benefitted her.

  Rather than being part of the regular financial aid programs, the Askins Scholarship had a somewhat unorthodox selection process. There was no formal application. Early in September, Leland Brooks, after months of investigation, had presented Ali with a list of ten possible candidates. The deserving students were drawn from the Verde Valley’s various secondary schools. Once Ali and Leland had winnowed that list down to three finalists, Leland had gone about collecting as much information as possible on all three. Ali had decided that before making her final decision, she wanted to interview each of the candidates. The first of those interviews was scheduled for later that day.

  “So you don’t want me to cancel your meeting with Miss Marsh?” Leland confirmed. Haley Marsh, a seventeen-year-old single mother, was a senior at Cottonwood’s Mingus Mountain Union High School.

  “No,” Ali said. “Considering what’s going on around here today, a drive over to Cottonwood would probably be good for what ails me. It’s not until afternoon, though. In the meantime it might be a good idea if I spent an hour or so going over the files on all the finalists.”

  Leland nodded. “Very well,” he said.

  Just then Bryan emerged from the house. Ali was relieved when he merely nodded in her direction and walked to his pickup without bothering to engage her in conversation. He clambered into the vehicle, wheeled it around, and drove out of the driveway.

  What if Dave is right about Bryan Forester? Ali wondered. And what should I do about the cabinet order? She had told Bryan she’d wire the money to get the rush job started, but should she? Wouldn’t that be sending good money after bad?

  Ali sat there for some time thinking about it, but then the whining sound of someone installing wallboard screws came to her attention. It was a wake-up call. Regardless of what was going on with Bryan, the job was moving forward. If her remodeling project was ever going to be completed, and no matter who was doing the actual work, Ali would need those cabinets on hand sooner rather than later. She spent the next little while making sure her rush order of cabinets was under way.

  She was still at the table and finishing up on the cabinet call when the two cameramen came over to the table and helped themselves to coffee and doughnuts. They seemed surprised to see her.

  “I want this morning’s tape,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Which one is he? Ali wondered. Robert or Raymond?

  “The tape,” she said. “The one you were doing this morning when Detective Holman was here. You were hired to film a home remodel. You weren’t hired to film a homicide investigation.”

  “But it’s all part of the same—”

  “Detective Holman’s visit doesn’t fall under the heading of home remodel,” Ali insisted. “I want whatever film you may have taken of that. I clearly remember stipulating in the contract that I had the right to say what film would be released to the public and what wouldn’t. That means I want a copy of the whole tape. That way, if all or part of it is released to any venue without my express approval, I’ll know where the material came from.”

  “But what about the wallboard installation?” Robert/Raymond objected. “That’s on the same set of footage.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, the crew is still hanging wallboard,” she said. “You’ll have plenty of usable footage on that, but the cop stuff is off limits—all of it.”

  “Well,” Robert/Raymond said, “I can’t just give it to you. It’s not that simple. This equipment doesn’t create an actual tape, as such. I can send you the file by e-mail, if you like.”

  “E-mail is fine,” Ali said. “But I want it today, no later than five. And if I were you, I’d make damned sure that I didn’t accidentally e-mail it to anyone else, either. I’m the one who determines who gets the material and who doesn’t. If you try passing my film along to someone who isn’t authorized to have it, be advised: I have plenty of trial attorneys at the ready who’ll be only too glad to take you to court and hold you accountable.”

  The two cameramen walked away, grumbling to themselves, as Leland Brooks appeared with three file folders in hand. “Good,” he said. “The two of them are forever throwing their weight around. It’s about time someone put them in their places.” With a ceremonial flourish, he set the folders on the table in front of Ali. “Here you are,” he added. “The official dossiers, as it were. When I put these together, I always feel a bit like M from the old James Bond movies.”

  “Don’t you mean Q?” Ali asked. “He’s the one with the gadgets. Isn’t M a woman?”

  “I know,” Leland replied with an impish grin. “I definitely mean M.”

  Ali remembered the night Arabella Ashcroft had realized that her long-term butler was gay. She had hit the roof about it. Ali liked the fact that Leland felt free to tease with her about the situation.

  Ali spread the folders out in front of her and glanced at the three names. Two of the candidates were female—Haley Marsh, from Cottonwood, and Marissa Dvorak, from Sedona. The male was Ricky Farraday, also from Sedona High School.

  Leland reached down and tapped Ricky’s file. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s out.”

  In the spring of his junior year, Ricky Farraday had gained some national exposure as the victim of Sedona High School’s first ever documented hate crime when he’d been publicly outed by having his locker filled with swarms of fruit flies. The ACLU had come to his rescue and had obtained an undisclosed monetary settlement. He had also been thrown out of the house by his hard-nosed, homophobic father. Ali knew from things Chris had mentioned that Ricky was now living in an apartment on his own—at his parents’ expense—as a supposedly emancipated adult.

  Even though Askins Scholarship winners were traditionally female, Ali hadn’t objected when Leland Brooks had put Ricky’s name on the list. Ricky’s grades up through his junior year had certainly merited that. Then there was the similarity between Ricky Farraday’s background and Leland Brooks’s own family history. After serving with the Royal Marines during the Korean War, Leland had been cast aside by his nearest and dearest because they hadn’t wanted “his sort hanging about.” Being rejected by his blood relations was the real reason Leland had emigrated from the UK to the States. Bearing all that in mind, Ali was somewhat startled to hear that Leland was prepared to kick Ricky Farraday off Scholarship Island.

  “How come?” she asked. She more than half expected to hear that since he was living on his own, his senio
r-year GPA wasn’t good enough. That was what often happened when kids went off to live without parental supervision for the first time.

  “Because he’s a fraud,” Leland declared forcefully. “A lying, cheating fraud.”

  Ali was stunned. “You mean he’s not gay?”

  “He may be gay,” Leland allowed. “Although I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced of that, either. My main problem with Ricky is that I’ve gotten to the bottom of the fruit-fly escapade. He’s a victim of a self-inflicted hate crime.”

  “You mean he put those fruit flies in his own locker?” Ali asked.

  “A friend of Ricky’s put them there at his insistence. He was at war with his father and was looking for a way to get thrown out of the house, and he certainly succeeded in that. Yes, he’s living on his own, but with that undeserved windfall from his court case, he doesn’t really need any scholarship help. That’s just my opinion, however. Go ahead and read all three dossiers. The final decision is yours, but I think either one of the two girls would make a better choice.”

  Ali didn’t ask how Leland had uncovered all these details, but she was prepared to accept his considered opinion on the subject. Setting aside Ricky Farraday’s file, she spent the rest of the morning in the canopy-covered break room, working her way through the two remaining dossiers. Although both Marissa Dvorak and Haley Marsh were capable students, neither was performing at the valedictorian or salutatorian level, where scholarship help would have been much more plentiful. The two girls were solidly second-tier students.

  Marissa Dvorak had been adopted as a ten-year-old from an orphanage in the Ukraine. Juvenile arthritis had left her confined to a wheelchair prior to her freshman year in high school. Lengthy hospital stays and prolonged absences had limited her academic achievement and had also contributed to a lower GPA than she would have had otherwise. Nonetheless, she was a serious student who gravitated toward classes in science and math. Her single extracurricular activity was the chess club, where she had easily walked away with the state championship.

  According to what Leland had been able to learn from interviewing friends and teachers, Marissa hoped to attend the University of Arizona as a premed student with the eventual goal of doing medical research. For right now, her hopes and dreams were stymied by the fact that her parents, who ran a chain of dry-cleaning establishments, made too much money for her to qualify for most forms of financial aid other than student loans. Both she and her parents were reluctant to sign up for those—a situation Ali Reynolds understood very well.

  Haley Marsh, along with her maternal grandmother, Nelda Harris, had moved to Cottonwood a little over two years earlier from Tuttle, Oklahoma. Haley had enrolled in Mingus Mountain as a very pregnant fifteen-year-old sophomore. Despite being an unmarried teenage mother, Haley had managed to maintain a solid 3.2 GPA for as long as she’d attended Mingus Mountain. Nelda, who worked as a school janitor in the afternoons and evenings, looked after the baby during the day while Haley was at school, and on weekends while Haley held a part-time job as a cashier at the local Target.

  Faye Gerrard, Haley’s homeroom teacher and her junior-year English teacher, was the one who had brought Haley to Leland Brooks’s attention. “The girl is smarter than she knows,” Faye had told Leland. “What she’s lacking is self-confidence. I don’t think anyone else in her family has ever gone on to college. She’s somehow decided that since they didn’t, she won’t, either.”

  Haley’s file left more questions than it offered answers. Where were Haley’s parents? Why weren’t they in the picture or even mentioned? And what about the baby’s father? Where was he? Who was he?

  Ali Reynolds found it easy to relate to both girls. Like them, she had been a second-tier student. For her, receiving the Askins Scholarship was the one thing that had made going on to school possible. She suspected the same would be true for either Marissa or Haley. One would have to overcome tough physical realities. As for Haley? Ali knew that being a single parent and going to school wasn’t easy, but she also knew it could be done. Ali Reynolds herself was proof positive of that.

  Marissa had a definite career goal in mind. The information on Haley gave no hint as to what her possible career choices might be, but Ali didn’t find that particularly alarming. After all, how many high school seniors already knew exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up?

  Ali abandoned her spot at the picnic table when the workers came wandering outside for lunch. Relieved to leave the construction behind, she grabbed some lunch on the way and then stopped by a Hallmark store and searched until she found just the right card for Chris and Athena. After ordering a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to the high school gym in time for their engagement celebration, she headed for Cottonwood.

  It wasn’t until she was alone in the car that she started thinking about Morgan Forester again—about Morgan and Bryan, about how the love two people once shared for each other could go horribly wrong. After all, when she had first met Paul Grayson, he had showered her with flowers, one arrangement after another, so many that her friends at work had teased her about being able to open her own flower shop. The onslaught of bouquets had started to dwindle shortly after their wedding, and the deliveries had ended completely long before Paul had ended up dead under that speeding freight train.

  Ali was relieved when she arrived at Haley Marsh’s place, a modest duplex on the far-east side of Cottonwood. When Ali knocked, she heard a toddler, crowing and babbling, come racing to answer it.

  “Get out of the way,” Ali heard a woman’s voice order from inside the house. “Let me open it.” Ali recognized the gentle drawl that betrayed the mother’s Oklahoma origins.

  The child must have stepped aside because eventually the door opened. Haley Marsh was a petite blue-eyed blonde. One arm was filled with an overflowing laundry basket, while a wide-eyed child with chocolate-brown skin and a cap of curly black hair peeked shyly out from behind his mother’s leg. Looking at him, Ali estimated that he had to be right around two years old.

  “Haley Marsh?” Ali asked. “My name is Ali Reynolds.”

  Haley nodded, but she didn’t open the door to welcome Ali inside. “Mrs. Gerrard said you’d be dropping by today,” Haley said guardedly. “She mentioned something about your wanting to talk to me about a scholarship, but I haven’t applied for any scholarships.”

  “May I come in?” Ali asked.

  Haley sighed and set down her laundry basket. “I guess,” she said. “But the place is sort of a mess.” She hefted the child onto her hip and motioned Ali into the room. The crammed living room wasn’t really a mess so much as it was lived in. A playpen empty except for a collection of outgrown toys was jammed into one corner of the room along with a changing table. Baby gear and more toys were scattered everywhere. Half the dining room table was covered with stacks of folded laundry. An open schoolbook and a notebook of some kind lay on the other end of the table as though an afternoon study session had been interrupted by Ali’s arrival. A high chair, littered with the remains of the toddler’s afternoon snack, sat nearby.

  Still holding the squirming child, Haley ushered Ali over to a sagging couch, then she took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. As soon as she was seated, the barefoot baby scrambled out of her lap and scooped up a tiny plastic truck from the floor. With a face-wide grin, he brought the toy to Ali and offered it to her. Ali accepted the proffered gift with a thank-you. The child clapped his hands in glee, said something that sounded very much like “truck,” and then dashed off in search of another one.

  “Good sharing,” Haley told her son. To Ali, she added, “He likes having company.”

  “He’s adorable,” Ali said. “What’s his name.”

  “Liam,” Haley answered. “After my grandfather.”

  Not after his father, Ali thought. She couldn’t help wondering how this clearly African-American child would go about explaining his very Irish first name as he grew up. And was the fact that Haley had been
expecting a mixed-race child part of why she and her grandmother had pulled up stakes and moved to Arizona?

  “I’m here on behalf of the Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship fund,” Ali explained. “The first Askins Scholarship was given to me years ago, when I was a senior in high school, and it made all the difference. My parents own the Sugarloaf Café in Sedona. At that point they had a viable business but not much money. Without the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to go on to college; with it, I could and did. They say what goes around comes around. Now I’ve been put in charge of distributing the scholarship that was so helpful to me.

  “You’ve been brought to our attention as an especially deserving student. I wanted to have an opportunity to talk to you about it. I wanted to see if your receiving a scholarship from us would help you go on to college.”

  “With him here and getting into everything, it’s hard enough just going to high school,” Haley said. “How could I possibly go on to college?”

  “But you’d like to?” Ali pressed.

  “I suppose so,” Haley admitted a little wistfully. “But I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “What were you planning to do instead?” Ali asked.

  “Work,” Haley answered. “My manager at Target promised me a full-time position once I graduate. All I want to do is earn enough so Liam and I can rent a place of our own. Give Grandma a little peace and quiet for a change. She already raised me. It’s not fair that she’s having to raise him, too.”

  “If you could do anything you wanted, what kind of work would you choose?” Ali asked.

  “I suppose I’d be a nurse,” Haley said without hesitation. “I’d also like to be Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The chances of that happening aren’t very good, either. For now all I want is to graduate from high school and for Liam and me to be on our own.”