Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  “But if someone would help you,” Ali began. “If someone offered to help pay your way—”

  Liam came back over to his mother, scrambled up into her lap, and cuddled up against her breast. Ali knew that, as a general rule, it was a bad idea for babies to have babies, but clearly, Haley Marsh was a good mother—an exceptionally good mother.

  “If you had a better education, there’d be more opportunities for Liam,” Ali said. “And more opportunities for you, too.”

  Suddenly, Haley’s bright blue eyes sparked in anger. “You don’t know that,” she declared hotly. “You don’t know anything about us. You don’t get to come in here with your fancy checkbook and think that gives you the right to judge us or tell us what we should do or shouldn’t do.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did,” Haley interrupted. “But this is my baby. I had him on my own, and I’m raising him on my own. Grandma’s been wonderful to us. I don’t know how we would have made it without her. But I’ll be eighteen in May. It’s not fair to ask her to do any more. It’s time for us to move out and be on our own. I can’t do that and go to school, too. So thanks for the scholarship offer, but no thanks.”

  It wasn’t quite the response Ali had expected. She had thought Haley would be as thrilled as Ali herself had been to learn she was even under consideration for a possible scholarship. She never expected that her offer would be turned down cold.

  “This is important. Before you decide, shouldn’t you at least discuss it with your grandmother?” Ali asked. “Yes, if you go on to school, it may take a few years longer for you and Liam to be out on your own, but obviously, your grandmother loves you very much. Surely she wouldn’t mind—”

  “No,” Haley insisted. “I don’t want it. We’ll be fine. Give it to someone else.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not going to ask her,” Haley said. “My grandmother looks after Liam while I’m at school, and then she works from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight. She can’t go on working that hard forever. It’s bad enough that she’s doing it while I’m in high school. I couldn’t ask her to do the same thing so I can go to college. I can’t and I won’t. She’s done enough for us already. Now go, please. I’ve got homework to do.”

  “Won’t you please reconsider?” Ali asked.

  Haley was having none of it. “Thank you but no thanks,” she said. “I appreciate the offer.”

  Rebuffed, Ali stood up and held out the toy truck. Liam scrambled out of his mother’s lap and dashed over to collect it. As Ali made her way to the door, she opened her purse and pulled out a business card, which she handed over to Haley. “Given the cost of tuition, books, and room and board, the scholarship could turn out to be a substantial amount of money over the next several years,” she said. “If you happen to change your mind…”

  Haley took the card and then dropped it on a nearby end table. “Right,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

  Moments later, feeling as though she’d been given the bum’s rush, Ali found herself in the yard outside.

  What kind of a salesman does that make me? she wondered. I can’t even give money away.

  CHAPTER 5

  With both Ricky Farraday and Haley Marsh officially out of the running, Marissa Dvorak was the only remaining candidate for that year’s scholarship. Ali’s appointment with Marissa was scheduled for tomorrow. In the meantime, awash in a sense of failure, she headed back to Sedona. She couldn’t help but contrast the ecstatic, grateful way she had felt when Anna Lee Ashcroft had told Ali about her scholarship with the way Haley Marsh had received similar news.

  Ali picked up the phone and dialed Leland’s number. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Not well,” Ali told him. “Haley Marsh told me to take my scholarship and shove it, then she threw me out of the house.”

  “She wasn’t interested?”

  “You could say so. She was vehemently not interested. Not interested in going on to school and not interested in receiving a scholarship.”

  “That wasn’t the impression I got from speaking with her grandmother,” Leland replied. “It sounded as though she was interested in Haley continuing on to university.”

  “You talked to Nelda Harris about the scholarship?” Ali asked.

  “Only in the most general terms,” Leland replied. “I led her to believe Haley was being considered for some kind of academic award, but I didn’t mention the scholarship per se.”

  “Then grandmother and granddaughter need to get on the same page,” Ali told him. “At this rate, we’ll be lucky if we award an Askins Scholarship this year.”

  “Don’t be discouraged,” Leland counseled. “There’s always Marissa Dvorak.”

  “She’ll probably throw me out, too,” Ali said despairingly. “What’s happening on your end?”

  “Bryan Forester came by and dropped off another load of wallboard,” Leland said. “Dropped it off and unloaded it, too. The crew had run out of materials and gone home.”

  “He unloaded it by himself?” Ali asked. “That stuff is heavy.”

  “By himself,” Leland confirmed. “And I can understand where he’s coming from. Mr. Forester strikes me as a man of action. Doing some hard physical labor probably did him a world of good. Maybe he’ll be tired enough to sleep. I doubt he did last night.”

  Ali doubted that, too.

  “Oh,” Leland added, “he wanted me to let you know that he heard from the cabinet company, verifying that the funds had been received and that your order was in process. They told him they have enough material in stock to do your entire order, and they’re getting started on it right away. They’re hoping to ship in two weeks, but that may be pushing it.”

  “So much for Thanksgiving,” Ali said.

  “What do you mean?” Leland asked.

  Now that she had opened her mouth, Ali regretted it. Considering the fact that Bryan’s whole family was coming apart, it seemed incredibly selfish for her to have brought it up. Now that she had started, however, she charged on.

  “I was hoping I’d be able to invite people over to the new place for Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “Even if everything wasn’t quite finished, I figured we’d be able to make do.”

  “Does Mr. Forester know about your dinner plans?” Leland asked.

  “Not really,” Ali admitted. “I never mentioned it to him. I didn’t want to add any more deadline pressure than there already was. Besides, it’s not that big a deal. I can always invite everyone over to my old house in Skyview. It’s the principle of the thing—and a matter of changing my mind. That’s all.”

  “Finished or not, if you’d rather have your guests come here, we’ll have them here,” Leland Brooks declared. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a very capable cook. If I could cook food for the officers’ mess in Korea in the cold and the mud, I’m sure I can manage this. How many people are we talking about?”

  “Not that many. My parents, Christopher and Athena, Dave and his three kids, one of my friends from California. Mom probably wouldn’t mind doing the turkey. She usually does, but she and Dad cook every single day of their lives. I wanted to give them a break.”

  “Not to worry,” Leland said. “We’ll work it out. You come up with the guest list, and I’ll manage the rest. We’ll make it a memorable occasion. And speaking of occasions, the florist called. They said they tried to deliver your flowers to the gym, but the place was locked up tight. I’m having them deliver them to me here instead. I’ll drop them off a little later myself. That will give me an opportunity to give the lucky couple my own good wishes as well.”

  Ali tried to remember if she had mentioned the engagement news to Leland. With everything else that had been happening throughout the day, it didn’t seem likely.

  “So you know about that?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Leland Brooks replied. “Mr. Reynolds came to me a couple of weeks ago with some concerns about where to take the rin
g to have it redesigned and resized. I sent him to see the man who used to handle all of Miss Arabella’s work. I hope he was pleased with the results.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Ali said. “And I’m sure Chris appreciated having the benefit of your advice.”

  Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly left out. Yes, she knew that Chris and Athena had wanted to surprise her, but her folks had both known about Chris’s engagement well in advance of last night’s ring unveiling. Obviously, the same was true for Leland Brooks.

  I always tried to raise him to be independent, Ali thought ruefully. I may have succeeded too well.

  When Peter woke up, he needed to pee like a racehorse and was astonished to see that he had slept for the better part of ten hours. When he was younger, he had been able to manage on far less sleep than that. It was, he supposed, part of getting older rather than better. He fixed coffee and some toast. Then he uploaded the memory stick from his camera and, after deleting some of the less-well-thought-out shots, added the remainder to his DVD.

  Scrolling through them, he congratulated himself on the fact that the crimes were all different. Morgan, still dressed, lay half in and out of the swing with her face battered and bloodied beyond recognition. He had arranged Candace so she lay on the ground with her various pieces put back together in all the wrong places—like a macabre human picture puzzle gone horribly wrong. He had heard that a novice FBI profiler had claimed this indicated a highly disorganized killer. Peter had laughed outright when he heard that; he was anything but disorganized. Melanie Tyler had been shot to death with her husband’s .38, while Debra Longworth had been stabbed to death before being the victim of a vicious postmortem sexual assault. And that was another part of being smart. Never do it the same way twice.

  The pictures were fine, but Peter was feeling vaguely displeased with himself as he stowed the DVD in his safe. He spent some time examining the diamond he had removed from Morgan’s finger. It was large and showy, though Peter understood enough about diamonds to know that it wasn’t as flawless as it should have been. But then Morgan hadn’t been flawless, either. With a sigh, he returned the precious diamond-loaded key ring to its customary hiding place.

  After one of his exploits, Peter usually spent the next day patting himself on the back. After all, who else was going to tell him “good job”? This time he couldn’t quite manage it. Yes, by trying to track him down, Morgan Forester had posed a threat to him. As a result, she had gotten exactly what she deserved. But had it been worth it? Usually, he came back from a kill with a euphoric sense of accomplishment. Today he was left with a lingering sense of forboding.

  When Rita had fallen off the mountain, he had been right there with her. Naturally, he had been a person of interest in that case, but the cops had never charged him. With the others, he had managed to make sure his name had never surfaced in the resulting investigations, and all those cases had gone cold without ever being solved. This time he worried that he might have made a mistake. He couldn’t get that asshole from Hertz out of his mind.

  One of the things Peter counted on in life was that worker bees would function that way—as miserable drones who collected their paltry paychecks without caring that much about doing their job. Peter’s big problem with the guy running the Hertz check-in line was that he hadn’t just been doing his job. He had actually been paying attention. How carefully had he been watching, and if questions were raised, how much would he remember?

  For the first time, Peter realized that he might have made a slight miscalculation. He had used Matthew Morrison’s name for car-rental purposes because he could. Because Matthew Morrison was convenient. Because he was as good a fall guy as any.

  People said that being a doctor let you play God. That was especially true in the ER. Patients came in. Peter sewed them up and patched them up. Some lived; others died; and after Peter was done with the ones who survived, he turned them over to other doctors who helped them go on with the messy business of living. But what he did and didn’t do with his patients in the ER was nothing compared to the havoc he could wreak in people’s lives when, as Internet puppet master, he could run them up and down a flagpole at will—as he had with Matthew Morrison.

  Much as Peter despised cheating women, that was nothing compared to his overriding contempt for weak-willed, pussy-whipped men like Morrison. Peter had created Suzie Q—her name, her profile, her e-mails, her everything. He had penned every word of Susan’s half of the e-mail correspondence, and it had amused him to see how smitten Matt had been, how he had fallen under the faux Susan’s spell. In return, Matt had poured out the details of his miserable, boring life—his deadly dull job and his loveless marriage to the appalling Mrs. Morrison, the loathsome Jenny.

  As far as Peter was concerned, Matthew was less than nothing. Peter had used the man’s hijacked identity for the car rental without the smallest concern that anyone would notice. And even if someone did notice, Peter couldn’t help wondering how Matthew would manage to talk his way out of that. The man was utterly petrified of losing his job. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the balls to tell someone that he couldn’t possibly have murdered Morgan in Sedona, since at the time she died, he was down in Red Rock waiting to get it on with some hot-to-trot sexy babe named Susan—who didn’t, in actual fact, exist.

  Peter had looked forward to watching Matt squirm, but because of the guy at Hertz, he’d have to deny himself that pleasure. He scanned through a couple of the thirteen plaintive, groveling, apologetic e-mails Matt had sent to Susan in the course of the last twenty-four hours. Too bad there was no time to reply. With a few clicks on his keyboard, Peter closed the e-mail account. Then he went to Singleatheart.com, found Suzie Q, and deleted her so thoroughly that no one but the most determined of hackers could have found the smallest cyber trace of her.

  That done, Peter turned his attentions to Matt Morrison’s hapless computer. Peter had kept his file-eating Trojan lurking undetected in the background of Morrison’s HP for a very long time. Again, all it took was a few keystrokes to bring the worm to life. When Matt came home from work that afternoon and tried to log on as he usually did, the worm would destroy his hard drive. He wouldn’t be able to boot up. The only thing left on his desktop would be the blue screen of death.

  Taking out Matthew’s computer meant that Peter would no longer have an unauthorized window into the man’s pathetic life. Though Peter had enjoyed the game as long as it lasted, now it was over.

  So long, Matt, Peter thought as he typed in the command. It’s been good to know ya.

  And then, having set the worm in motion on Matt’s computer, Peter turned his attentions to those that belonged to the Foresters. Through spying on Morgan’s files, Peter had managed to gain unlimited access to Bryan’s computer. Peter hoped that by waiting this long he had given cops ample opportunity to find the bloodied hammer in Bryan’s truck and that they would now be focusing their investigation in that direction. He was certain that the homicide detectives involved would take a very dim view of having their prime suspect’s files suddenly disappear from the family’s computers. Forester could shout to all the world that someone else had destroyed the data, but under the circumstances, who would believe such a story? The missing files would make him seem that much more guilty.

  With a few masterful key strokes, Peter launched that destructive process as well, then he turned off his computer and headed for the gym. What he needed before work was a good workout and a nice lunch or dinner.

  With Morgan gone, he was once again ready to go on the hunt for a new woman. He knew he was blessed with relatively good looks. When it came to attracting women, that always helped. So did good muscle tone and properly defined abs and biceps. This time, though, he hoped he’d find someone who didn’t ask so many questions.

  Peter remembered his mother telling him once that curiosity killed the cat. He had been a little boy at the time, only seven or eight. He had wondered about the statement, trying to figure out
exactly how it worked. He no longer wondered about it because he knew it was true.

  So did Morgan Forester.

  Ali was back home by four-thirty. After showering, still wearing her robe, she turned on her computer and logged on to the Internet. She had been reassured by Leland Brooks. Now, regardless of whether or not her stalled home remodel would be finished in time for Thanksgiving, Ali was determined to start issuing holiday invitations. To that end, she was relieved to see Velma Trimble’s screen name, VelmaT, on her buddy list.

  Velma T, an eighty-six-year-old widow from Laguna Niguel, had started out as a fan of Ali’s blog. Over months of regular correspondence, a friendship had grown up between them. When Velma was diagnosed with cancer, both her son and her doctor had been more than willing to write her off. Ali had been the one who had stepped up and encouraged Velma to seek a second opinion. With that dire second opinion, Velma, too, had been willing to give up. She had gone off on what was to have been a final splurge, an all-first-class, round-the-world tour. Much to Ali’s surprise, Velma had returned from the trip determined to undergo treatment.

  “That’s what Maddy Watkins told me,” Velma had said, referring to the retired schoolteacher from Washington State who had been her traveling companion on the trip. “Anyone who’s tough enough to go see Mount Kilimanjaro is tough enough to fight cancer.”

  Now that Velma was finishing her second round of chemo, Ali wanted her to come to Sedona for Thanksgiving dinner. She immediately sent an instant message to that effect and received an almost instantaneous reply:

  Velma T: I couldn’t possibly. I’m bald as a billiard. I look a fright. Ghastly.

  Babe: I’m inviting you to come have dinner. It’s not a beauty pageant.

  Velma T: Who all would be there?

  Babe: My parents. My son and future daughter-in-law. A few friends.