by J. A. Jance
Left for Dead
( Alison Reynolds - 7 )
J. A. Jance
J. A. Jance
Left for Dead
Prologue
2:00 A.M., Thursday, April 8
Phoenix, Arizona
Seventeen-year-old Breeze Domingo lay on a sagging leather couch in a filthy apartment that Thursday morning and tried to sleep, but sleep eluded her. She tossed and turned and spent the time wishing her life had been different. She wished she had listened to her mother and stepfather and stayed in school. She wished she had never set foot on Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix and discovered how easy it was to make money if you didn’t care what you had to do to get it. And she wished she had never hooked up with Chico Hernandez.
Some of the other girls had warned her to stay away from him, but Chico was a smooth operator. When she first met him, she’d been new to the life, a fourteen-year-old runaway living on the streets. Chico was the one who had told her what she wanted to hear-that she was beautiful and that he would take care of her. That was the day a john had busted her in the jaw rather than fork over his money. Chico had taken her to urgent care and waited while she got stitched up. After that she owed him. After that she was his. She had ditched her given name of Rose in favor of becoming Breeze Domingo. Three years later, she still was.
In a way, Chico was like Breeze’s stepfather: As long as she did as he said and didn’t give him backtalk, they got along fine. For a while everything seemed A-OK with Chico, too. His girls stayed in three apartments in a not too rundown building near downtown Phoenix. All she had to do to earn her keep was put out on demand and turn over whatever money she earned to Chico. Breeze noticed that girls who tried to short him in the money department tended to disappear without a trace, so she made sure she paid him every last cent.
But then Chico got in some kind of money trouble. The girls who had lived in three separate apartments now found themselves crammed into one. Premium cable TV went away right after the two additional apartments. The food got worse. So did the clothing. That was bad for business, because if the girls didn’t look the part, they didn’t bring in the same kind of cash.
Having that single apartment made for difficult sleeping arrangements. Four of them shared the two queen-size beds in the bedroom with one sleeping solo on the sagging leather couch in the living room. That night Breeze’s john had been old and drunk. He couldn’t get it up. When he passed out, she had left him in his room at the Hyatt and caught a cab back to the apartment, where she had arrived early enough to lay claim to the couch.
The place was a disgusting mess, with dirty dishes piled in the sink; with fast-food containers and leftovers covering every surface, attracting swarms of cockroaches that scurried out of sight when the lights came on; with clothes strewn everywhere; with garbage and trash cans overflowing. At first, remembering her stepfather’s amazingly clean house in Buckeye, Breeze had tried to clean up and make the others do their share, but she finally gave up. Chico didn’t care. As long as the girls showed up for work clean, smelling good, and ready for action, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the squalor they lived in.
Tonight, when sleep wouldn’t come, Breeze thought about home, her real home, less than twenty miles but forever away.
It was hard to remember how life had been back then, when she was an innocent but rebellious girl named Rose Ventana. She had run away when her mother’s new husband, Jimmy, had taken a look at her report card. Once he discovered she was flunking four subjects, he immediately canceled plans for her quinceanera celebration. First he returned the dress, a gorgeous thing and the only formal dress she had ever owned. Then, even though he’d already put down money for the caterer and the DJ, Jimmy canceled those, too, losing his deposits in the process. When Rose objected, Jimmy told her that the traditional party in honor of the fifteenth birthday was a privilege, not a right, and that she hadn’t kept her part of the bargain.
It was true. Jimmy had warned her back in September when school started that if she wanted the party, she had to keep up her grades, help out with her younger sisters, and be home by curfew-ten o’clock on school nights; midnight on weekends. Rose’s problem was she thought he was bluffing, the same way her mother, Connie, usually bluffed back when she was a single mother trying to raise three daughters on her own with the slim income she earned working part-time and irregular hours in a series of tattoo parlors.
Life with Connie alone had been one of not enough food and plenty of empty promises and equally empty threats. By the end of her long odd-hour workdays, Connie was too worn out by keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to carry through on anything she said. The three girls had learned to function in a world where no one kept their word or did what they said they’d do.
Then James Fox, an electronics engineer who worked at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, had shown up in their lives. He had come to the tattoo parlor, where Connie Ventana had inked a bright red fox on his arm. The next week he came back for another tattoo. Before Rose and her sisters knew what was happening, their mother had up and married the guy. Jimmy, as he told Connie’s girls to call him, was someone who always did exactly what he said. He had promised them braces for their teeth, and he had delivered. He had moved them from the small Section 8 apartment that was all Connie could afford into his spacious air-conditioned home in Buckeye, where they had a heated pool to swim in and where Rose and her sisters each had a room.
In Jimmy’s house, there was always plenty of food on the table. Rose and her sisters had new clothes to wear to school without having to shop at the Salvation Army thrift store. They no longer had to face the humiliation of eating “free” lunches at school, which every kid in the universe understands aren’t really free at all. From that point of view, Rose’s life had improved immeasurably when Foxy, as her mother liked to call him, became part of the family equation.
As far as Rose was concerned, however, all those improvements had come with a very steep price. Jimmy expected Connie’s girls to mind; to be respectful; to listen to their mother; not to talk back; to do their homework; to do chores around the house. Three years later, a prostitute named Breeze Domingo could see that all Jimmy had done was try to impose some order on a chaotic family that had little to none before his arrival on the scene.
To the oldest child in the family, the sudden introduction of structure and discipline was something of a shock. Rose Ventana had been used to playing substitute parent to her younger sisters, and she resented the loss of authority a lot more than she appreciated the loss of responsibility.
Jimmy had told her he wanted to give her a chance to be a girl again, but she hadn’t understood what he meant at the time, and she hadn’t valued it, either. Now that she finally did realize what he had been trying to do, it was too late. She had been on the streets for too long even to think of going home. She had seen what happened to girls who tried to get out of the life. They usually didn’t make it because their so-called families no longer wanted them.
A year earlier, while flipping through the channels on the second anniversary of the day she ran away, Breeze had been shocked to come across her parents being interviewed on a local television newscast. They both looked a lot older than she remembered. There were deep lines around her mother’s eyes and dark shadows under them that Breeze had never seen before. All through the news segment, Jimmy had stood next to Connie, looking sad and patting his wife’s shoulder encouragingly while she spoke into the microphones and cameras, asking anyone with knowledge of her daughter’s whereabouts to please come forward.
Nobody did, because no one in Breeze’s present life knew or even guessed who she once was. Rose Ventana had been replaced. Even before she changed her name,
Rose had changed her looks. One of the first things she did when she landed on Van Buren Street was to dye her hair. With her naturally tanned skin, she made a convincing and striking blonde. She was also young and on her own in a very rough part of town. That made her a target, and Chico Hernandez was the guy who had come to her rescue.
As part of Chico’s stable, Rose was rechristened with the name Breeze. Chico liked his girls to have unusual and often weather-related names: Breeze, Stormy, Dawn, Rain, Sunny. Weird names aside, working for Chico wasn’t such a bad thing. His girls were regarded as call girls rather than whores, and he forked over the money needed for them to dress the part. He had a particular clientele made up of guys who liked their partners to be girls, the younger the better, and Chico had people who usually handled the “bookings.”
Rose had always been self-conscious about being underendowed in the boob department, but in her new line of work, being small was an advantage. It made it easy for Chico to pass her off as several years younger than she was, and Breeze had the added advantage of being pretty. The braces her stepfather paid for served her in good stead. In a business where lots of the competition came with meth mouth, Breeze’s mouthful of straight white teeth offered yet another mark in her favor.
Breeze had been a part of Chico’s team for three years, but tonight she found herself wishing she were back in Buckeye in a clean room with clean sheets and with nothing to do the next morning except get up and go to school.
At last she managed to fall asleep. All her roommates were home and sleeping when Breeze’s cell phone rang at nine A.M.
“Okay,” Chico said. “I’ve got you a date in Fountain Hills. Meet me down in the lobby at ten. And don’t tell the other girls where you’re going.”
An hour later, with her roommates still sawing logs, it was easy for Breeze to do as she was told. She hurried downstairs without saying a word to anyone and found Chico waiting out front in his aging Lincoln Town Car. He gave her an appraising look as she climbed into the front seat.
“I told you Fountain Hills,” he said. “Couldn’t you do any better than jeans and a T-shirt?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have time to do laundry.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll do some shopping on the way.”
To her amazement, he took her to Biltmore Fashion Park, where a quick dash through Macy’s netted her some very high heels, a slinky little black dress, and some silky black underwear, all of which he had her wear out of the store. Breeze was happy to have the new clothing, but she was also a little puzzled. If Chico was having financial difficulties, why would he spend that kind of money on her?
Once they left Macy’s, it seemed to Breeze as though they drove forever. She never had any idea that Phoenix was that big. Chico was surprisingly quiet the whole way. Nervous, too. Breeze wanted to ask him what was going on and who the client was, but if life on the street had taught her any lessons at all, the most basic was not to ask questions, especially not when you didn’t want to hear the answers.
At last they turned off a winding strip of pavement onto a smaller but still curvy street. Eventually, Chico stopped the Lincoln in front of an ornate iron gate, complete with a manned guard shack. At the end of a long uphill drive sat an imposing house.
“Get out here,” Chico directed.
Breeze looked down at her five-inch heels. “In these?” she asked.
“Don’t worry. Someone will run you up the hill in a golf cart.”
“How do I get back?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Someone will come get you.”
The other girls, the ones who had warned Breeze about Chico in the first place, had also warned her: Don’t get stranded somewhere you can’t get home from on your own steam.
Breeze glanced back the way they had come and realized she had no idea how to get back to the apartment in downtown Phoenix. “But-” she began.
“I said get out,” Chico urged. “Do what they tell you. Understand?”
Breeze got out of the car, and Chico’s Lincoln drove away. It was windy and surprisingly cold to be standing outside in a skimpy, sleeveless dress and a pair of sling-back pumps. She wished she had asked Chico to buy her a sweater, too. The guard opened the gate wide enough for her to slip inside the compound. As Chico drove away, the guard spoke into some kind of walkie-talkie. Minutes later, a golf cart came down the hill to get her. The ride in the open cart that brought Breeze up to the house left her shivering.
The cart stopped under a covered portico. Breeze stepped out of the cart and waited while the driver-a man wearing a uniform very much like that of the guard at the gatehouse-hurried up onto the porch, opened one of a matching pair of doors, and escorted her into a marble-floored entryway that was, she realized later, a beautiful entry into hell itself.
At the door the driver handed her off to a uniformed maid who led her into an ornate room that looked more like a museum or a hotel lobby than part of a house. There were huge paintings on the walls and groupings of furniture. At the far end of the room was a woodburning fireplace, alive with a roaring fire. A man stood as if posing for a photo shoot in front of the mantel. Holding a champagne flute in one hand, he watched as the maid led Breeze into the room.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “The guest of honor has arrived. Let me take a look at you.”
Breeze wasn’t stupid. She knew why she was there, and it wasn’t as anybody’s guest of honor. The man carefully set his drink down on a table in front of the fireplace and then moved toward her. Breeze had become fairly adept at estimating johns’ ages. This one was at least sixty and very ugly. The bulbous red nose spoke of too much booze, the leathery lizardlike skin of too much sun, and the narrow eyes of too much meanness.
He stopped directly in front of her and stared her up and down. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Better-looking than I expected.”
Breeze was accustomed to this kind of frank appraisal. Even so, the way his eyes trailed over her body made her nervous.
“I’m forgetting my manners,” he said, giving her a leer. “Can I offer you some champagne?”
That was one of Chico’s rules: DO NOT DRINK WITH THE JOHNS! Not even champagne, even though a sip of champagne sounded very good right about then.
“No, thank you,” Breeze said.
“Lunch, then?”
“That would be nice,” she said.
He turned to the maid, who had retreated to the doorway, where she stood, awaiting further instructions. “You can bring lunch upstairs to the library,” he said.
Breeze had never been in a house with an actual library. Why someone would eat food in a library, she didn’t understand. Libraries were for books. Dining rooms were for eating.
“This way,” he said, reaching out and putting a proprietary arm around Breeze’s waist. “I wouldn’t want you to trip and fall on one of those amazing heels.”
With his arm still around her waist, he led her up a long curving staircase. There were thick rugs on the floors. There was more colorful artwork on the walls of the long upstairs hallway. The room he led her into was indeed a library. Three walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in shelves loaded with leather-bound books. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the entire Valley of the Sun. Breeze stood there staring while yet another uniformed maid rolled a linen-covered serving cart into the room.
There was a small table in the middle of the room. With deft movements, the maid covered it in a snowy white cloth and then set it for two, laying out as sumptuous an array of food as Breeze Domingo had ever seen.
“Since you won’t have any champagne,” her host said, “would you care for some iced tea?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Sugar?”
“Please.”
She took the icy glass gratefully and swilled down the tea. That was the last thing she remembered for a very long time.
1
10:00 A.M., Friday, April 9
Sedona
, Arizona
In the late morning, on a cold but bright Friday in early April, Ali Reynolds sat outside on her patio in Sedona, Arizona, ninety miles north of Phoenix. An outdoor heater hissed nearby, keeping the chill at bay. Around her, Sedona’s iconic red cliffs glowed in the distance, but on this particular morning, Ali was immune to the view. Instead, she tried desperately to focus on the table in front of her, spread with a dozen paper-filled folders. Ali had been scrutinizing each of the files one at a time for the past hour and was more than ready for a break. She just couldn’t concentrate.
How had she, intrepid reporter turned L.A. anchorwoman, then murder suspect, widow, and police academy graduate, wound up administering a private charitable fund as her primary duty in life? Surely she was too young to be put out to pasture.
“I’m going in to check on Sister Anselm’s cassoulet,” Leland Brooks said, stopping in front of the table on his way past. “While I’m there, would you care for some coffee?”
Leland was Ali’s majordomo, her butler, her right hand, and her elderly but spry man Friday. Since Ali’s return to Sedona, Sister Anselm, a Sister of Providence who lived in nearby Jerome, had become one of Ali’s dearest friends. In the process Sister Anselm and Leland Brooks had become friends as well.
Sister Anselm served on the board of an organization that helped people dealing with substance abuse issues in several northern Arizona counties. On the second Saturday of each month, after a regularly scheduled board meeting in Flagstaff, she would often stop off in Sedona to enjoy one of Leland’s signature meals. Cassoulet, a savory stew that the good sister had loved during her childhood in France, was one of her personal favorites. Even though it took Leland the better part of two days to make the stuff, he was always eager to serve it to such an appreciative guest. Sister Anselm had told him that eating it “transported” her back home.
