by J. A. Jance
It was still early winter, so the river had not yet frozen over. After removing all of Brigitta’s IDs from her purse, he dumped both the purse and her clothing over the bridge rail. After that he stood there shivering and smoking a cigarette for the next ten minutes, giving the current a chance to do its work before tossing Bridget’s IDs and jewelry into the water as well. The only thing he held back was one of the golden hoop earrings. After all, he wanted something to remember her by.
A short time later, he flagged down another cab and rode back to the bar, where he met up with his pals and bragged to them about getting lucky. If any of them noticed the scratches on the backs of his hands, no one asked. Staff Sergeant McCluskey had a certain reputation on base, and his fellow soldiers had the good sense not to say anything that might get his nose out of joint.
The next day, Sunday, Harvey and his buddies boarded a train and returned to their base some two hundred miles away. From that distance it wasn’t really possible for Harvey to monitor what was going on in Munich. He never knew when or even if Brigitta’s body had been found, much less identified. On those occasions when German authorities suspected American soldiers of any wrongdoing, the MPs on post heard all about it. This time there was nothing—not one peep—and once he realized he’d gotten away with it scot-free, Brigitta’s hoop joined Ida Mae’s wedding ring on the chain Harvey wore around his neck.
Occasionally someone might summon up enough nerve to ask him about the chain he wore under his uniform. Harvey always had a ready answer for that. The wedding ring had belonged to his dear departed mother, who had been murdered long ago. As for the hoop? It came from a pair of earrings owned by his one true love, the high school sweetheart and fiancée who’d died in a horrific car wreck shortly after graduation. Once the unfortunate questioners heard the tragic answers to their inquiries, they were always hugely embarrassed and sorry they’d ever asked, and Harvey was always amused by that. He wondered what they would have thought if he’d told them the truth.
So Harvey had some real-life experience suggesting that unimportant people tended to disappear with hardly any notice. Well, if he couldn’t go after Ali Reynolds directly, what about that little bitch who’d been there in his office with her. All the time Ali had been bitching him out, that black-haired vixen had been filming the entire proceedings on that pricey-looking iPad of hers.
Harvey knew Ali’s sidekick worked for High Noon. He had no idea what High Noon did, nor did he care to find out. It was none of his business. What was his business was to track down Ali’s pal. She was a tiny pissant of a thing, and he could probably strangle her single-handedly. First, however, he needed to find out exactly who she was and where she lived. He left the bar finally and returned to his office. Once inside, and knowing that Ali Reynolds would probably make good her threat to sic the cops on him, the first thing he did was to collect his bedding, haul it back outside, and stuff it under the canopy on his pickup. If he had to sleep in that for the time being, so be it.
While going in and out, Harvey quickly spotted the presence of a small electronic device that he’d never seen before. It was attached to the glass of the outside door, just beneath the push bar that opened it from the inside. A quick glance on his way past told Harvey that this had to be some newfangled kind of surveillance camera. He understood that if there were surveillance cameras inside the buildings, it was easy to assume that the parking lot was probably full of them as well, so he settled into the chair in his office and used the pair of binoculars he kept in his desk to surveil the parking lot through his outside window.
At ten past five, he saw his little black-haired target exit High Noon’s front entrance and climb into a bright red Prius. He was out of the building in a flash, fast enough that her vehicle was still at the stoplight at the intersection of Business Park Way preparing to turn right onto 89A and head back into Cottonwood as Harvey pulled out of the office park. His pickup was tall enough that he could keep the Prius in view without having to be too close. When it pulled in to the parking lot of a nearby strip mall, he drove past, then made a U-turn a block and a half away. He returned in time to see his target grab a gym bag from the back seat of the Prius before heading inside one of the businesses in the mall. A slow swing through the parking lot revealed that the strip mall contained not one but three martial-arts studios. The one his black-haired Princess Prius had entered was marked KRAV MAGA.
Harvey had never heard of Krav Maga. He had no idea what it was, but if it was some kind of martial-arts deal she thought would help fend off an attack when Harvey McCluskey came calling, she would be sadly mistaken.
Harvey made another U-turn and located the last line of parking places at another strip mall. There, partially concealed behind a billboard, he settled in to wait. The only way for him to know precisely where Princess was going—since he didn’t know her name, that’s what he had decided to call her—was to follow her home, and that’s exactly what he intended to do. Once he knew where she lived and who, if anyone, lived there with her, it would be time for him to make a plan, and devising plans to kill someone happened to be a skill set Harvey McCluskey had mastered long ago.
He waited patiently for over an hour and a half until she finally emerged from the gym. Once she got into the Prius and fired it up, he once again followed her at a discreet distance. It was dark by then, and that worked to his advantage. He knew it would be far more difficult for her to differentiate one vehicle from another based on headlights alone. She drove through town and then turned onto Cornville Road where there was much less traffic, and Harvey was forced to drop back.
Approaching the little burg of Cornville, Princess began signaling for a right-hand turn. He slowed to allow her to turn onto a dirt road and then took the first possible left, which supposedly led to the local post office. He turned in at the entrance to a storage facility, where he pulled over and was able to observe the Prius’s movements on the far side of the highway. After traveling a short distance, the headlights turned right into a driveway. Moments later the vehicle seemed to come to a complete stop. After a pause of maybe a minute, what appeared to be a porch light flashed on, followed seconds later by several interior lights as well. Obviously she had entered a dwelling. After waiting a few minutes, Harvey followed, finding himself on a dusty dirt track named Tuff Cody Trail.
The house in question wasn’t especially impressive. It appeared to be a small bungalow that probably dated back to sometime in the fifties. Two outdoor lights—one by the front door and one leading into the house from a carport—illuminated a small unfenced yard. The Prius, fully visible in the light from the back door, was parked under the carport. Harvey was delighted to note that it was the only vehicle on the property. If someone else lived there in addition to Princess, wouldn’t there be a second vehicle parked at the house as well?
Not wanting to raise anyone’s suspicions, Harvey didn’t linger, but a plan was forming in his head. Cornville wasn’t that big. He drove into town and located a store—the Cornville Mercantile—where he paid cash for a six-pack of Coors—bottles rather than cans—as well as a prepackaged sandwich. When the cashier offered him a receipt, he waved it aside and left it sitting on the counter. He didn’t want to bring along any kind of damning paper trail.
He pulled in to an almost empty parking lot outside a closed tattoo parlor. The place didn’t look upscale enough to have any kind of video surveillance, and that was exactly what Harvey wanted. He parked behind the darkened building and sat there, eating his sandwich, drinking his beer, and waiting for time to pass. He had picked up several napkins to go with his sandwich, and he used those to hold the bottles. He didn’t want to leave behind any fingerprints, and when the bottles were empty, he wiped their spouts both inside and out. Leaving behind traces of DNA would have been worse than losing track of the cash receipt.
Once Harvey deemed it was late enough, he got out of the truck, walked over to a curb near the dumpsters, and began breaking the now-empty bo
ttles. It was a challenging process because he still needed to use a napkin when handling the bottles. In order to achieve the exact effect he wanted, each one had to be broken in just the right way, without his getting cut up in the process. Finally, all six bottles in, he had a total of four perfectly jagged bottlenecks. Still careful not to touch the glass, he loaded them back into the cardboard six-pack case and headed for Tuff Cody.
It was close to midnight when Harvey parked just short of the house itself. It was dark both inside and out. Princess obviously wasn’t much of a night owl. Harvey got out of his truck and left the door cracked open to avoid the sound of his closing it. Carrying the bottlenecks in the cardboard container, he approached the house by walking on the rough, gravelly shoulder of the road rather than the road itself in order to avoid leaving behind any visible footprints. There were no streetlights, but a partial moon glowed overhead. If there were dogs in the neighborhoods, none of them barked.
It took only a few moments for him to position his broken bottlenecks behind all four of the Prius’s tires, propping them between the rubber and the cement in a way that was bound to slice into the tires the moment the vehicle was put in reverse.
Mission accomplished, Harvey left the yard and then bailed on Cornville. He went straight back to the office park and pulled in to his designated spot, but he didn’t venture inside the building. Instead he crawled into the shelter of the canopy, unrolled his bedroll and pillow, and slept there. Without the air mattress, however, it wasn’t very comfortable. He still had the compressor, but lacking an available electrical outlet, he couldn’t use it.
Harvey figured even Ali Reynolds would have a difficult time convincing the local cops that they should arrest some poor guy for sleeping in his own vehicle. With all the focus on surveillance, somebody would probably be watching if he had to crawl out of the bed of the truck overnight to take a leak behind his back tires. And if Ali Reynolds minded that… well, piss on her.
|CHAPTER 17|
RENTON, WASHINGTON
Having not slept at all the night before, Mateo went to bed that Friday night and slept like a rock—so hard in fact that he failed to hear his alarm and might have missed his plane if Randy hadn’t come pounding on his door at 6:35, saying, “I thought you wanted to be at the airport by now.”
The crowd at Sea-Tac wasn’t as bad as Mateo had expected. Even so, the security line seemed to take forever. He had his boarding pass and ID in hand, so he was good on that score. Cami had sent him an e-mail explaining that his toiletries had to be in a clear quart-size plastic bag, and they were. Not that he had much along for an overnight stay—his toothpaste and a tube of hair oil. What she had failed to mention, however, was the allowable size. So although his nearly empty tube of Crest toothpaste couldn’t have contained more than two ounces at the most, the tube itself was too large. It was confiscated and tossed into the trash.
Cami had also warned Mateo that there might or might not be food service on the plane, so once he was through security, he took her advice and bought himself a Burger King Whopper to take along. He had always imagined that flying in a plane would be luxurious. This was anything but. He was stuck in a middle seat near the back of the plane. On one side was a huge guy whose shoulders were inches wider than the back of his seat. On the other was a tattooed, pierced young woman with spiky pink hair who glowered at him as if daring him to speak to her.
He didn’t. In fact, for the duration of the flight not one of his seatmates exchanged a word. But when the flight attendant came by to close the overhead luggage compartments and check for fastened seat belts, she left Mateo almost breathless. She looked so much like Emily Tarrant that the two of them might have been sisters. And that had been Emily’s plan—to become a flight attendant once she had finished college.
What had happened that night outside Edmonds had destroyed both their lives. Emily died. She never got to finish college or be a flight attendant or marry or have kids. Mateo had finished college, but he hadn’t married or had a family either. Emily had been his first serious girlfriend and his only serious girlfriend.
Now here he was with a chance—maybe his only chance—of getting his life back on track. But with Emily’s look-alike pushing the beverage cart up and down the aisle, a sense of foreboding settled over him. Emily’s brief appearance in Mateo’s life had derailed his once-promising prospects, and maybe the unexpected appearance of Emily’s look-alike was an omen that the same thing might happen again and that this whole trip to Arizona was an exercise in futility. Come Monday morning Mateo Vega would most likely be back working on the loading dock with no hope of ever finding anything better.
|CHAPTER 18|
CORNVILLE, ARIZONA
When Cami Lee’s alarm went off that Saturday morning, she was tempted to ignore it, but she knew she couldn’t. It was her turn to do the Saturday watch at the office. If a possible intrusion alert sounded for any of the networks under High Noon’s protection, someone needed to be on hand to take immediate action.
Opening her eyes, though, she looked up at the sky-blue ceiling of her bedroom, and her heart did a little leap of joy that only got better once she was standing under the rain-bath showerhead in the spacious, glass-enclosed shower of her newly remodeled bathroom.
For a number of years after coming on board at High Noon, she’d lived happily in a studio apartment in Cottonwood. Unfortunately, the apartment complex was now under new management with a company that didn’t respond readily to complaints regarding plumbing or electrical issues. The building had also previously been designated as nonsmoking. That was still supposedly true, but the rule was no longer enforced. Months earlier she had been expressing her dissatisfaction about her living conditions at the apartment complex in the break room at work when Shirley Malone had spoken up.
“On my way into the office this morning, I noticed that one of my neighbors in Cornville had a brand-new For Sale by Owner sign posted in her front yard. It’s not a very big place and probably not in the best condition, but it would be bigger than a studio apartment, and the nearest neighbors are far enough away that even if they smoke like chimneys, it shouldn’t bother you.”
“How much?” Cami had asked.
“I have no idea.”
Cami had driven out to Cornville that very afternoon. It turned out the words “not in the best condition” were a huge understatement. The house was built in the fifties, and its last occupant, a recently deceased eighty-nine-year-old widow, was a hoarder who’d lived there for thirty years. Her kids were attempting to unload the property, but none of the local real-estate agents had been willing to list the place without the widow’s relatives doing a massive cleanup job beforehand.
The truth is, at this point in her life Camille Lee, despite being only in her mid-twenties, was in the enviable position that, whatever the asking price on the house, she could probably pay cash to buy it. Six months earlier the beloved grandfather she’d called “Papa” had passed away after a brief illness. Liu Wei Ling, known to his customers as Louie, was the longtime operator of a family-owned restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
His was a dysfunctional family, where bad blood between parents and children went with the territory. Cami’s grandparents had expected their daughter, Xiu, to grow up and take charge of the restaurant. Instead she had changed her name from Xiu to a more Americanized Sue and gone off to college. While there she met Cami’s father, Cheng Lee, a foreign student from Taiwan, at an antiwar rally. With Cheng’s student visa about to run out, the two had married, primarily in order for him to secure a green card. The thing was, once Cheng became a citizen, the couple had never taken the customary green-card marriage step of getting a divorce.
Both husband and wife were professors at Stanford—Cheng in computer science and Sue in French literature. They lived separate lives while at the same time inhabiting opposite ends of the same house. The only thing the two of them had in common was their daughter, Cami, and she’d been a bone
of contention between her parents from the day she was born. While Cami was growing up, the only thing her parents had been able to agree upon about their daughter’s future was the plan that she would ultimately become an academic of some kind.
The problem was, Cami had been no more interested in becoming a college professor than her mother had been in running the family’s restaurant, and both parents had gone apoplectic when Cami took her two cum laude bachelor’s degrees and gone off to work for High Noon Enterprises in some godforsaken place called Cottonwood out in the wilds of Arizona.
Only after Cami left California did she discover that her grandfather had spent his lifetime working in the restaurant business because his own father had deemed him too stupid to go to college and become a doctor the way his older brother had. It came as a shock for Cami to learn that the stories her mother had told her about how much her grandfather loved the restaurant business hadn’t been true at all.
When Papa died, Cami had of course attended the funeral. The restaurant had already been sold, and her parents were busy making arrangements for her widowed grandmother to come live with them. Knowing that sparks between Nainai and Sue would be flying early and often, Cami was grateful to have many miles of empty desert between her parents’ home and hers.
A month after the funeral, a gentleman with a briefcase in hand had turned up outside the door of Cami’s studio apartment. He was a claims adjustor for an insurance company. It seemed that on the occasion of Cami’s birth her grandfather had taken out a twenty-pay life policy in the amount of two hundred fifty thousand dollars on his own life, naming his newborn granddaughter, Camille, as the sole beneficiary. The lawyer handling Liu Wei’s estate had found the paid-up policy among his papers. Cami doubted that her mother had any knowledge of the policy’s existence, and that was just as well, since she probably would have been offended—even more so if she’d suspected that her father had just paved the way for Cami to remain well off the beaten path her parents had charted for her.
