Unfinished Business

by J. A. Jance

  So that day, when Cami went to see the house in Cornville, she knew going in that she had the wherewithal to buy it if she so desired. The woman trying to sell the place was reluctant to show it to anyone in its current condition, but eventually she succumbed to Cami’s polite inquiries and seemingly genuine interest.

  True, the place was an appalling mess. Aside from mounds of trash and filth, the house consisted of tiny closed-off spaces, with far too little lighting, far too much wood paneling, and an antique pink tile bathroom that had not aged well. The dingy windows were of the single-pane variety and were in grave danger of falling out of their frames.

  But through all that, Cami Lee saw something else—a place that could be entirely her own, one that suited her own style and interests. She watched enough HGTV to know that the kind of remodeling she had in mind—opening up the spaces, getting rid of the paneling, replacing the windows, and upgrading the electrical service—would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars. She also knew that the comps in the area said houses there were going for right around two hundred thousand.

  “How come you’re selling the house yourself instead of using a real-estate agent?” she asked.

  The woman shook her head. “No one’s willing to take it in this condition—it’s such a mess. I can’t afford the kinds of repairs it will require, and even if I could, by the time I do all of that and pay closing costs, I’ll barely walk away with anything.”

  Obviously none of those agents are fans of Flip or Flop, Cami thought, but that’s not what she said.

  “Tell you what,” she told the woman. “I’m willing to pay a flat hundred thousand in cash as is with zero contingencies. If you’d like, I can give you a cashier’s check today.”

  The woman had looked at her in utter astonishment. “As is?” she repeated. “You mean I wouldn’t even have to clean out all the garbage and I’d still walk away with a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Exactly,” Cami answered.

  The woman’s face brightened with relief. “Done,” she said, and the two of them shook hands on the spot. It took longer than Cami expected to sort out the paperwork and the title and so forth, but ten days later the deal closed, and Cami took possession of the place on Tuff Cody Trail. It had taken three dumpsters, a keg of beer, and a whole flock of pizzas to empty out the house. Lance Tucker from work had rounded up some pals from his gym. They had turned up early one Saturday morning and made short work of the job. The woman selling the place hadn’t wanted any of her mother’s mounds of stuff, so there was no need to sort any of it. They carted it all out in wheelbarrows. By the end of the day, everything in the house was gone. When the work crew finished with the trash, they took down and hauled away all the paneling for good measure.

  The following week, at Ali’s recommendation, Cami had summoned Morgan Forester, the contractor who’d handled the remodeling of Ali’s once-crumbling midcentury modern on Manzanita Hills Drive. Morgan had listened to Cami’s wants and desires and had come up with a proposed budget that was well within her means. Forester brought in an architect to do the drawings, then he obtained the necessary permits and went to work.

  Three months later Cami was living in her dream home. The quartz countertops and the kitchen cabinets had been customized to account for her less-than-average height. The open-concept design made for a large space that included a sitting area, a dining table, and a sparkling top-of-the-line kitchen. That area basked in the glow of a massive skylight that came with remotely operated blinds for those times when summer sunlight became too much of a good thing.

  Three tiny bedrooms and one bath had been transformed into two of each—a master suite with a massive bath and a deluxe walk-in closet and a smaller bedroom, also with a bath, that held a combination desk and Murphy bed to serve as both guest space and private office.

  Showered and dressed, Cami went to the kitchen and made herself a raspberry smoothie to take along in the car. She was due at work at eight, but preferring to arrive early, she left the house at seven fifteen.

  As soon as she backed out of the driveway and started down Tuff Cody, Cami noticed that the car seemed to be pulling to one side. Suspecting a flat, she stopped short of the intersection with Cornville Road and got out to check. She had a flat tire, all right. Unfortunately, she had more than just one. All four tires were toast.

  Realizing that the car would need to be flatbedded to a garage for repairs, Cami dialed the only tow-truck operator located in Cornville. Jim Baxter from Baxter’s Garage was there within ten minutes. While she waited, Cami called Shirley, who was now her neighbor, and asked for a lift into town.

  “I’ll be right there as soon as I get dressed,” Shirley said, “but how’s it possible that you have four flats at once?”

  “Beer bottles,” Cami answered grimly. “I came back to the house and looked. There’s debris from four beer bottles lying just behind where each tire would have been.”

  “Are you saying somebody did this on purpose?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Why would they?” Shirley asked. “And when?”

  “Sometime after I got home last night.”

  While the Prius headed for Discount Tires, Shirley dropped Cami off at the office.

  “You’re late,” Lance Tucker said pointedly, glancing at the clock. It was eight fifteen.

  “Someone wrecked my tires,” she said. “I woke up to four flats.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Somebody came into my carport last night and put broken beer bottles behind each of my tires. Shirley gave me a ride to work.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “On its way to Discount Tires. The tires are shredded. I’ll have to buy all new ones.”

  “Who did it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Don’t you have surveillance cameras set up?”

  “Not yet,” Cami admitted. “I hadn’t quite gotten around to it.”

  “You’ll have a system in place before the day is out,” Lance told her. “Give me your house keys. I’ll have it up and running by this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, Lance,” she said, gratefully handing over her key ring. “I really appreciate it.”

  |CHAPTER 19|

  COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA

  When Harvey McCluskey woke up early that Saturday morning, not only was he freezing cold, he also had a crick in his neck and an aching back. Cottonwood might have been located in what’s called high desert, but nighttime temperatures were surprisingly cold. Wanting to be up and out of the parking lot before occupants of the other offices and nearby assigned parking places arrived, he moved to the cab of his Silverado and drove out of the lot. A warm shower at his gym got his blood running again. After leaving the gym, he stopped by a gas station, where he picked up a cup of coffee and used their compressor to fill up his air mattress. He wouldn’t be spending another night sleeping on the hard bed of the pickup. Then he headed for Cornville.

  From the day he slashed Rhonda Ward’s bicycle tires, he’d never forgotten the amazing sense of power that surged through his body when, hidden behind the hedge of a neighboring house, he watched Rhonda walk up to the bike rack, discover the damage, and race back into the school building in tears. She returned moments later with the principal in tow. They were still conferring when an invisible but triumphant Harvey slipped away from the scene.

  This morning was his chance to relive that long-ago thrill. Twenty minutes later, with coffee in hand, he was parked on the shoulder of the road across from Tuff Cody Trail. If either the storage-unit facility or the post office had video surveillance—which he thought unlikely—he was too far away for them to pick up any details of his vehicle other than the fact that it was a pickup truck with a canopy on it.

  He’d brought along the binoculars from his office and shoved them into his glove box. Now he pulled them out and sat with them resting on his lap. If anyone asked what he was doing, he would tell them he was
a bird-watcher. That was true, he was a bird-watcher, with Princess Prius being the current bird in question.

  He had thought about her all night long. She was a dark-haired little beauty—a bit on the exotic side—and seeing her reminded him of the stray hitchhiker he’d picked up years ago, somewhere along US-95 north of Vegas.

  While Harvey was still in the army and wondering whether to stay or leave, one of his buddies, Patrick Duffy, had left the service and landed a terrific job working security at Caesars Palace. Lured by Duff’s enthusiasm for the locale, Harvey had opted for Vegas as well, and he, too, had ended up working at Caesars.

  For a while it was a great gig. Their immediate boss was a good ole boy who willingly turned a blind eye to someone having the occasional drink on the job or maybe slightly fudging on his time card. Unfortunately, a couple years in, all that changed. Someone put a woman named Margo De Angelo in charge of the department. The daughter of one of the big bosses, she was a bitch on wheels for sure. As the first-ever female to hold that position in a major casino, she was determined to make a name for herself, and she did.

  First to go was Harvey’s good-guy boss. Shortly thereafter Duff bailed as well, taking a job with a newly opened casino in Reno. He’d needed help moving, and Harvey had been happy to oblige. Back then he’d been driving a Toyota Tundra. He had traveled north with the bed of his pickup loaded down with as much of Duff’s furniture as the truck would hold. After helping unload, Harvey was on his way back to Vegas and fuming because Witch Margo had cost him such a good friend, when just south of Beatty he’d spotted a lone, dark-haired girl hitchhiking along the highway. He’d stopped and offered her a ride.

  She told him her name was Dawna Marie Giles. She was seventeen years old, came from Tonopah, and was heading to Vegas to meet up with her boyfriend. Her parents hated the guy’s guts and had forbidden her to see him again. The parents got their wish on that score, because Dawna Marie never did see the boyfriend again. In fact, she never saw anybody. Harvey had made sure of that.

  A few miles after picking her up, he’d turned off the highway onto a dirt road. Once Dawna Marie realized what was going on, she’d actually thrown herself out of his moving truck, but he’d caught up with her and knocked her silly. It had been a cold March day, and she’d been wearing leggings. He had used part of the leggings to tie her hands together. Then he’d thrown her facedown into the sand of a nearby wash, unzipped his pants, and did what needed doing, including wrapping his hands around her throat and squeezing the life out of her. She was wearing a ring of some kind—a class ring, he realized later. After pulling that off her finger and pocketing it to add to his trophy chain, he siphoned some gasoline out of his truck, splashed it on her, and set her body on fire.

  All this had happened in broad daylight. By the time he made it back to the highway, the cloud of smoke seemed to be clearing and barely showed.

  When someone at work asked about the scratches on his hands, he said it had happened when he was helping Duff clean weeds out of his new backyard. In the days that followed, Harvey had checked the news on a daily basis, but he never spotted any mention of what had happened to Dawna Marie Giles in either newspaper coverage or on TV. It seemed likely to him that even if someone had found Dawna Marie’s body, what happened in Beatty wasn’t newsworthy in Vegas.

  If the local cops devoted much time or effort to investigating her homicide, they never came knocking on Harvey’s door. Out in the middle of the desert like that, there’d been no surveillance footage to lead back to him and most likely no remaining fingerprint or DNA evidence either. Yes, Dawna Marie had been just another throwaway kid who nobody really gave a damn about. Harvey hoped the same would hold true for the Princess in the Prius.

  As for Dawna Marie’s class ring? He still had it, and he wore it every day as one of his trophies. While Harvey sat in his truck that morning, waiting and sipping his cooling coffee, he let his fingers touch each of them in turn, taking comfort in the reassuring presence of what he considered to be his good-luck charms.

  At seven fifteen Harvey saw activity at the house on Tuff Cody Trail as the Prius backed out of the carport and then nosed its way north toward Cornville Road. Just short of the intersection, it pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. Harvey could tell from the way the car moved that the broken beer bottles had done their job. All four tires were trashed.

  Watching through his binoculars, he saw a frowning Princess climb out of the driver’s seat and walk around the vehicle, surveying the damage as she pulled a cell phone from her pocket. She was clearly upset. Harvey wanted to see more, but he didn’t dare risk moving any closer.

  Surprisingly, a tow truck arrived in short order. Leaving the driver to load her Prius onto his flatbed, Princess hoofed it back to her house. He saw her standing outside the carport, where she seemed to be examining the debris left behind. Fat lot of good that would do her.

  Minutes later another vehicle came down Tuff Cody. He recognized it as a Honda sedan that was usually parked near High Noon’s portion of the complex. It stopped at the end of Princess’s driveway. Once she climbed into the passenger seat, the Honda drove away.

  “Show’s over,” Harvey said aloud, putting the binoculars away. He felt vaguely disappointed. It hadn’t been quite as much fun as he’d hoped or expected. For now, though, it was time for him to go have a real breakfast and figure out his next move.

  |CHAPTER 20|

  SEDONA, ARIZONA

  With B. at home and lying next to her in bed, Ali slept better than she had for days. Awakening late on Saturday morning, she was grateful that the only official event on that day’s agenda was B.’s upcoming appointment with Mateo Vega, which, according to Stu, was due to happen at 3:00 p.m.

  Venturing out of the bedroom, she located B. in the library with coffee in hand, a computer open on his lap, and Bella stretched out next to his thigh in his easy chair. “Morning, sunshine,” he said. “Or should I say good afternoon?”

  B.’s ability to negotiate time zones with no lingering aftereffects was always a source of wonder to her—wonder and envy.

  “How long have you been up?” she asked.

  B. glanced at his watch. “A couple of hours. Coffee?” he asked.

  A thermal carafe and a cup and saucer sat on the coffee table in front of him.

  “Sure,” she said. “So what are you up to?”

  “I’m reading through the dossier on Mateo Vega that Stu had Frigg prepare for us. If we’re considering hiring an ex-con—”

  “Another ex-con,” Ali inserted with a smile. After all, Lance Tucker had been in a juvenile lockup before High Noon helped correct the miscarriage of justice that had put him there.

  “Yes,” B. agreed, “another ex-con.”

  Taking her coffee, Ali settled into her own chair. Bella stayed where she was. “What are you finding?”

  “I’ve been reading the transcripts of the parole hearings,” B. replied, “and Mateo’s story remains consistent. He claims that he agreed to the plea deal on the advice of his public defender, who said that if they took the case to trial, there was a good chance Mateo would end up with a life sentence. Ever since that court appearance, however, he’s maintained that he didn’t commit the crime. He says that as he and Emily were leaving the party, she exited his vehicle, and he never saw her again.

  “Frigg also provided copies of his prison correspondence,” B. continued. “Initially there were letters from both his parents, but Mateo’s father, Joaquin, died while Mateo was incarcerated. In their letters back and forth, he complains that law enforcement always focused on him and never bothered looking at anyone else.”

  “That’s because it’s always the boyfriend,” Ali murmured.

  “He was released last spring,” B. continued. “As near as I can tell, he’s kept his nose clean ever since. He got a job with a local thrift store within days of his release, and he’s still working there. He obtained a Washington State driver’s license but apparently
doesn’t own a vehicle. He also has a King County Library System card. The catalog of materials he’s checked out not only since his release but also while in prison explains why he was able to ace our hack simulations. Back when he worked for us at VGI, people were trying to steal our intellectual property, and Stu was training Mateo to counter those folks. So whenever he was reading through technical material, he already knew what he needed to learn from it. And that laser focus has made a huge difference.”

  “It sounds to me as though, interview or not, you’ve pretty well already made up your mind,” Ali suggested.

  “I think I have,” B. agreed after a long, thoughtful pause. “My whole life was in shambles when Mateo was arrested. I had just learned that my wife and my partner were carrying on an affair right under my nose. If I’d been thinking clearly back then, at the very least I could have seen that Mateo had better representation than he received at the hands of that public defender. Maybe the outcome would have been the same, who knows? But even if he’s guilty, he’s paid his debt to society, and he’s evidently walking the straight and narrow now. The real injustice is that even though the guy is way smarter than the average bear, no one in Seattle will give him an opportunity to work at even the lowest entry-level job.”

  “And you think he deserves a break.”

  “I do,” B. said with a nod, “a break and a second chance.”

  “What are you planning on offering him?”

  “I’ll start him out at about the same level of compensation we gave Cami when we hired her—probably a little more to account for inflation. I’ll also give him a signing bonus to help offset his moving expenses.”