Deadly Stakes (3 page)

Lynn, on the other hand, paced the floor and agonized over her hair, makeup, and clothing. “Your makeup is perfect,” she said, examining Ali. “Do I look all right?”

Ali had spent years in front of a camera, and she was an expert in what to do and what not to do. She didn’t have the heart to tell the poor woman the truth.

“You’re fine,” Ali assured her. “The crew will probably have someone along who can doctor your makeup should they decide it needs fixing. Sit down. Relax. It’ll be okay.”

With a resigned sigh, Lynn sank down on one of the room’s several uncomfortable chairs. “I take it you’re one of Richard’s victims, too?” she asked.

“No,” Ali said. “I’m from Sedona. Originally, I was a friend of Brenda’s. I’m the one who ran the background check that started the whole unmasking of Richard Lowensdale.”

“Oh,” Lynn said. “You’re the detective, the one who figured it all out, you and that guy from Grass Valley.”

“Gil Morris is the detective,” Ali said. “I was a concerned bystander.”

“Luckily for Brenda,” Lynn said. “I’m glad you’re not one of us. Because of Richard, I ended up losing everything—my job; my self-respect. And then my son committed suicide . . .”

“I’m so sorry,” Ali murmured.

Those three words of sympathy were enough to launch Lynn on a long, sad monologue, leaving Ali no choice but to listen.

“Thank you,” Lynn said. “Lucas died just after I learned the truth about Richard. That’s where I met him, by the way—in a tough-love chat room shortly after Lucas was picked up on drug charges. Here I was, the superintendent of schools, and my kid was in jail for dealing drugs. You can imagine how that went over in a place like Iowa City.

“When Lucas was arrested, my ex refused to take any responsibility. He blamed the whole thing on me, and that’s why I fell so hard for Richard. He told me his name was Richard Lewis. It’s no wonder I fell in love with the guy. Here was a caring man who was willing to listen to my troubles and who really seemed to understand what I was going through because he had a similar story. Richard claimed he had a daughter who had gone down the same druggie path Lucas was on—including spending time in juvie. Fortunately, his daughter had come out all right on the other side.

“Hearing that gave me a glimmer of hope that maybe someday Lucas would be all right, too. Then I found out Richard was a complete fraud, that everything he had told me was a lie—he didn’t even have a daughter. That’s when everything caught up with me, and I went to pieces. I couldn’t go to work. Couldn’t get out of bed some days. It was then, while I was lying around feeling sorry for myself, that Lucas committed suicide. He left a note saying he was sorry but he couldn’t live in prison and he’d rather be dead. That’s my fault, too. If I had been there for him, maybe I could have saved him.”

Listening and nodding, Ali didn’t bother saying what she knew to be true—that kids from even the most loving of families could fall victim to suicide. Survivors were always too ready to accept blame and assume that something they might have done or said, or might not have done or said, would have made a difference.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said again.

Lynn nodded and continued. “With Lucas gone, I just gave up. I ended up quitting my job. I also lost my house. My parents had retired
and moved to Surprise. By then my father’s Alzheimer’s was getting worse and worse, so I came here to help my mom look after him. That’s one good thing. Once I was without a job, I was able to lend a hand. I think the stress of looking after a man who was essentially an eighty-year-old toddler would have killed my mother without my help. Alzheimer’s is hell,” she added.

Ali nodded again. Lynn’s tale of woe was appalling. “How’s your dad doing?” Ali asked.

“He passed away a few months ago,” Lynn replied. “I’m sorry he’s gone, but he was gone a long time before he died. It’s not easy, but my mother and I are starting to recover. It’s hard not to feel guilty about feeling relieved. Not everyone gets that. You need to have lived it to really understand. My mother has started reconnecting with her bridge-playing friends, and she’s taken up golf again. As for me? There’s a wonderful new man in my life. A real one this time,” she added with a shy laugh. “Without my coming out here to help my mom, I never would have met Chip.”

The sudden glow on Lynn’s face had nothing to do with makeup, and Ali found herself hoping that Chip was as nice a person as Lynn seemed to think he was.

Ali’s phone rang. The readout showed her mother’s number. A glance at the clock told her the luncheon was most likely over. “Sorry,” she said to Lynn. “I need to take this.” Into the phone, she added, “Hey, Mom, how did it go?”

“Harlan Masters is full of himself,” Edie muttered.

Ali laughed. “That’s hardly news,” she said. “Tell me something we didn’t already know.”

Ali’s longtime boyfriend, B. Simpson, owned High Noon Enterprises, now an internationally respected Internet security company, though the company still did what once was High Noon’s bread-and-butter business—security checks. The one they’d done on Harlan Masters revealed that he was a trust-fund baby. He had moved to Sedona from Southern California some five years earlier and had set out to bring Sedona up to what he regarded as an acceptable level of
Southern California sophistication by running for mayor. During his first four-year term, he set out on a program to transform Sedona as far as rules and regulations were concerned. Having never gotten his hands dirty in the world of business, he did so without giving much thought to how much it would cost local businesses to implement some of his bright ideas.

The one that had galvanized Edie into running for office was a city-imposed requirement that restaurants inside the city limits post the calorie and fat content of each item on a menu. That might not have been much of a hardship for chain-type operations, but for struggling independents like the Sugarloaf Café, redoing the menus not once but twice—first for the calorie count and later for the fat content—had been a costly process. Naturally, Edie’s signature sweet rolls had been off the charts in both categories.

Emboldened by passing his restaurant regulations through a city council that was completely in the mayor’s pocket, Masters had set off on a campaign to outlaw contrails inside the city limits, thus forcing commercial airline traffic to detour around Sedona’s airspace. Edie thought the whole contrail controversy was nothing short of ridiculous.

“How did the meeting go?” Ali asked.

“He must have worked the word ‘old’ into every other sentence,” Edie grumbled. “As in ‘Now is no time to return to old, timeworn ideas.’ Or ‘Let’s not settle for old-fashioned thinking when what’s needed are progressive youthful ideas to carry us forward in the twenty-first century.’ Everything he said implied that I was old and decrepit, and it took every bit of restraint I could muster to keep from calling that little jerk a young whippersnapper.”

“Now, Mom,” Ali said. “Let’s not resort to name-calling this early in the process. In fact, let’s not resort to it at all. What were the reactions from the audience?”

“Three people came up to me afterward and offered to host coffee hours for me. I have their names and numbers.”

“You gave those to Jessica?”

Jessica Townley, a recent graduate from Sedona High School, was
this year’s winner of the Amelia Dougherty Scholarship, a program Ali personally administered. In the fall, Jessica would be attending Arizona State University on a full-ride scholarship. Since her intention was to major in political science, she had volunteered to spend the summer working as an unpaid intern in Edie Larson’s campaign.

“Yes, I did,” Edie answered. “Do you want her to wait until you get back to schedule something?”

“That’s not necessary,” Ali said. “Jessica has access to your campaign schedule, and she’s perfectly capable of setting up events. When people say yes to something like that, it’s important to follow up with them right away. So have her call. If she has any problems, she knows she can always call me for backup. And now that you know Harlan is going to go after you on the age issue, we need to strategize on how to disarm that attack the next time you run into it. The best way to do it is turn it into a joke instead of getting all bent out of shape about it.”

“All right,” Edie agreed grudgingly. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“And give yourself the rest of the afternoon off,” Ali suggested.

“Can’t do that,” Edie replied. “I have a whole afternoon’s worth of doorbelling to do. Jessica said she’ll ride along on that, too.”

“Don’t overdo,” Ali advised.

“What?” Edie retorted. “Because I’m too old?”

“No,” Ali said, “because it’s a long campaign, and you need to pace yourself.”

When Ali hung up, Lynn Martinson was looking at her questioningly.

“My mother,” Ali explained. “She’s running for office for the first time—mayor of Sedona. She was at an event this afternoon, and her opponent is a young guy who thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“I hope she wins,” Lynn said. “I’ve met a few guys like that in my time, and it’s fun to see them get taken down a peg.”

The door to the greenroom opened, and a tiny black-haired woman bounded through it. “All right,” she said. “I’m Carol,
Scene of the
Crime’
s producer. We’re ready to rumble. Ms. Martinson, how about if we take you first?”

“Sure,” Lynn said, rising to her feet. “Is my makeup all right?”

Carol gave Lynn an appraising look. “We’ll do a few additions and corrections before we turn on the cameras, but you look all right to me.”

As Carol led Lynn out of the room, Ali turned on her iPad and switched over to her downloaded copy of
A Tale of Two Cities.
It was the latest in her self-imposed task of reading some of the classics—all those books she had heard about in school over the years but had never read. It was either that or sit there and worry about her mother’s political campaign.

Right that minute, reading seemed like a more productive use of her time—better than worrying. Either Edie would be tough enough to survive in the ego-bruising world of small-town politics, or she wouldn’t. However it went, there wasn’t much Ali could do about it.

2

S
tanding at the gas pumps at the 7-Eleven on Camelback, A. J. Sanders felt conspicuous as he pumped twenty bucks’ worth of regular into his Camry. He kept waiting for someone to ask him why he wasn’t in school. It seemed obvious to him that he was ditching school, and he waited for someone to notice, but the clerk took his money without so much as a raised eyebrow. There were two patrol cars sitting side by side at the far end of the parking lot, but the cops paid no attention to him as he pulled onto the street and merged into traffic.

He might have felt less self-conscious if he had done it before, but he hadn’t. Halfway through the first semester of his senior year, this was the first time ever he had ditched school. He sincerely hoped he’d get away with it. Other kids did it all the time. Why not him?

A.J. already had a note from his mother—one he had carefully forged—folded up and waiting in his wallet for him to turn in to the office tomorrow morning when he returned to Phoenix’s North High. As long as he was back in town this afternoon in time to make it to his four o’clock shift as a stocker at Walgreens, he’d be fine.

The school probably wouldn’t call his mother to check on him, but the manager of the Walgreens, Madeline Wurth, was his mother’s best friend from the time they were in grade school. If he missed a shift, Madeline would be on the phone to Sylvia, A.J.’s mother, before he could blink an eye. That was how he had gotten the job—Maddy and Sylvia were friends—but Madeline ran a tight ship. She didn’t tolerate
unexplained absences or tardiness. The one time A.J. had shown up fifteen minutes late because someone had a tire-slashing spree in the North High parking lot, Madeline had called his mom before he had a chance to change the tire, change his clothes, and get to work.

So, yes, he could most likely get away with missing school, but he wouldn’t ever get away with missing work, because if Madeline called Sylvia, the jig would be up. His mother would find out he’d been lying to her for a very long time. That was the last thing he wanted—for his mother to find out about the lies. He didn’t want her to know, because if she did, he was certain it would break her heart.

A.J. got onto the 51 and then drove north to the 101 and finally onto I-17 again heading north. His father had given him simple directions. Take I-17 north to General Crook Trail. Take that exit west for six tenths of a mile. Walk north approximately fifty yards. Find the boulder with the heart painted on it. Dig there, behind the boulder.

His father. That was the problem. A.J. had an ongoing relationship with his father, and his mother had no idea.

Until a little over a year ago, it had been just the two of them—A.J. and his mom. His mother’s favorite song, the one she had played and sung to him for as long as he could remember, was Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World.” She had played it when he was tiny and she was driving him back and forth to the babysitter’s. Later, when he was old enough to learn the words, they both sang along. A.J. and his mommy—the two of them and nobody else.

When he was in first grade, A.J. noticed that other kids had both a mommy and a daddy, and he had started asking the big question: Where is
my
daddy? Sylvia never said anything particularly bad about A.J.’s father. The worst thing she ever said was that he was “unreliable.” When A.J. was six, the closest he could come to sorting it out was that you couldn’t count on his father to do what he said he would do or be where he said he would be. Still, that didn’t seem like a good enough reason not to have a daddy.

In Sunday school he found out that the Virgin Mary was Baby Jesus’ mother, but Joseph wasn’t exactly His father. Somebody called
the Holy Spirit was. For a while A.J. thought that might be the case with him, too. Maybe his father was some kind of ghost, and that’s why no one could see him and why there weren’t any pictures of him.