Deadly Stakes (32 page)

Lucy nodded and started to walk away.

“Wait,” Doris said. “I need to pay you for that.” Once again she searched the booth, frantically looking for a purse Lucy already knew was nowhere to be found. Obviously, Doris had already forgotten it was missing.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said gently. “This is on me. You’ve been here for quite a while, and I haven’t seen anyone else sitting here. Are you sure your husband came to the restaurant with you? Someone told me a man in a pickup dropped you off.”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t be riding around in a pickup. I’ve never been in one of those in my life. And of course James is here,” Doris declared. “Where else would he be?”

A new set of customers—three separate couples of gray-haired retirees, traveling in a caravan of RVs—came in, talking and laughing. With a glance at Richard’s disapproving scowl, Lucy left Doris to
eat her Whopper Junior in peace and hurried back to the register. At some point in the course of the next hour, Doris got up and limped to the bathroom. When she came out, she stood at the end of the corridor and looked around the restaurant as if unsure where to go.

“You’re over there, Doris,” Lucy said, pointing. “In the corner booth.”

Doris smiled at her. “Thank you.”

Richard sidled up behind Lucy as Doris returned to her booth. “What’s the matter with her?” he asked. “Is she nuts? We should call the cops.”

“Leave her be,” Lucy said. “She’s not bothering anyone.”

When Richard went outside for a cigarette break during the next lull, Lucy went to fill the ice machine, then back over to Doris’s booth. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Phoenix,” Doris said at once. “You’d like it. It’s a lovely place, right next to the mountains.”

“If you’re from Phoenix and you’re going to Palm Springs, what are you doing here?” Lucy asked. “Why didn’t you stay on I-10?”

Doris frowned. “You’ll have to ask James about that,” she said. “He’s the one who was driving. But where is he? It seems like he’s been gone a long time.”

“Don’t worry,” Lucy assured her. “You stay right here. I get off work in another hour, then we’ll see about getting you a ride back home.”

Doris’s expression darkened. “I’m not sure I want to go back. Not if he’s there.”

“He who? Your husband?”

“Oh, no, not James. He’s fine,” Doris said. “Barry’s the one I don’t like. I don’t trust him. I think he stole my necklace.”

“Don’t worry about any of that right now,” Lucy said. “You just sit here and wait for me. Once I get off work, we’ll sort it all out.”

“What does that mean?” Richard asked when Lucy returned to her register. He had evidently been listening. “Are you planning on taking her home with you like she’s some kind of stray dog?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I called Tommy and Nana on my break. Nana
will look after the kids while Tommy and I figure out a way to take Doris home.”

“Doris,” Richard sneered. “So now you’re on a first-name basis?”

You could be, too,
Lucy thought,
but it’s never gonna happen.

Five minutes before Lucy’s shift ended, Tommy showed up and ordered his usual. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Over in the corner,” Lucy said, swiping his card. “Her name is Doris. Her husband’s name is James.”

“Yes,” he said, “and she lives on Upper Glen Road in Phoenix. At least she used to.”

“How do you know where she lives?” Lucy demanded.

“Where she used to live,” Tommy corrected. “I know about it because I’ve got a friend who’s a dispatcher for the Arizona Highway Patrol. About an hour ago, a light green Jaguar was reported abandoned near a rest area on I-8. It was out of gas, and Doris Ralston’s purse was found inside. They’re sending a patrol officer here to pick her up. He should be here any minute.”

“Wait,” Lucy said, outraged. “You mean they’re going to arrest her? The poor woman hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s just confused.”

“She may be confused,” Tommy said, “but she’s also really, really lucky.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s still alive. Somebody burned her house down earlier this afternoon,” Tommy said. “Until I called in the report about your lost friend being at the Burger King in Gila Bend, everybody thought she was dead.”

“Oh my God!” Lucy exclaimed. “That’s what she said!”

“What did she say?”

“She told me she was afraid of someone. That he scared her. That he had stolen something that belonged to her. She also mentioned that her husband, James, was supposedly driving the car. Where’s he?”

“Maybe he’s the guy who set the fire,” Tommy suggested.

“No,” Lucy said. “I don’t think so. It’s the other guy she’s scared of. She’s not afraid of James.”

“If somebody burned down her house,” Tommy said, “it sounds to me like she had good reason to be afraid.”

Nodding, Lucy turned back to the window, where she picked up Tommy’s order and set it on a tray. Then she caught the backup cashier’s eye. “Hey,” she said. “Take over for me for a minute, would you?”

Ignoring Richard Marino’s looming objection, Lucy took the tray and led Tommy to the corner booth, where Doris was once again paging through photographs.

“Hey, Doris,” she said, “this is my boyfriend, Tommy. If you don’t mind, he’d like to sit with you for a little while. Maybe you could tell him about your day.”

“I suppose that would be all right,” Doris said, “but if James comes back . . .”

“Tommy will move, of course,” Lucy said, “but right now he has some good news. The Arizona Highway Patrol found your car. It was on the freeway, out of gas.”

Doris looked devastated. “You mean James wasn’t there?”

“Just talk to the officer when he gets here,” Lucy said reassuringly. “Tommy will look after you until he does. Don’t worry. We’ll be able to help find your husband. I’m sure he can’t have gone far.”

30

S
tuart had already launched into the hard part of the job. When B. called, Stu was well into the process of hacking into Molly’s cell phone provider. Once B. gave him the S550’s VIN, Stu set aside his triangulation effort and concentrated on the Mercedes.

Computerized records being what they were, he was easily able to track down the original bill of sale for Doris Ralston’s S550. As Stu hoped, at the time James Ralston purchased the vehicle, he also signed a yearlong contract with Prestige Auto Concierge Service, which had long since lapsed.

Stuart refrained from high-fiving himself. He had dealt with the company before. In fact, he had designed some of their anti-hacking security measures, so it was easy for him to find an untraceable back-door entry into their servers and backup servers, and he did so with no concern that they’d be able to detect his unauthorized entry.

Within minutes, he had updated the records of the S550’s service account, bringing the billing up to current status. For good measure, he changed the name of the account from James Ralston to Doris Ralston, backdating the order to two months ago, citing the receipt of James Ralston’s actual death certificate as the reason for the billing change.

Stuart was tempted to give the updated account a new password. He favored something like MMWRUS, which would have been short for “Minnesota’s Most Wanted Are Us.” Instead, he left James Ralston’s original password. As far as Stu was concerned, Jimmyjim
wasn’t a particularly secure password, but that wasn’t his problem. What made him smile was his newly acquired ability to see that Doris Ralston’s S550 was moving steadily west on Arizona Highway 68 west.

With his silver bullet properly locked and loaded, Stuart exited Prestige’s system and returned to the task at hand, infiltrating Molly Handraker’s cell phone provider. Within minutes, he succeeded. Once he had the first cell triangulation ping, Stuart Ramey also had his answer. Molly Handraker’s cell phone, and most likely Ali’s iPad, were in the S550.

“Okay,” Stu said, watching the cell phone screen. “I’ve just located Doris Ralston’s vehicle and Molly’s cell phone. They just turned off Arizona Highway 68 west, northbound on Davis Dam Road.”

“All right.” B. was off the line for a moment while he conferred with someone else. “Okay,” he said, speaking to Stuart. “The pilot says we’re still about twenty minutes out. What’s the program?”

“I’ll keep monitoring their movements. Call me again when you’re at Davis Dam Road. Above Cabin Site Road, there’s a tangle of unnamed dirt roads that lead to boat launches; I’ll probably need to help guide you in. When I believe you’re close enough, I’m going to use Prestige’s auto theft recovery system to shut down that Mercedes. Once they’re stopped dead, it’s up to you. Do you want me to call in law enforcement?”

“We’ll get back to you on that,” B. said.

Stuart sat back, closed his eyes, and uttered a silent but fervent prayer—that Ali would be there, that she’d be alive, that they’d be able to save her. If none of those things turned out to be true, Stuart didn’t think he’d ever be able to face himself in the mirror again. He wouldn’t be able to face B. Simpson, either.

To keep himself occupied, he put himself back to work. Within minutes he had hacked his way in to the surveillance cameras at Turnberry Towers. There were dozens of them, but he focused on the ones that opened from the elevators into the various parking garage levels. Once he had those cameras isolated, he called up the related recordings. After inserting Barry Handraker’s mug shots into a beta
facial recognition program that High Noon Enterprises had been testing, he turned the program loose on the tapes.

Scanning the tapes manually would have taken days. The new program accomplished the goal within minutes. In a section of tape dated Sunday evening at 06:28:31, Stuart found Barry Handraker exiting the elevator on level three of the parking garage. He was pulling a single piece of roll-aboard luggage. Two minutes later, another camera located at the parking garage entrance showed him driving an S550 with Arizona plates.

“I’ve got you, you scumbag,” Stuart said aloud to the monitor. Not only had Barry Handraker been living in Doris Ralston’s condo, he had evidently been using her vehicle.

Stuart had every expectation that his silver bullet was going to work, but just in case it didn’t, he wanted to make sure he had backup. To that end, he used an untraceable VOIP connection to send a copy of the Turnberry Towers tape to the
Minnesota’s Most Wanted
website. If Barry managed to slip through the first trap, he probably wouldn’t be as lucky with the professionals from the Las Vegas Police Department. They had plenty of practice in taking down fugitives.

31

W
hen Ali’s eyes blinked open again, more time had passed, although she couldn’t guess how much. She noticed that the darkness wasn’t as complete as it had seemed before. Her moving prison was suffused in a strange green glow. Did that mean it was night? She didn’t know. Some time ago, long before she found herself locked in this prison, it had been morning. She had been somewhere—Phoenix, maybe?—and on her way to see someone, driving under a clear blue sky. She remembered being somewhere that had seemed like a bar, and a guy with a mustache who had been angry about something. Maybe he was the one who had locked her in here. Maybe he was the one who was driving her God knows where.

She remembered someone else—had that been earlier than the bar or later? She didn’t know. A woman who seemed to be walking away from Ali, striding off across a parking lot. Concentrating, Ali could almost sort out the woman’s features but not her name. What was it? Susan, maybe, or Sally or Cynthia? Whatever her name was, part of the time she had been scared and part of the time angry, but she was worried about someone else. Her child, a son. The kid was in some kind of trouble—trouble that had something to do with a box. Suddenly, for no reason Ali could imagine, the lyrics to a song from
Fiorello!
were running unchecked through her head:

A little tin box

A little tin box

That a little tin key unlocks.

What was that all about? As the song went back out of her head, Ali realized she was no longer hearing the roar of traffic from outside. Yes, there were occasional vehicles coming and going, but they sounded more like cars than trucks. There was pavement under the tires, but they were no longer traveling on a freeway. They were on a less traveled road.

As Ali attempted to assemble the pieces, her heart filled with dread: They were on a less traveled road to some deserted corner of the desert. It might be night. She was being driven there by someone evil who, for reasons she didn’t understand, had locked her in a trunk. When they got wherever they were going, she was going to die, because she remembered that much. That was what had happened to the other woman, the one in the trunk, and this was the same thing. The person driving the car had killed that other woman—what was her name? Jan. Gina. Jill. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t dredge it up.

This time, much as she wanted to, Ali didn’t allow herself to fall back asleep. She willed herself to fight through the mental fog—to remember whatever it was that she didn’t want to forget. She twisted her cramping body and managed to free the arm that had been trapped. As circulation returned to her aching limb, Ali used the painful waves of needles and pins as a reminder that she was alive.

The car turned sharply to the right, thumping off the pavement and onto something much rougher. A dirt track, maybe? If that was the case, they were probably getting closer to stopping, getting closer to the end—of everything she held dear.

Her mind was filled with an endless parade of folks she’d never see again if she were dead. These were the beloved people she had left behind that day, or even the day before, without holding them close
and saying a proper goodbye. B., of course, and then her parents; Chris and Athena; Colin and Colleen. It pained her to think that her grandchildren most likely wouldn’t remember anything at all about her except that she had been hauled off in a trunk and murdered. And then there was Leland Brooks. What would happen to him?

It was remembering all those people that did the trick, that made her want to go on living. That made her refuse to give up.