Authors: J.A. Jance
The parking lot was full of people. Two vans with signs that read
SUNSHINE DAYCARE
pulled up and parked in the two spots closest to Crystal. Several women and seven little kids clambered out of them. While the attendants pulled out a series of multiple-child strollers and began loading children into them, Crystal caught sight of the Explorer. It pulled into the lot and stopped a few parking places beyond the vans.
The women and kids and strollers were right there in front of Crystal—only a few feet away. If she popped out of the bushes right then, Crystal knew she’d startle them and draw way too much attention to herself. So she waited, willing them to move on; willing her itchy nose not to sneeze. But then, just as the crowd started moving out of the way, something happened in one of the middle strollers—one containing three toddlers. The middle child began howling and whacking away with one little fist at the child on his right. The whole parade came to a stop, while the lady pushing the stroller tried to figure out what was going on.
Come on,
Crystal urged silently.
Get out of the way.
But they were still there, milling in front of her, when beyond them, Crystal saw the door of the Explorer come open. A man stepped out. Crystal could barely believe her eyes. It wasn’t Curt—it wasn’t him at all. But the man driving Curt’s truck was someone Crystal recognized. She had seen him once before as a frightening figure caught in the Explorer’s headlights—someone wielding a baseball bat.
Crystal gave a sharp intake of breath. One of the women seemed to notice. She looked around, frowning, but then her charges drew her attention once again, and she turned back to the kids in her stroller. Moments later the whole group moved on, clearing the way between Crystal and the Explorer.
Shaking with dread and afraid of being seen, Crystal stayed where she was and waited. While she watched, the man who wasn’t Curt pulled a phone out of his pocket and began pressing buttons. A moment later, Crystal’s cell phone buzzed, announcing a text message. The vibration startled her so much that she could barely pull the phone out of her pocket. With her breath coming in short, shallow gasps and with her fingers trembling so much she almost dropped the phone, Crystal read the message:
“WRU?” Where are you? CU wanted to know.
CU was Curt’s handle, but he wasn’t the one who had been sending Crystal messages. The man in the parking lot, the man driving Curt’s Explorer, was the one who had offered to give Crystal a ride back home to Sedona. So what did all this mean? If Curt wasn’t here—if he wasn’t the one driving his truck or using his phone, Crystal wondered, where was he? Was he dead? Had those awful men from Mund’s Park used a baseball bat on Curt the same way they had on Kip Hogan? She had seen two of them get Curt’s SUV. Had they found Curt while Crystal was hiding in the restroom and taken him away? If they had killed Curt and almost killed Kip, what would they do to Crystal if they ever found her?
Without ever emerging from the bushes, Crystal used her trembling fingers to key in her response.
“UHA.” Under house arrest. “SRY.”
Over in the parking lot, the man who wasn’t Curt muttered something under his breath and kicked the tire. Then he jumped into the Explorer, slammed the door behind him, and drove away.
Watching him go, Crystal Holman was smart enough to know that one thing and only one thing had saved her—that howling little boy who had been so intent on beating up his seatmate. If it hadn’t been for him, Crystal knew she would have been a goner.
When Ali first noticed Crystal was gone, she wasn’t all that concerned. Thinking she might have simply responded to a call of nature, Ali got up and went across the lobby to the women’s restroom. Unfortunately it was empty. Crystal wasn’t there and no one else was, either. With rising apprehension, Ali hurried over to the lobby entrance where a uniformed security guard was stationed just outside.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Did you see a girl come out this door in the last few minutes? She was wearing a pair of oversize sweats.”
“Blue sweats? Long blond hair in a ponytail?”
Ali nodded. “That’s the one.”
“Sure, I saw her,” the security guard said. “Just a couple of minutes ago.” He pointed. “Headed off toward Thomas on foot.”
Ali headed that way, too. As she did so, she pulled out her cell phone and scrolled through the call history until she found a number that had to be Crystal’s. When she reached Thomas, she paused on the sidewalk and looked in both directions. Nothing, and when Ali called Crystal’s cell phone, there was no answer on that, either.
She had ended the call and was hurrying back toward the parking garage when her phone rang. Hating the idea of having to tell Dave what was really going on and that his runaway daughter was once again on the lam, Ali was relieved to see her son’s name in the caller ID window.
“Hey, Mom,” Chris said. “I’m at lunch. I thought I’d call and see how things are going down there. How’s Kip?”
“Still in surgery,” Ali told him. “And everything else is a disaster. Believe it or not, Crystal just took off again.”
“You mean she ran away?”
“Evidently. There’s a woman here working with Sandy on a set of composite drawings. I got caught up in that. Crystal must have realized I wasn’t paying attention and made her getaway. I never expected her to pull a stunt like that.”
“You should have,” Chris counseled. “She’s a teenager after all.”
“You never did any of this stuff,” Ali countered.
“Don’t be so sure, Mom,” Chris said with a laugh. “Most of the time I was lucky and didn’t get caught.”
By then, Ali was back at her car. “I’m hanging up now,” she said. “I’m going to drive over to the freeway and see if I can spot her between here and there. Maybe Crystal’s trying to hitch a ride back home.”
Once in her Cayenne, Ali drove straight to I-17. Heading north, she checked entrance and exit ramps as far as Bethany Home Road, all to no avail. Frustrated beyond bearing but still stalling on making the necessary call to Dave, Ali was on her way back to the hospital when her phone rang again.
Ali was almost sick with relief when she heard the missing girl’s voice. “Crystal!” she exclaimed. “Where are you?”
“I’m scared. Can you come get me, please?”
“Where are you?”
“At the park where we went earlier this morning. The parking lot by that little lake.”
“What are you doing there?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just come get me,” Crystal insisted. “Please.”
There were dozens of questions Ali wanted to ask, but Crystal sounded so upset—so desperate—that Ali stifled all of them. “I’m on my way,” she said grimly. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
More furious than she was relieved, Ali swung into the parking lot with a squeal of tires. At first Crystal wasn’t visible, but as soon as Ali stopped the car, the girl emerged from beneath some oleanders and came sprinting toward the Cayenne. Once inside, she fastened her seat belt without having to be reminded.
“What in the world were you thinking?” Ali demanded. “Why did you leave the hospital? What are you doing here?”
But whatever was going on with Crystal and no matter how scared she was, she wasn’t prepared to give a straight answer. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she half-sobbed. “Can’t we just go back to the hospital?” she begged. “Please. I won’t do it ever again. I promise.”
For two days Ali had done her best to be understanding and sympathetic toward this troubled child. Now she was in no mood for Crystal Holman’s latest set of drama-queen histrionics.
“I should hope not,” Ali said.
Crystal sat huddled miserably on the far side of the car, but instead of watching where they were going, she seemed to be concentrating on traffic in the rearview mirror. Her verbal response, when it finally came, was the last thing Ali expected.
“Thank you,” Crystal said.
For what?
Ali wondered.
For picking you up or for giving you hell?
“Are you going to tell me what you were up to?” she asked.
“I just needed to get out of the hospital for a while,” Crystal said. “I needed to be by myself.”
“That’s probably a lie,” Ali said. She held out her hand. “Now give me your cell phone.”
“My cell phone?” Crystal repeated with a gasp. “Why?”
“Give it to me,” Ali repeated.
“You’re taking my cell phone away? How come?”
“Because having a cell phone is a privilege, not a right,” Ali replied. “At the moment, as the person who’s supposed to be looking after you, I’m declaring that your behavior doesn’t warrant any privileges.”
After a long moment’s hesitation, Crystal sighed, plucked her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweats, and dropped it into Ali’s open palm.
“Are you happy now?” Crystal wanted to know.
“Hardly,” Ali answered. “I’m not going to be happy until I can hand you back over to your father and turn you into his problem instead of mine.”
Back in the hospital lobby, Detective Lee Farris had arrived on the scene and taken charge of the situation. He had moved Sandy Mitchell and Madeline Havens to the far corner of the room and had commandeered both a small table and a power outlet for Madeline’s computer. By then all three sketches had been completed. While Lee began questioning Sandy, Madeline used a tiny portable scanner/printer to run off copies of the composite drawings.
With no one paying particular attention to her, Crystal wandered over to the printer and picked up one of the sketches. She looked at it for only a moment. Then, turning deathly pale, she let the paper slip from her hand. “I’ve gotta go to the restroom. I’m gonna be sick.”
As she raced away, Ali picked up the fallen sketch, which turned out to be the one of the empty-eyed man she had seen earlier. Crystal may not have picked the sketch out from a law-enforcement-approved montage, but her reaction was enough to convince Ali that for Crystal Holman, the chilling likeness was of someone she recognized.
Ali followed Crystal as far as the restroom door, where the very convincing sound of retching made it clear that Crystal really was sick. Before Ali could storm inside and confront her about any of it, however, Crystal’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. When Ali went to answer, she discovered it was a text message rather than a voice call, a message from someone called CU.
Does that C stand for Curt?
Ali wondered.
“WHERE R U?” the message read. “WENT TO PARK. U DIDNT SHOW.”
The words confirmed Ali’s worst suspicions. Crystal hadn’t gone to the park just to get away from the hospital. She had gone there to meet this person who was now text-messaging her. And wasn’t it possible that this was also the same guy Crystal claimed she couldn’t contact, Curt with no last name? And why was he so eager to be in touch with Crystal now? Ali was reasonably sure he was looking for a second helping of whatever sexual favors Crystal Holman had been offering.
Staring at the screen, Ali wanted to reach through the phone and grab CU by the neck. Much as she would have enjoyed strangling him, she also knew someone needed to convince him to come forward and tell the authorities whatever he knew about Kip Hogan’s attackers. Since Detective Farris was fully occupied with interviewing Sandy Mitchell at the moment, Ali decided to take matters into her own hands. And fingers.
Ali and Chris had been sending text messages for years. When she had been working late hours at the station, text messaging had afforded her the simplest means of staying in touch with her son. And because she had been considered “in the know” on that topic, she had done a series of stories designed to help clueless parents have some idea of what their kids were doing and saying with their now ubiquitous cell phones.
Ali hesitated for a moment. Would she be able to reply without letting CU know that someone other than Crystal was responding?
What’s there to lose?
she wondered.
“WENT,” Ali said, keying in her response. “CAUGHT.” Ali had had to think a minute. “UHA.” She was pretty sure that meant under house arrest, but she had no way of knowing if CU understood what she was saying.
“WAYN?” That one was easy. Where are you now?
“HOSPITAL”
“ST FRANCIS?”
“Y” YES.
Inside the restroom the toilet flushed. That meant Crystal would be coming out soon. “L8R,” Ali wrote. “PAW” Ali knew that was universal teen speak for “parents are watching.”
Ali shoved the phone back into her pocket just as Crystal emerged from the restroom. “Better?” Ali asked.
Crystal nodded wanly. Either the girl really was sick, or she was doing an excellent job of faking it. She went over to a love seat and lay down on it, covering her eyes with her arm. Meanwhile, the phone was once again vibrating in Ali’s pocket, announcing the arrival of another message.
Just then Bob Larson bounded into the hospital lobby. Ali hadn’t expected him until much later—not until after the restaurant closed in the early afternoon and he had a chance to drive down.
“My Bronco’s still in the shop,” Bob explained. “Franco gave me a loaner and your mother let me off early, so here I am. What’s happening?”