Deadly Stakes

17

Ali’s drive down I-17, from high desert to low desert, was uneventful, with light traffic in both directions, until she hit the exits to Anthem. That was also about the time Stuart Ramey called.

“Sorry to say, I don’t have much for you. I’m making nice with people at the MGM Grand in order to get a copy of the tapes. I find that diplomacy generally takes more time than hacking, but B. prefers me to use up-front methods whenever possible.”

Stuart’s abilities to wander through complex computer systems as invisibly as a cyber ghost made him an invaluable asset to High Noon Security’s anti-hacking initiative. Companies set up what they thought were foolproof cyber-security systems that Stuart routinely broke through. Although Ali had occasionally made use of Stuart’s off-the-books hacking skills, she knew what he did, although expedient, was also skirting the law. She felt more comfortable when he used front-door rather than back-door methods.

“Right now I’m on my way to Phoenix to interview James Sanders’s wife and son. I know you gave me their address earlier, but could you send it to my iPhone so I can program it into the GPS?”

“Done,” Stuart said.

A moment later, an arriving message buzzed on her phone. He rang her back. “Anything else?”

“I talked to Dr. Charles Ralston. He said his wife was enrolled in several dating websites both before and after the divorce. If we can find out which ones, we might be able to find out if James Sanders met up with her that way.”

“Hearts Afire,” Stuart said.

“I beg your pardon?” Ali asked.

“That’s the name of the main dating website Gemma Ralston was signed up with,” Stuart answered. “I already know which one, because I found her profile.”

“I should have known you’d be one step ahead of me,” Ali said with a laugh.

“Gemma made no bones about looking for someone with big bucks,” Stuart continued, “and she wasn’t looking to get married. What she wanted was a meaningless relationship-preferably a high-end meaningless relationship. Since you told me Sanders didn’t have his own computer to go online, I’ll have to look through the browsing history on the Mission’s computers to find out if there’s a connection. Fortunately, almost nobody thinks to clean their caches these days, which makes my work child’s play.”

“All right,” Ali said. “Thanks for the help. You keep doing what you do, and I’ll keep doing what I do.”

She pulled off at the next exit long enough to program her GPS, then got back into the flow of traffic. The computerized voice in the dash told her to take the 101 to the 51 and then that down to Thomas. She had to jog around on surface streets in a modest working-class neighborhood until she found the correct address on East Cheery Lynn Road.

Ali stopped in front of a small white brick bungalow. The front yard was flat and unfenced. Once upon a time the yard might have boasted crops of lush green grass. Now, due to the escalating cost of water, the owners of that yard, as well as many of the near neighbors, had opted for xeriscaped patches of desert landscaping. Sylvia Sanders had moved one notch up on the scale of landscape severity by covering her entire front lawn with a layer of white gravel. Not so much as a single weed dared poke its head up through the thick blanket of tiny rocks.

In view of what had happened, Ali had expected that she would arrive to find a houseful of visiting friends and relatives. That didn’t appear to be true. Other than Ali’s Cayenne, the street in front of Sylvia Sanders’s house was empty. A single aging Passat sat parked in the two-car carport.

Dreading the encounter and unsure of her reception, Ali walked up to the door and rang the bell. The woman who answered a few seconds later appeared to be somewhere in her mid-thirties. She came to the door in a well-worn jogging suit. She looked as though she had been crying.

“Ms. Sanders?” Ali asked, holding out a business card that contained nothing but her name and her cell phone number.

Nodding, the woman opened the door wide enough to take the card. She glanced at it without appearing to take it in. “I’m Sylvia Sanders,” she said.

“As it says there,” Ali explained, “my name is Ali Reynolds. I’m very sorry for your loss, but I’m a journalist doing a story on the Camp Verde homicide-the other one,” she added quickly. “I know this is a terribly challenging time for you, but would it be possible for me to ask a few questions?”

“I’ve already spoken to the cops, and the reporter from Las Vegas just left. I don’t know how much more I can add.”

“Please,” Ali said. “Anything you can do to shed light on the situation for my client. .”

“All right,” Sylvia said with a sigh. She opened the door, stepped aside, and motioned Ali into the house, leading the way through a small entryway and into a combination living room/dining room. Sylvia directed Ali toward an old-fashioned sofa with brown and orange plaid upholstery and wide wooden arms. As Ali sat down, Sylvia resumed what was evidently her seat in a matching chair, where a coffee mug sat within arm’s reach. She glanced at her watch before picking up the coffee mug. “My son’s late getting home,” she said. “He’s usually here by now.”

“That would be Alexander?” Ali asked, removing her iPad from her briefcase-size purse and opening the cover.

Sylvia nodded. “I call him A.J.,” she said.

“This must be terribly difficult for both of you.”

Two new tears squeezed out of Sylvia’s eyes and coursed down her cheeks. “A.J. barely knew his father. I did my best to protect him from all that. . notoriety. Now, though, all the details are bound to be back in the papers. In fact, that’s what Betty Noonan was asking about.”

“And she is?” Ali asked, deftly typing notes on the iPad’s flat-screen keyboard.

“The reporter I told you about. From the Las Vegas Examiner. She left a few minutes ago, just before you got here. That’s where James, my husband, had been living and working ever since he got out of prison-in a halfway house in Vegas called the Mission.”

Ali had spent years as a television journalist. In this day of shrinking print newspapers and equally shrinking newspaper budgets, she wondered why the murder of a lowly halfway-house janitor would be important enough for a news editor to send a reporter on a three-hundred-mile one-way trip. Obviously, there was more to James Mason Sanders than anyone was letting on.

“You said James Sanders was your husband,” Ali repeated. “Does that mean you never divorced?”

Sylvia nodded. “We’re Catholic,” she said simply. “If he had ever asked me for a divorce, I suppose I would have given it to him. After all, except for those first few months, we’ve lived apart the whole time. He never asked, and I never bothered. I thought the less said about that whole situation, the better off we’d be. Having all of this come to light now that A.J.’s a senior seems worse somehow. Maybe if I’d been more open about it when he was younger. .”

“Open about what?” Ali asked. “About A.J.’s father going to prison for counterfeiting?”

She already knew the answer, but that was part of the drill. If you knew what interviewees were supposed to say, it was a lot easier to see if they were telling the truth or lying.

“We started dating when we were in high school,” Sylvia explained. “He went off to college while I was a junior. He got in to a fraternity at ASU. When he was a sophomore, one of his buddies came up with the stupid idea of trying to print money. It was just a lark. They wanted to see if they could get away with it. I don’t think any of them thought of the long-term consequences. If they’d been serious about it, they would have made hundreds instead of twenties. When they got caught, two of them hired big-shot defense attorneys and got off completely, and the third one paid a fine. James was the one left holding the bag. He’s the one who went to prison.” Sylvia paused, her gaze far away. “We found out I was pregnant just before the whole thing blew up. We got married right away, but we ended up living with his grandparents in Tempe because we couldn’t afford to rent a place on our own. James was willing to work, but no one would give him a job. A.J. was born while James was out on bail awaiting trial, and he was only three months old when his father was sent to prison.”

“For what was essentially a first offense and a victimless crime,” Ali said.

“The prosecutor didn’t think it was victimless,” Sylvia said.

“It must have been tough being left on your own with a baby.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Sylvia agreed, “but we weren’t completely adrift. My parents helped, and so did his. It was an inheritance from James’s grandparents that made it possible for me to buy this house.”

“Are you still in touch with his parents?”

“No,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “His father died a number of years ago. His mother remarried and moved to Sun River in Oregon. I called her earlier today to let her know what happened. She and her husband are leaving later today to drive down.”

“Pardon me for saying this,” Ali said, “but it’s clear to see that you still cared about the man. When he got out of prison, why didn’t he come to live with you?”

Sylvia bit her lip. “I asked him not to,” she said finally. “I was trying to keep my son away from someone I thought would be a bad influence. Maybe it was wrong, but I thought A.J. would be better off with no father at all than with a father who’d spent years of his life in prison. Kids can be so mean about stuff like that, and I didn’t want A.J. to be bullied.”

Ali felt a rush of sympathy for this solitary woman who had damned herself to a life of loneliness in hopes of sparing her son. Ali had spent enough time as a single mother to know the drill-the unrelenting responsibility of having to make all the decisions on her own, all the while hoping against hope that those decisions were the right ones. And now that James Sanders’s murder was in the public eye, all of Sylvia’s efforts to dodge the unsavory past had gone for nothing.

“Since your husband’s body was found in much the same location where the other victim, Gemma Ralston, was found, some people seem to be making the leap that he was somehow connected to what happened to her.”

“I know about the other victim,” Sylvia said. “The detective told me. I have no idea what James was doing there the night he was killed, but I do know he didn’t go there to kill someone. For one thing, the James Sanders I knew wasn’t a killer, but even if he was, he wouldn’t have done something like that there! Never.” Sylvia sounded like she was close to losing it.

Ali gave her a moment. “You sound certain of that.”

There was a long pause before Sylvia answered. “I am certain,” she replied, “because I know that place all too well. We were kids back then. We were horny. We went skiing up in Flagstaff with a bunch of our friends. On the way home, we stopped off at that very place-the turnoff to General Crook Trail. If we’d had more money, we might have gone to a motel. Instead, we found a likely place to pull off the road. Later on we figured out that’s probably where it happened-where I got knocked up. So, no. Even if James turned out to be a cold-blooded killer-which he wasn’t-I refuse to accept that he would have chosen that particular place to murder someone.”

Just then a car door slammed shut outside the house. Several times during the conversation, Sylvia had glanced unobtrusively at her watch. She charged out of her chair and hurried toward the entryway as the front door banged open.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been worried sick. Maddy called to see how you were doing and was surprised to learn that I thought you had gone to work.”

Sylvia returned to the living room accompanied by a rangy young man, a kid in his late teens who, at five-ten or so, was a good head and a half taller than she was. He was good-looking and carried what looked like a heavy book bag slung over one slender shoulder. Ali realized this had to be A.J. He reminded her of her own son back when Chris was a senior in high school.

“I needed some time to think, is all,” he said. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“Were you with that girl?”

A.J. seemed to bristle. His ears turned red. “What girl?”

“Sasha something or other,” Sylvia said. “A black girl. Maddy tells me she comes by the store when you’re working. She always buys something, but she seems to like hanging out wherever you happen to be stocking shelves.”

“Maddy Wurth needs to mind her own business,” A.J. declared, “but like I said, I was by myself. I needed to think!” At that point, he caught sight of Ali and stopped short. “Who’s this?” he demanded.

Sylvia leveled a look in her son’s direction that, without saying a word aloud, let A.J. know that he needed to mind his manners.

Ali stood up and handed A.J. one of her cards. “My name’s Ali Reynolds,” she said.

A.J. glanced at the card, then back at Ali. For a fleeting moment, an odd look appeared on his face, something akin to panic. By then his mother had turned away from him, but Ali caught the expression before he managed to stifle it. By the time Sylvia sat back down, A.J. had recovered enough that the strange expression had been wiped clean.

“Are you a cop?” he asked.

“No, I’m a writer,” Ali explained. “I’m working on a story about the woman who died, but I’m also trying to piece together what happened to your father.”

“You think he’s the one who killed her?” A.J. asked.

“I’ve spoken to the lead investigator on the two cases. He seems to think that because of your father’s somewhat dubious history, he might be involved in what happened.”

“No,” Sylvia declared, shaking her head. “That’s not true. I told Ms. Reynolds here the same thing I told the detective earlier today, and it’s the same thing I’m telling you right now. James Sanders didn’t kill that woman. Whatever happened to her, your father was not involved.”

“But if he was there at the same time-” A.J. began.

“From what I’ve been able to learn, your father was dead long before the other woman died,” Ali said kindly. “So I’m not accusing your father of anything. I was simply hoping you and your mother might be able to shed some light on what happened. You two may be the only people in the world with a vested interest in proving that your father wasn’t involved.”

A.J. stood there, seemingly struggling with some kind of indecision. “I can’t help you,” he said finally. “I don’t know anything about it. I’ve got homework,” he added. “I’d better go do it.”

“Do you want me to heat up that leftover carne asada?” Sylvia asked.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”

With that, A.J. disappeared down a hallway. Shortly thereafter, a door slammed hard behind him.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “That was a terrible blunder on my part. I’ve known about Sasha Miller for weeks now. I’ve been waiting for A.J. to come clean and tell me about her himself. I never should have mentioned her in front of company.”

It occurred to Ali then that A.J. Sanders and his supposedly secret girlfriend might be following in his parents’ footsteps. Perhaps he and Sasha had been off on their own somewhere and engaged in something far more interesting than solitary “thinking.”

“That’s what happens to boys when they grow up,” Ali said. “Keeping secrets from their mothers is part of the deal. If you’ll pardon my saying it, I’m under the impression that your son hardly knew his father. That’s got to make things that much more difficult for both of you right now.”

Sylvia nodded. “A.J. was a baby when James went to prison. From the time James walked out of the courtroom, A.J. saw him only once. That was a little over a year ago.” For the first time, Ali heard real bitterness in Sylvia’s response.

“James showed up here uninvited on A.J.’s sixteenth birthday, just in time to play the Great White Father. A.J. and I had agreed beforehand that he wasn’t going to get a car because we couldn’t afford it. Not only did James show up with the car, he gave me enough cold, hard cash to pay for insurance and gas for the next three years. Real money, by the way. I checked it before I took it to the bank. I didn’t want to be caught passing out counterfeit bills that I didn’t know were counterfeit.”

“He gave A.J. a new car?” Ali asked.

“Not new, secondhand-a Camry. Even so, the grand total came to over twenty thousand bucks. I convinced myself it was like having James pay back child support. That was the only reason I let A.J. keep it.”

“I’m assuming there was no court-ordered child support, because you never went to court and asked for it,” Ali said.

Sylvia nodded. “By the time James got out of prison, A.J. and I were settled in here and doing all right. I didn’t want to be beholden to him, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in some kind of visitation situation. I decided to just let sleeping dogs lie. When he showed up with the car, it was a big deal for A.J., and not such a good deal for me. My son had always taken me at my word that we were better off without his father in the picture. After the birthday adventure, I think A.J. started questioning that. I also think that’s part of why this is and will be so hard for him. He was probably hoping that someday he’d have a chance to get to know his father. Now he never will.”

“So they weren’t in touch?” Ali asked. “They didn’t exchange phone calls or e-mails?”

“Not as far as I know,” Sylvia said with a sad smile, “but I could be wrong about that. Secrets, you know.”

“And you don’t know any of James’s associates from Vegas-friends, girlfriends, that kind of thing?”

“No,” Sylvia said. “I’m afraid we didn’t have that kind of relationship. He came here briefly right after he got out of prison. When I sent him packing, that was the last we saw of him until the birthday car a year ago. I had no idea where he was living or how he ended up in Vegas. The detective who came here this morning told me that the dead woman is some kind of fancy-schmancy socialite from here in Phoenix. A doctor’s wife or ex-wife. How would James Sanders have hooked up with someone like that? The detective told me he was working for minimum wage in a halfway house, for Pete’s sake.”

Ali busied herself writing a series of notes, remembering as she did so that Stuart Ramey had said James Sanders’s checking account never went over the thousand-dollar mark. What came in went out again almost immediately. Having learned about the birthday gift, Ali realized that about a year earlier, there must have been another invisible influx of money, some or maybe even all of which James had squandered on a car for his son.

Ali made a show of closing her iPad and putting it away. “A.J. looks like a good kid. Where does he go to school?”

“North High,” Sylvia answered. “You’re right. He is a good kid, one who’s never given me a moment’s worth of trouble. He’s in the Baccalaureate program at North High-the honors program. He also works two hours a day after school and a couple more on the weekends at a Walgreens where one of my good friends, Madeline Wurth, is the manager. He’s saving money to go to college. We both are.”

Ali stood up. “I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more help,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, you were a help, all right,” Ali said. “The fact that you don’t believe James Sanders would have been involved in any way in Gemma Ralston’s murder doesn’t mean it’s one hundred percent certain. But in my book, let’s say it seems a lot less likely.”

Sylvia Sanders’s hard-won composure took a hit. “Thank you,” she said. “In spite of everything, I believe James was really a good man. Maybe not an honest man, but a good one.”

A man who recently came into another unexplained batch of money, Ali thought, though she didn’t say it aloud.

Ali stood up. “Don’t bother getting up,” she told Sylvia. “I can find my way out.”