Hand of Evil

CHAPTER 4

The truth was, Ali left the title company office knowing she had money coming her way, but feeling more burdened by that fact rather than less. Ali briefly considered going by to see her parents, but decided against it. She usually enjoyed being around Bob and Edie Larson, but the last time she had seen them, her mother had been all over her about being “down in the mouth.” Edie had asked several pointed questions about what Ali was doing to “get herself back on track.”

Not wanting to risk being lectured by the parental units, Ali drove back home where she was delighted to see Chris’s Prius already parked in the driveway. Chris’s energy and cheerfulness were usually welcome antidotes for her current bout with unaccustomed torpor.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, looking up from the evening news as she walked in. With his blond hair suitably moussed and spiked, the six-foot-one Christopher could have easily passed for one of the new breed of weather reporters showing up on the tube. Chris had gotten in the habit of watching television news back in the old days when his mother was often on screen. Ali was pretty much over her own TV news addiction. Chris wasn’t. He sat on the couch with Sam stretched out next to his leg.

“My night to cook,” Chris told her. “Pizza’s on the counter in the kitchen.”

Ali had grown up in a household at the back of a restaurant. Her parents were both professional cooks. As a consequence learning to cook had never been a priority-she had never needed to. When she had been married the first time, to Chris’s father, she had cooked enough to get by, but that was all. When she had married Paul, she had moved into a place where yet another professional cook, Elvira Jimenez, had held sway over the kitchen. Besides, Ali’s news anchor duties had precluded her being anywhere near home during meal prep time.

The upshot of all that meant that not only was Ali not a capable cook, neither was her son. Between them, they subsisted on takeout and leftovers sent over from the Sugarloaf.

Ali went over to the counter and scooped up a napkin and a piece of still steaming pepperoni pizza. She stared down at the message book beside the telephone.

“Dave called?” she asked.

Dave was Detective Dave Holman, a fellow alum of Mingus Mountain High, where he had graduated a year before Ali. He had served in the U.S. Marine Corps and, along with his work as a homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, he was still a member of the Marine Reserves. During the years Ali had been away from Sedona, Dave had established a firm friendship with her parents. Now he was her friend as well. Months earlier, during that awful time in California after Paul’s murder, Dave had been at Ali’s side every step of the way.

“Yup,” Chris said. “Wanted to know if you’d be home later. Said he’d like to stop by. I told him as far as I knew you’d be here. I also told him if he’s not too good to turn up his nose at pizza he’d be welcome to have dinner. Tuesday is the two-for-one special, so we have plenty.”

Pizza was their usual Tuesday night fare, and Chris usually spent the remainder of the evening playing city league basketball down at the high school gym. Much as Ali enjoyed her son’s company, she was also accustomed to having the house to herself on the evenings he played ball, taking advantage of the solitude to work on her blog entries and go through her readers’ comments. Tonight, if time allowed, she had planned to delve into Arabella’s diary. There was a part of her that resented the fact that Chris had seen fit to invite company over without consulting her first, especially when he had no intention of being at home.

“Oh,” Chris added. “And Gramps called. He wanted to know if you knew where Kip went.”

“Kip?” Ali returned. “I have no idea. He was here earlier this afternoon, but I haven’t seen him since.”

“That’s what I told Gramps-that since the credenza was there in the entryway, Kip must have come by. He said not to worry; something probably came up. I could hear Grandma grousing in the background-that Kip had probably fallen off the wagon and gone out and wrecked Grandpa’s precious Bronco. There’d be hell to pay if that happened.”

Bob Larson’s vintage Bronco was precious all right. Ali reached for the phone. “Did Grandpa want me to call?”

Chris unfolded his long legs from the couch, dislodged Sam, and came over to the counter where he collected another piece of pizza.

“Depends on how brave you are,” he said. “It sounded to me like he and Grandma were going at it pretty hot and heavy. If I were you, I’d wait awhile and give them a chance to cool off.”

Ali found a soda in the fridge and brought it to the counter. She was several bites into her pizza before she spoke again. “I signed the papers on the Robert Lane house,” she said.

“The sale went through then?”

“As long as the buyers sign, too.”

“Good,” Chris said. “I’m glad that’s all behind you.”

Except it wasn’t all behind Ali. Selling the house would go a long way toward allowing Ali to finally straighten out Paul Grayson’s financial obligation to his daughter-an out-of-wedlock child whose mother had refused, on religious grounds, Paul’s offer to pay for an abortion. That whole issue was still an unsettling obstacle to Ali as she attempted to move forward and consign her deceased husband to where he belonged-as a fading image in her rearview mirror.

Something in Ali’s facial expression must have betrayed what she was thinking. “Are you okay?” Chris asked.

“Of course, I’m okay,” Ali answered abruptly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Don’t bite my head off,” Chris replied. “And I asked because you don’t look okay. You look upset. You’ve been upset for weeks now.”

You’re almost as bad as my parents, Ali thought.

“I’m okay,” she repeated, but just because she said it didn’t necessarily make it so. She got up from the table, tossed the rest of her pizza into the disposal, and made a show of loading the few dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Once that was done, she went into the bedroom to get out of the tea-drinking attire she’d worn to Arabella Ashcroft’s house and into something a little more comfortable-a pair of well-worn sweats. When she emerged, Chris had disappeared.

Without knowing when Dave would show up, Ali was reluctant to start reading Arabella’s diary. Instead, she reached for her laptop, but before she had time to log on, the doorbell rang. Peering outside, she found Dave Holman standing on her front porch. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, he had turned away from the door and seemed to be staring off at the last of the sunlight on the distant red rock formations.

Determined not to let him gripe at her about her current emotional state, Ali opened the door with a flourish and was going to make some smart-mouthed comment. When she glimpsed the grim set of Dave’s lean, square-jawed face, she stifled.

“Come in,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

Stepping inside, Dave grimaced. “It’s that apparent?”

“Evidently,” Ali responded. “What’s up?”

“It’s Crystal,” he said. “She ran away.”

Crystal was Dave’s twelve-year-old daughter. Dave’s three kids-sixteen-year-old Rich and two daughters, including eight-year-old Cassie, lived with their mother, Roxanne, and her second husband, a time-share salesman with a none-too-sparkly reputation.

“From Lake Havasu?” Ali asked.

Dave gave Ali a look and then dropped heavily onto the sofa. “From Vegas,” he said. “They moved to Vegas the first of October, remember? Cassie and Rich seem to have adjusted all right, but not Crystal. Roxie called me about it just a little while ago.”

Listening to the news, Ali took a hit in the guilt department. She had been so caught up in her own miseries that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her friend’s difficulties. The last Ali remembered Dave’s kids had still been living in Lake Havasu with their mother and her new husband. She had no recollection about them having moved to Vegas.

How come I didn’t know about any of this? What kind of a friend am I? Ali wondered.

“How long has Crystal been gone?” Ali asked.

Dave’s face was bleak. “Since early this morning,” he said. “Rich dropped her off at school, but she never showed up for any of her classes.”

“A twelve-year-old truant on her own in Vegas?” Ali asked. Not good, she thought. Not good at all!

“They’ve issued an Amber Alert,” Dave continued. “But only just now-an hour or so ago. Somehow the school didn’t notify Roxie that Crystal wasn’t at school, and nobody worried when she didn’t show up at home as soon as school was out. When it comes to parental supervision, Roxie runs a pretty loose ship. Until it was almost bedtime, everyone assumed Crystal was off at a friend’s house. And she’s thirteen, by the way,” Dave added. “Not twelve. Just turned. Her birthday was last week. I’m terrified thinking about what might happen to her, and with a twelve-hour head start, she could be anywhere by now.”

Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away-a drive of a little under five hours. The way Dave looked right then, he could probably make the trip in far less time than that. Ali stood up, brought the pizza box over from the counter, and offered him some. Absently he took a slice of the cooled pie and bit into it.

“If all this is happening in Vegas, what are you still doing here?” Ali asked. “I would have thought you’d be on your way by now.”

“Roxie asked me not to come,” Dave replied. “Told me not to, actually. She said she had enough on her plate right now without having to worry about me showing up and making things worse.”

“But you’re a cop,” Ali objected. “How could you possibly make things worse?”

“You’d be surprised,” Dave said grimly. “You don’t know Gary, her jerk of a husband.”

Ali didn’t know Gary Whitman personally, but what little she knew about the man wasn’t good. He had been new to town-a hotshot time-share salesman-when he had taken up with Roxanne Holman, wining and dining her while Dave was off doing his second tour of duty with the reserves in Iraq. The affair had started then. The actual divorce hadn’t happened until months later, after Dave got back home from his deployment.

Just being divorced had been hard enough on Dave, but the previous fall, when Roxanne and Gary had moved from Sedona to Lake Havasu and taken the kids with them, Dave had been devastated. Ali vaguely remembered Dave mentioning that there had been trouble of one kind or another with Gary’s employment situation in Lake Havasu, but that was all she could recall. She had no idea that another move had occurred, and right that minute, none of that seemed particularly important.

“Forget about Gary Whitman,” Ali said now. “He doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out where Crystal could have disappeared to and why. And how do we go about bringing her back home?”

“I suppose Roxie’s right in a way about wanting me to stay here,” Dave admitted. “I can make more inquiries-official inquiries, that is-by going through channels on this end than I could as boots on the ground in Nevada, where I’d be outside my jurisdiction.”

Ali knew from personal experience that being outside his jurisdiction hadn’t kept Dave Holman from riding to Ali’s rescue when she had needed his help in California a few months earlier. Surely, with his own daughter at risk, there could be no question now about what he should do.

“You have to go,” Ali declared urgently. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

Dave blew out his breath as though trying to relieve some pressure. “Rich said pretty much the same thing his mom did when I talked to him a little while ago-that I shouldn’t come. He says Gary and Roxie fight about me all the time as it is. He said if I come up, it’ll only make things worse.”

“All the more reason for you to go,” Ali insisted. “True, you may not be able to do anything to help find Crystal, but at least you can be there as moral support for Cassie and Rich, and they’re the ones who need it. What did Rich tell you, by the way? Did he have any idea why Crystal might have taken off?”

“Not really. According to him she’s been quite the handful since they got to Vegas. She’s already been suspended from her new school-twice.”

“Suspended twice from middle school?” Ali asked. “What did she do?”

“I have no idea,” Dave said. “Roxie hadn’t mentioned it to me, and Rich didn’t say, either. But here’s what I don’t understand. It used to be that, of all the kids, Crystal was the one who actually liked going to school. At least, I thought she did. Up until this year, she was always a straight-A student. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her.”

“Divorces are difficult for kids,” Ali offered. “And middle school especially can be tough, especially if you’re the new kid on the block. In that case it can be downright brutal. I’m sure you’ve heard about ‘mean girls.’ But tell me about the Amber Alert. I know a little about them, but I don’t know how they work.”

“It’s like an all-points bulletin for missing kids,” Dave replied, “except more so. The announcements don’t just go out to law enforcement agencies. They’re posted on radio and television and on road signs on the interstates. They also go to bus depots and airports so busline and airline personnel are also on the lookout. The problem is, for it to do any good, it should have gone out within hours of Crystal’s disappearance.”

“So why are you still here?” Ali asked.

Dave heaved himself off the sofa and walked over to the window, where he seemed to stare outside. With the now all-enveloping darkness, his brooding features were reflected back into the room by the windowpane.

“I didn’t tell you the real reason Roxie doesn’t want me to come,” he said softly. “She’s scared.”

“Of her husband?” Ali asked. “Because of what Gary might do if you show up?”

“No,” Dave said softly. “Of me. She’s scared about what I might do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I told her I was going to get in my car, come to Vegas, and kill that son of a bitch of a husband of hers. It was bad enough that the slimeball destroyed my family the first time. Then he took them to Havasu. Now he’s dragged them all off to Vegas. You can’t just move kids around like that, hauling them from place to place like so much excess baggage. It’s too hard on them. Crystal used to be a really good kid. If she’s screwed up now, I’m blaming it on him. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all Gary Whitman’s fault.”

“You may have said you were going to kill him, but I don’t think you meant it,” Ali said.

“Didn’t I?” Dave returned gloomily. “I’m not so sure. Maybe I did mean it. But the point is, I did say it. Roxanne heard me and so did Gary. So that’s the deal. First thing tomorrow morning Roxie plans on going to court to swear out a restraining order against me. If I come anywhere near her and Gary, I’ll go to jail.”

“Screw Roxie and Gary!” Ali said forcefully. “And screw going through ‘official channels on this end.’ You need to be there, Dave. Let the cops look for Crystal. That’s their job. The people who need you the most right now are Rich and Cassie. You’re their father. In order to help them, you don’t need to go anywhere near the house. You just said Rich took his sister to school. That means he has his driver’s license now, right?”

Dave nodded.

“So go to Vegas,” Ali told him. “Check into a hotel somewhere close but not too close to where they live. Call Rich and Cassie and let them come to you and be with you.”

“But I’m used to doing things,” Dave objected. “I’m used to taking action. If I’m just sitting around in a hotel room somewhere, I’ll feel utterly useless, even more than I feel right now.”

“Being there for your kids is doing something,” Ali insisted. “So is setting a good example about how to behave in the face of a crisis.”

Dave seemed to consider what she had said before he responded. “I just thought that if Roxanne wouldn’t let me come to the house, there wasn’t much point in my going.”

Ali shook her head. “You mouthed off when you probably shouldn’t have, but so what? From what I can see, Roxanne isn’t very high in decision-making skills, either. So go. Be there for your kids-for all your kids.”

Dave looked down at his watch. “If I left now, I could be there by midnight.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “You could. And if you’re really worried about taking a potshot at Gary Whitman, you could always leave your gun at home. Take some more pizza and leave the gun.”

Dave accepted another piece of cold pizza and gave her a halfhearted grin. “Maybe I’m not that worried,” he said. Pizza in hand, he started toward the door; then he stopped and turned back. “I guess I already knew what I should do,” he added. “I just needed someone to point me in the right direction. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “That’s what friends are for. But drive carefully. You won’t be of much use to your kids if you end up in a wreck somewhere between here and there. And call me. The moment you hear something about Crystal, call me. Day or night, it doesn’t matter.”

Dave sobered, his grin disappearing as suddenly as it had come. “I will,” he declared. “I’ll call day or night and let you know what’s happening.”

For a while after Dave left, Ali sat on the couch absently stroking Sam’s soft fur and wondering if she had given her friend the right advice. She had no doubt that Dave Holman was capable of using deadly force when necessary, but she also wasn’t at all convinced that his threat toward his ex-wife’s new husband was real. It seemed more likely that what he had said was nothing more than bluster, an empty emotional outburst provoked by his daughter’s unexplained disappearance.

Faced with a choice between blogging about this current crisis or perusing Arabella’s diary written sixty or so years earlier, Ali voted for immediacy by reaching for her laptop. Once it booted up, she began working on her post for the next day’s installment.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

We’ve all seen the headlines and watched stories like this unfold on the airways. A young girl, a teenager, inexplicably disappears on her way home from school or from a friend’s house. Eventually, concerned parents go to the police and report her missing. If they’re really lucky, an Amber Alert is issued, and their child is found.

Sometimes the missing child turns out to be nothing but a common runaway. Once she is reunited with her anxious parents, the family is left to cope with whatever it was that caused her to leave home in the first place. Sometimes the difficulties seem relatively minor-problems with a friend at school, a bad report card, or maybe a case of puppy love gone awry. Sometimes the reasons are much more troublesome and the finger of blame points directly back to unsavory conditions existing in the home itself. In families plagued by drug or alcohol abuse or where domestic violence and/or sexual molestation are the order of the day, leaving home can seem like-and sometimes is-the child’s only viable avenue for survival. And when runaway children are returned to homes like that, it’s often only a matter of time before they bolt once more.

We’re also all too familiar with other endings to this story-horrific instances where missing children disappear and never return home. They simply melt into the ether. Days or weeks or months later their remains are found and identified-close to home or far away. At that point what was once a missing persons case is suddenly transformed into a homicide.

Today a friend’s thirteen-year-old child has gone missing. She never made it to school this morning even though she was dropped off right outside the campus. She wasn’t reported missing until late this evening, a good twelve hours after she was seen walking in the direction of her first morning class. An Amber Alert has been issued, but her father fears too much time may have passed before that happened.

Yes, the cliches are all there. The girl is from a broken family-a divorced family-with the distraught father living in one state and with the mother, children, and new stepfather living in another. Some people are probably thinking this is nothing more than a custody dispute gone bad. But it isn’t that, not at all.

It’s bad enough for families to have to face this kind of crisis when a marriage is solid and intact. It’s even tougher to contemplate doing so when the marriage bond has been severed and the crisis must be faced alone.

And that’s where my friend is tonight-facing the loss of his daughter on his own. His former wife has a new husband, and the two of them are together in this difficult time. My friend is alone-alone and angry; alone and grieving. He came to talk to me earlier this evening. I did what I could to bolster him, but there’s only so much anyone else can do.

I have no idea how these events will sort themselves out in the course of the next few days. If it is a family dispute of some kind and if his daughter has simply run away, she may turn back up on her own when she gets cold enough or hungry enough or even tired enough. But it may turn out that something else is going on here-something more ominous than that. If foul play is involved, it’s likely the story will go public. For right now, and out of deference to my friend’s privacy and that of the other family members, I’m not identifying any of the players. There may come a time when that will change, when posting the missing girl’s information on this Web site may be used as a possible means for bringing her home.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to hope and pray that doesn’t happen.

While the post took its sweet time about uploading, Ali turned to her new mail list. There, along with a mountain of spam, was an e-mail from one of her regulars, Velma Trimble in Laguna Beach, California. Under the name of “Velma T in Laguna” she usually sent correspondence to the comment section of cutlooseblog.com. It was odd for her to write to Ali directly.

Dear Babe,

You’re the only person I can think of to write to tonight. You see, today I went to the doctor to get the results back from the biopsy for the lump on my left breast. It took almost two weeks to get the results back. I don’t know why it takes so long, but today was the day.

I had pretty well prepared myself for the fact that it was going to be bad news, and it was. Since I have a computer, I had gone to the various Web sites and looked up what I could expect in terms of treatment options-surgery, radiation, chemo. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be told not to bother.

“At your age,” this little whippersnapper doctor

told me, “there’s really not much point.” He’s probably all of forty-five and he should count himself lucky I didn’t whack him over his head with my walker. The problem is, I can’t get in to see an oncologist without a referral from my primary physician. And if he does give me a referral, what’s he going to say? “Here’s Velma, but don’t bother doing anything to fix her because she’s a useless eighty-something and curing her cancer isn’t going to be cost effective.”

What I want to know is this: Did this happen because Medicare reimbursements are so low that the doctor can’t be bothered? Maybe he’d rather treat full-fare patients. Or does he just hate old people in general? (Surprise, he’s going to be one someday himself. I wonder how he’ll like it?) Or does he just hate me? Personally.

Should I go to the trouble of trying to see another doctor-not easy when you have to go by cab or bus because you can’t drive anymore (another bad thing about getting old) or should I just take him at his word, decide he’s right, I’m a hopeless case, and that the sooner I turn toes up the better off we’ll all be?

You’re pobably wondering why I’m asking you these questions. I can’t very well ask my son, because he would definitely be in the toes-up corner. Unfortunately my doctor and my son are friends. They belong to the same club and play golf together. That’s how I ended up with him for a doctor-my son recommended him. I even signed a form saying it was okay for him to let my son have access to my medical information. That was before all this happened, of course.

Please write back and let me know what you think. I really value your opinion.

Sincerely,

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Ali was absolutely outraged. When she had been in California dealing with the avalanche of crises that had accompanied Paul Grayson’s death, she had been overwhelmed by everything that had been coming at her. On the night when she had been at her very lowest ebb, a single bright spot had appeared. Velma T had managed to track Ali down at her hotel. Sporting a walker decorated with patriotic items-including red, white, and blue tennis balls-the woman had caught a cab and come all the way across L.A. to offer her support and to let Ali Reynolds know there was someone in her corner.

This was a sprightly, outgoing woman. And this obnoxious doctor was writing her off because she was eighty-eight?

Ali’s first husband, Dean, had died of glioblastoma when he was in his twenties and while Ali was pregnant with Christopher. During her high-profile years as an L.A. area newscaster, Ali had done lots of work with the cancer community-helping with fund-raising and doing guest appearances. One of the side benefits of that had left Ali with a good deal of knowledge and with a whole list of cancer treatment contacts she could call on for help and information.

The idea of Velma, a most likely impoverished old woman trying to fight her way through the cancer treatment morass on her own, left Ali feeling physically ill. And suspecting that Velma was spending this worrisome, sleepless night in front of her computer screen, Ali wrote back at once.

Dear Velma

I’m so sorry. Receiving a cancer diagnosis is always devastating no matter how old you are or how young or how young at heart.

Although I’ve dealt with my share of medical professionals, I have no idea why your primary care physician thinks treatment options are off the table at this time. It may be that you were in such a state of distress that you simply didn’t understand exactly what he was saying. On the other hand, there may be other physical and medical conditions involved that make it risky for you to undergo treatment of any kind. There’s always a chance that, as you suggested, your doctor is simply an uncaring jerk. Another possibility that tends more to aluminum-foil-hat conspiracy theories would have to do with your doctor having a conflict of interest in treating you due to his chummy relationship with your son.

Although I no longer live in southern California, I still have many contacts in the local cancer care medical community. I’ll be in touch with some of them first thing in the morning and see what, if anything, I can do.

In the meantime, go ahead and worry. You are right to be upset and scared, but try to take things one step at a time and let me and others do what we can to help.

My thoughts and prayers are with you.

ALI