Hand of Evil

“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.