“You mean you go around them or over them?”
“With Sergeant Dobbs,” she said, “I’m choosing the go-around option. Since you’ll be working with him after I leave, that’ll be a better choice than a direct confrontation.”
37
11:00 A.M., Monday, April 12
Tucson, Arizona
For Ali, pulling the pieces together for the drive to Patagonia was a lot like herding cats. When Teresa had said she’d call her uncle Tomas, it sounded easy, but it wasn’t. Tomas Kentera was Maria Delgado’s brother. Unlike her, he had a cell phone and no landline. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to recharge the battery. As a consequence, his cell phone wasn’t working. Ali had to drive to his house on the far west side of town to find him and then convince him to ride along with her to retrieve Teresa’s minivan.
They were on the freeway and headed for Patagonia when Ali’s phone rang.
“We closed the restaurant right after breakfast and gave ourselves some extra time off,” Edie Larson announced. “The agreement is signed, sealed, and delivered. The Sugarloaf is sold. Your father is over the moon, and so am I. Can you believe it?”
“I do believe it,” Ali said. She couldn’t remember her mother ever sounding so excited. “Congratulations.”
“In the meantime,” Edie continued, “we’ve got an appointment later this afternoon to take a look at the available units at Sedona Hills. Since we really will be moving in a matter of weeks, we need to get our ducks in a row about where we’re going. One thing is for sure-we’ll need to have a yard sale or two.”
“What about the mayor thing?” Ali asked.
“Yes,” Edie said, “the mayor thing is still on. Your father hasn’t exactly come around, but I’m guessing he will eventually.”
Ali thought so, too. “He usually does.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Edie objected. “When you say it that way, you make your father sound henpecked.”
“What I’m really saying is that you deserve each other,” Ali said. “You both have your moments.”
“All right, then,” Edie said, changing the subject. “How are things on your end? How is your friend doing?”
“Better,” Ali said, looking at Teresa’s uncle, sitting in stolid silence in her front seat. “Better but not completely out of the woods.”
A few miles later, Ali’s next call was from Leland Brooks. The cement pour had gone well. Neither of the Askins nominees had RSVPed, but it was early days, the two teas were almost a whole week away. As for the garden? The long-term weather report indicated that some of the hardier items could start being planted the following week.
“So things are moving forward?” Ali asked.
“Absolutely, madam,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d let you down, did you?”
“No,” Ali said. “Actually, I didn’t.”
Feeling guilty about carrying on not one but several telephone conversations in her passenger’s presence, Ali switched her phone off. By then they had turned off I-10 onto Highway 83. Ali was trying to figure out how to initiate a conversation with this relative stranger when Tomas Kentera did it for her.
“Why do you think Sheriff Renteria ordered his people to stay away from the hospital?” Tomas asked.
“He what?” Ali demanded.
“I know lots of people in Nogales, and that’s what they’re saying-that Sheriff Renteria ordered his people to stay away from the hospital and from Jose.”
Ali was astonished. “That can’t be.”
“Have you seen any people from the sheriff’s department at the hospital?”
“No, but-”
“Someone should ask the sheriff about this,” Tomas said. “I would really like to know.”
“Believe me,” Ali said determinedly, “so would I.”
Teresa and Jose’s mobile home was located in a housing development that had mostly failed to develop. Ten acres had been divided into ten one-acre lots, seven of which remained empty. Two other mobile homes, one obviously a derelict, were situated on the property. The Reyes lot was the only one that was completely fenced.
It was just past noon when Ali stopped at the gate. Tomas got out to open it. The minivan sat in a free- standing carport at the back of the house. Teresa had told Ali that the car keys were in a drawer in the kitchen and that a spare house key could be found under an empty flowerpot sitting next to the front steps. The key wasn’t there, but by the time Ali reached the front steps, she realized no key would be necessary, because the front door stood ajar.
Ali knew that Duane Lattimore had executed a search warrant on the house, but it seemed unlikely that he would have gone off leaving it unsecured. She suspected that an enterprising burglar might have decided to take advantage of the current uproar in Teresa and Jose’s lives. If so, it was possible the intruder might be inside the home.
Holding up one hand and motioning for Uncle Tomas to stay where he was, Ali eased her way up the wooden steps. By the time she was ready to pull the door open the rest of the way, she had her Glock 17 out of its small- of-the-back holster.
Ali peered around the door frame and came to an abrupt stop. During the time she had worked with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, she had seen the messy aftermath of several executed search warrants. This wasn’t anywhere close to messy. Everywhere Ali looked, she saw wanton destruction.
Living room and dining room furniture had been overturned and the upholstery shredded, spilling fill into snowdrift like piles of cotton. Lamps had been flung to the floor and broken; a glass coffee table had been smashed into thousands of shards. In the kitchen, the fridge had been tipped over on its side, spilling contents into a sticky, broken-jarred mess on the floor. Drawers had been removed from the cupboards, dumped, and then stomped apart. Dishes and glassware had been pulled out of cupboards and smashed to pieces. Something that looked like super glue covered the glass stove top. What appeared to be a collection of cookbooks had been thrown to the floor, and something wet and sticky, like Karo syrup, had been poured over them, swelling the covers and sticking the pages together in a sodden mass.
Picking her way through the debris field as carefully as possible, Ali searched the remainder of the house, feeling more and more heartsick as she went. In the room Jose and Teresa had prepared for Carmine’s nursery, Ali found the wreckage of a crib and mattress as well as a demolished changing table. Diapers, tiny clothing, and piles of receiving blankets had been thrown on the floor and then covered with a thick substance that appeared to be a mixture of the contents of two Costco-size containers, one of baby powder and one of lotion. The last bedroom-the one at the far end of the mobile, which evidently belonged to Lucy and Carinda-seemed to have been spared, making Ali wonder if the intruder had run out of time or energy or both.
On the opposite end of the house, in Teresa and Jose’s master bedroom, the level of destruction once again escalated. Gaping holes had been slashed into the mattress and box spring. Clothing had been pulled from the closet, ripped apart, dumped on the floor, and soaked with bleach from an empty two-gallon jug that lay nearby. Bottles of still-tacky nail polish had been spilled onto the torn bedding, sparing none of it. Bottles of shampoo and conditioner and lotion had been poured into an oddly flowery-smelling soup in the bathtub. Chunks of jaggedly broken glass left in the bottom of that mixture presented a cutting hazard for anyone trying to clean up the mess.
After searching the house from end to end and finding no intruders, Ali returned to the living room, where she
