A.J. hopped up out of his chair. “No,” he said quickly. “I should probably get back to class. We’ve got a big test tomorrow.”
His mother looked a little surprised. “All right,” she said. “But if you don’t want to go to work this afternoon, I understand. I’ll be glad to call Maddy to let her know you won’t be in today.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be fine, and I need to go to work.”
The truth was, he dreaded being at home with his mother. That would be far worse than going to work.
He made his way back to class. Sasha, seated two rows away, caught his eye as he returned to his desk.
A.J. sank into his chair and covered his face with one hand. He knew he would have to tell Sasha the truth sometime, and when he did, it would all be over.
Maybe that was just as well.
When the bell rang, she caught up with him before he made it to the corridor. “What’s wrong? And don’t try telling me it’s nothing.”
“It’s my father,” A.J. said softly after a long pause. “He’s dead.” Then, to his horror and as much as he tried to keep it from happening, he began to cry.
14
As soon as Ali located Stuart’s office, tucked in the far corner of what was a former warehouse facility, she understood why he had sequestered her in the conference room. For one thing, he evidently lived in his office. Rumpled bedding on an army cot was half hidden behind a cloth-and-wood screen covered with Post-it notes and an impressive collection of pizza coupons. The room was in semi-darkness, and the air was thick with the perfume of pizza.
Stuart sat at one of a bank of computers in the middle of the room with a pizza box at his elbow. He looked up at her in surprise as she entered the room, then shoved the box in her direction. “Lunchtime,” he said. “Want some?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I think I have a lead. I have reason to believe that James Sanders recently came into a sum of money, so maybe the idea of him being hired to make a hit isn’t so far from the mark.”
She went on to relate everything Regina had told her, including the fact that James had most likely used a work-based computer for both e-mail and telephone communications. Stuart listened, nodding absently while keeping one eye on the data flashing across the screen of the computer in front of him. It would have been easy for Ali to think that he wasn’t paying attention, but she knew he was.
“There are a lot of stretch limos in Vegas,” he said when Ali finished her recitation. “So that doesn’t help us much, but knowing the token came from the MGM Grand might. Thousand-dollar tokens aren’t handed over to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wanders in off the Strip. And the casinos take their security arrangements very seriously. It’s my understanding that they video everything-every hallway, every entrance, every table. And unlike the folks running the local traffic cams, casinos keep everything they video on a permanent basis. What day was that again?”
“Regina said she saw the limo on Wednesday a week ago. The limo picked Sanders up about four P.M. We don’t know that they went directly to the hotel. That’s just an educated guess.”
“But the guy in the limo was evidently expected,” Stuart said. “That means there must be some point of contact that we’ll be able to find. Is it possible Dr. Ralston made a quick trip to Vegas last week? Let’s say that’s who the guy in the limo was-Charles Ralston. If that’s the case, somewhere along the line, we’re going to find some communications links between them. Let me work on this for a while. In the meantime, I’ve got something else that may interest you.
“James Mason Sanders married Sylvia Ruth Bixby on June sixteenth, 1996, a few days after she graduated from high school. The wedding was a little late, since their baby, Alexander James, who just turned seventeen himself, was born less than three months later. The wedding took place just before the whole counterfeiting mess started to come apart. I found records of the marriage but no sign of a divorce.”
“So it was a shotgun wedding, but she stayed married to him the whole time he was in prison and even after he got out?” Ali asked.
Stuart nodded. “As far as I can tell, they stayed married then and were still married when he died.”
“That’s taking the words ‘for better or worse’ very seriously, with a lot more worse than better.”
“I’ll say,” Stuart agreed. “I checked public records in Nevada, too, just in case Sanders instituted divorce proceedings there. No such luck. As for the kid? As far as I can tell, he’s okay. Alexander is a senior honors student at North High School in Phoenix, where he’s taking lots of Advanced Placement courses. His mother may have been on her own the whole time, but she’s done something right in raising him.”
Ali’s phone rang. When she saw the number, she left Stuart’s office and took the call in the corridor.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Dave Holman exclaimed. “Are you really working for the public defender?”
He spoke in a way that registered in Ali’s ear as an audible sneer. He didn’t utter the words “How could you?” aloud, but the message was there nonetheless.
“I’m actually doing a project for Lynn Martinson’s mother,” Ali said. That was the truth, if not the whole truth.
“Lynn Martinson is a suspect in a homicide in this jurisdiction,” Dave pointed out, his voice flat with anger. “And you’re a reserve officer. When I came by your place last night, I thought I was speaking to a fellow officer. It never occurred to me that I was talking to someone on the other side.”
“When you were there last night, there was no other side-” Ali began, but Dave cut her off before she had a chance to finish.
“I’ve just been on the phone with Sheriff Maxwell. He’ll be expecting your letter of resignation before the end of business today.”
With that, Dave hung up. Ali was left with a dead phone in her hand and a puncture wound in her heart as well as her pride. Her primary responsibility as a reserve deputy had been to help transport prisoners from one jurisdiction or facility to another. The use of reserve deputies helped keep patrol officers where they needed to be- on patrol.
Ali hadn’t intended to offend Dave, and so far she had done nothing to undermine his investigation. His reaction seemed over-the-top. She had seen the situation with Beatrice Hart and Paula Urban as a temporary arrangement. She hadn’t expected it to be something that would undo years of established relationships, but it sounded as though irreparable damage had already been done. If Sheriff Maxwell was expecting her resignation, she would give it to him.
Ali called home to let Leland and B. know that she was on her way to Prescott. Before she headed out, she stuck her head back in Stuart’s office and gave him the same information. “If you come up with anything,” she said, “call me. I’ll probably drop in on Paula Urban while I’m in Prescott and let her know what we have so far.”
It should have taken an hour and fifteen minutes to get from Cottonwood to Prescott. She did it in just over an hour and considered herself lucky not to have a speeding ticket to show for her trouble. She pulled up in front of the Sheriff’s Department and parked in a designated visitor’s spot. After all, if she was being given her walking papers, that’s what she was-a visitor.
During her brief stint as a media relations officer, her office had been temporarily shoehorned into a corner of the front lobby, which had done nothing to endear her to the front-office clerks who felt their territory had been invaded. That had all changed.
The revamped media relations department, with Ali’s onetime intern Mike Sawyer in charge, was no longer housed in the lobby. All evidence of the previous arrangement had been eradicated. The cubicle where Ali’s desk once sat was long gone. In its place was a long chest-high counter stocked with a supply of forms that could be filled out and passed to the clerks through a bank teller-like opening in their Plexiglas shield. Ali paused long enough to grab one of the forms. Using the back, she scrawled off a one-sentence note of resignation and then made her way to the service window.
Holly Mesina, the head clerk, greeted her with a knowing smirk. “The sheriff is expecting you,” she said. “Do
