“What is it?” Sasha demanded.
“I think it’s a gambling token,” A.J. murmured. “It says it’s worth a thousand bucks.”
“A thousand bucks,” Sasha repeated. “Are you kidding? How many of those are there?”
A.J. felt the inside of the box, sifting the tokens through his fingers. “I don’t know,” he said. “A lot.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Sasha said. “You need to count them.”
A.J. did so, dumping the contents onto the floor and then counting them back into the box one at a time. The whole time, he was remembering what his mother had said about the gas and insurance money James had handed over along with the title to the Camry. “Is this even real?” If his father had gone to prison for counterfeiting U.S. currency, what were the chances he might try counterfeiting gambling tokens?
“Two hundred and fifty,” he said at last.
“Whoa!” Sasha exclaimed. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”
A.J. nodded.
“That means you’re rich,” she said with a laugh.
Coming from Sasha, whose family really was rich, that seemed weird, and A.J. didn’t bother mentioning his niggling worry that the tokens might be fake.
“He wanted me to use the money to go to school. He said this way I wouldn’t have to get student loans or a job-I’d be able to concentrate on studying.”
“How do you turn it into real money, so you can take it to a bank?” Sasha asked.
“I guess you have to take it back to the casino,” A.J. said. “He told me in the note that I’d need someone of age to cash them in.”
“Your mother?”
“No,” A.J. said, shaking his head. He closed the box again and latched it. “I don’t think my mother would be the one doing it.”
“Are you going to tell her about this?”
A.J. thought about that. “No,” he said finally. “You’re the only one who knows. I don’t want to tell anyone else, especially my mother.”
There was an injury accident at the junction of I-17 and the 101. Both before and after the accident, traffic crawled along. By the time Sasha dropped A.J. back in the school parking lot, it was almost seven-far later than he should have been, even if he’d gone to work. He hoped his mother hadn’t called Maddy to check on him.
Once Sasha left him, A.J. put the strongbox in the trunk of his Camry and covered it with a bag of discarded clothing that his mother had asked him to drop off at Goodwill two weeks earlier. After closing the trunk, he happened to look down at the clothing he was wearing. The jeans weren’t bad, but his shirt was a grimy mess. The reddish-brown dirt from the strongbox had been ground into the material; and no amount of wiping would remove it.
A.J. reopened the trunk and dug through the bag of cast-off clothing. He found a shirt that he’d never liked much, even though it still fit him. He traded his dirty shirt for that one. Then, unsure what if anything he would say to his mother, A. J. Sanders headed home.
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
