dread she was feeling-dread brought on by that vision of the flesh disappearing from Gayle Stryker’s face. And if Lani couldn’t understand it, there was no way she could explain it to her mother.
“I’m worried about Dad,” she hedged at last.
“Don’t be,” Diana said with absolute confidence. “Your father’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
Not without help, Lani thought. She pushed her plate away and gave her mother what she hoped was a convincing smile. “I’m full,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
She wanted to be back home-back in her room with the door closed. There, at least, she’d be able to sit on the floor with her legs crossed, hold Looks at Nothing’s crystals in her hands, and sing the song that had come to her earlier. As a medicine woman, it was all she knew to do. As a daughter, it was the best help she could offer.
Staying at a discreet distance, Brandon followed Larry’s LS 430 through Catalina, past Saddle Brook, and then off onto Highway 79 at Oracle Junction. When Larry slowed and signaled for a left-hand turn at Flying C Ranch Road, Brandon took his foot off the gas and then drove by with his face averted in case Larry happened to look in his rearview mirror. Brandon continued on up the highway another half mile or so before pulling another U-turn and parking on the shoulder.
Taking out his phone, he called Brian. “Where are you?” Brandon asked.
“Just past Oracle and Orange Grove,” the detective returned. “Traffic is the pits. We finally had to put on the lights and siren.”
“Don’t worry,” Brandon said. “Everything’s cool. Larry just pulled off Highway 79 onto Flying C Ranch Road. My GPS says that’s a dead end, so he’ll have to come back out eventually. I’m parked up the road a few hundred yards. When he comes back out, I’ll see him, but he won’t see me.”
“Sounds good,” Brian said.
“I’ve been thinking about all this while I’ve been driving,” Brandon added. “Larry was all upset when I brought up the possibility of his being the father of Roseanne Orozco’s baby. I’d talked to him about Roseanne yesterday. He kept his cool then, but the paternity issue threw him into a blind panic. If you and PeeWee can apply the screws…”
“With pleasure,” Brian returned. “We’ll see what we can do.”
“Okay,” Brandon told him. “I’ll hang tight. See you when you get here.”
Larry’s phone rang again as he drove up Flying C Ranch Road. When he checked the readout and saw that it was Gayle, he didn’t answer that time, either. Obviously she knew now that he had left the office and was trying to track him down. Too bad!
He was still shaken by the phone calls to CitationShares, still astonished that she would betray him like that. He had always worried it might happen, though he had never really thought it would, though now it had. Gayle had turned on him, just as she had turned on Erik LaGrange, but with one big difference: Larry had figured out what was up in time to get his own damned plane. Gayle was on her way out of town; so was he.
When he drove into the yard, Gayle’s Lexus was nowhere to be seen. He had half expected that she might have beaten him here and he’d arrive to find the ranch house already reduced to rubble, but it wasn’t. She probably lied to me about that, too, he thought bitterly. She probably never planned to blow it up at all.
That was an appalling possibility. What if somebody stumbled into the basement room with its restraints and shackles and the rest of his equipment? He stopped the car. For a space of time he was too shaken to get out. He had cleaned things up as best he could, but he knew enough about current crime scene investigation to realize that tricky alternate-light sources could locate blood droplets that were invisible to the naked eye.
What should he do? If Gayle wasn’t going to destroy the evidence against him, should he try to do it himself?
No, he decided finally. Get the notebooks and get the hell out. Go wait at the airport. No one will ever think to look for me there…not at Pinal Air Park.
So Larry Stryker hurried into the house and on into the study. He’d had a wall safe installed there, behind one of the big oil paintings. And because Gayle had no idea the safe existed, it had been the right place for him to keep his notebooks.
He was upset enough that his hand shook as he worked the combination. It took three tries before he got it right. Swinging the door open, he grabbed up the notebooks. He shoved them into the open briefcase on his desk and slapped the lid shut. He turned back to the safe to close it and return the painting to its place.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Gayle asked.
He hadn’t heard the car or her. The sound of her voice scared him to death. A chill ran up his spine. The painting fell from his hand, splitting the heavy gilt frame as it smashed onto the Saltillo floor. This couldn’t be happening. Larry led a charmed life. He wasn’t supposed to get caught.
“Nothing,” he said, turning to face her. That’s when he saw the gun-a chrome-plated pistol-that was pointed straight at his chest. It wasn’t a very large weapon, but it seemed to grow in size. He stared at it until the gaping mouth of the pistol was all he could see. “I came to see if you needed any help,” he added lamely.
She smiled and shook her head, but she didn’t move the gun. It stayed pointed at him.
“I never knew about that safe,” she said quietly. “What do you keep in it?”
“Odds and ends. Nothing important. Put down the gun, Gayle. Shouldn’t we get to work?”
“Did you have money in there?” she demanded. “Were you hiding money from me?”
“Of course not!” he declared. Flustered, he felt his face turn red. “Nothing of the kind.”
“Then open the briefcase,” she ordered. “Show me.”
As he carried on his end of the conversation, Larry Stryker was trying to grapple with this new reality. There was no question about whether or not she would pull the trigger. Of the two of them, Gayle was the natural-born killer. He had known that about her for more than thirty years. He had always supposed he was immune. But he wasn’t. His only hope was to fight back.
So he stepped toward the desk and made as if to comply. Instead of opening the briefcase, he picked it up and heaved it at her. She dodged out of the way of the flying briefcase, and her first shot missed him completely. The second one didn’t. The bullet hit him square in the chest and flung him backward. It took forever for him to slide down the wall. He watched her, expecting her to fire again. She simply disappeared from view as he slid behind the desk.
“Gayle,” he called. “Don’t leave me like this. Please.”
She didn’t answer. The last thing Larry Stryker heard was the sound of the study door slamming shut behind her.
In twenty-six years of driving gravel trucks, Amos Brubaker had never had an accident-not even a fender bender. This, his last load of the day, was headed for another new development on the far side of Saddle Brook. The gravel pit was in the riverbed west of I-10 and southeast of Marana. According to the map, it should have been easier for him to get where he was going by backtracking as far as Rillito and going east there. Mileagewise, that would have been closer, but that was the sad truth about Tucson-area traffic. Amos was actually better off going miles out of his way, taking the freeway as far as north Red Rock, cutting over there to Highway 79, and approaching his drop-off point from the opposite direction.
Amos was doing that now, sailing along on the straightaway at slightly over the 65-miles-per-hour legal limit. He slowed slightly when he saw a green Suburban parked on the right-hand shoulder. These days DPS sometimes used stealth vehicles rather than clearly marked patrol cars to police Arizona’s highways. But the Suburban turned out to be just that, a Suburban with a single occupant-a man-sitting in it. His hazard lights weren’t on. He didn’t look like someone having car trouble or trying to flag someone down, so Amos put his foot back on the gas pedal and kept going.
Just then some dim-bulb babe in a Lexus went tearing past him doing at least eighty-five. She’d barely gone around the front fender of his Mack truck when she slammed on her brakes and turned off on a dirt road. Amos flipped her a bird as he went past. What the hell was the matter with drivers today-and not just women drivers, either? If she was planning on turning right, couldn’t she have stayed behind him for that last quarter of a mile? Did bimbos like her have even the vaguest idea of how much blacktop was needed to stop a loaded gravel truck? That was another problem with driving these days. Everybody was in too much of a hurry.
Amos was coming up on Oracle Junction. He reached the place where the straightaway ended. Beyond that
