CHAPTER 5
With both Ricky Farraday and Haley Marsh officially out of the running, Marissa Dvorak was the only remaining candidate for that year’s scholarship. Ali’s appointment with Marissa was scheduled for tomorrow. In the meantime, awash in a sense of failure, she headed back to Sedona. She couldn’t help but contrast the ecstatic, grateful way she had felt when Anna Lee Ashcroft had told Ali about her scholarship with the way Haley Marsh had received similar news.
Ali picked up the phone and dialed Leland’s number. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“Not well,” Ali told him. “Haley Marsh told me to take my scholarship and shove it, then she threw me out of the house.”
“She wasn’t interested?”
“You could say so. She was vehemently not interested. Not interested in going on to school and not interested in receiving a scholarship.”
“That wasn’t the impression I got from speaking with her grandmother,” Leland replied. “It sounded as though she was interested in Haley continuing on to university.”
“You talked to Nelda Harris about the scholarship?” Ali asked.
“Only in the most general terms,” Leland replied. “I led her to believe Haley was being considered for some kind of academic award, but I didn’t mention the scholarship per se.”
“Then grandmother and granddaughter need to get on the same page,” Ali told him. “At this rate, we’ll be lucky if we award an Askins Scholarship this year.”
“Don’t be discouraged,” Leland counseled. “There’s always Marissa Dvorak.”
“She’ll probably throw me out, too,” Ali said despairingly. “What’s happening on your end?”
“Bryan Forester came by and dropped off another load of wallboard,” Leland said. “Dropped it off and unloaded it, too. The crew had run out of materials and gone home.”
“He unloaded it by himself?” Ali asked. “That stuff is heavy.”
“By himself,” Leland confirmed. “And I can understand where he’s coming from. Mr. Forester strikes me as a man of action. Doing some hard physical labor probably did him a world of good. Maybe he’ll be tired enough to sleep. I doubt he did last night.”
Ali doubted that, too.
“Oh,” Leland added, “he wanted me to let you know that he heard from the cabinet company, verifying that the funds had been received and that your order was in process. They told him they have enough material in stock to do your entire order, and they’re getting started on it right away. They’re hoping to ship in two weeks, but that may be pushing it.”
“So much for Thanksgiving,” Ali said.
“What do you mean?” Leland asked.
Now that she had opened her mouth, Ali regretted it. Considering the fact that Bryan’s whole family was coming apart, it seemed incredibly selfish for her to have brought it up. Now that she had started, however, she charged on.
“I was hoping I’d be able to invite people over to the new place for Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “Even if everything wasn’t quite finished, I figured we’d be able to make do.”
“Does Mr. Forester know about your dinner plans?” Leland asked.
“Not really,” Ali admitted. “I never mentioned it to him. I didn’t want to add any more deadline pressure than there already was. Besides, it’s not that big a deal. I can always invite everyone over to my old house in Skyview. It’s the principle of the thing-and a matter of changing my mind. That’s all.”
“Finished or not, if you’d rather have your guests come here, we’ll have them here,” Leland Brooks declared. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a very capable cook. If I could cook food for the officers’ mess in Korea in the cold and the mud, I’m sure I can manage this. How many people are we talking about?”
“Not that many. My parents, Christopher and Athena, Dave and his three kids, one of my friends from California. Mom probably wouldn’t mind doing the turkey. She usually does, but she and Dad cook every single day of their lives. I wanted to give them a break.”
“Not to worry,” Leland said. “We’ll work it out. You come up with the guest list, and I’ll manage the rest. We’ll make it a memorable occasion. And speaking of occasions, the florist called. They said they tried to deliver your flowers to the gym, but the place was locked up tight. I’m having them deliver them to me here instead. I’ll drop them off a little later myself. That will give me an opportunity to give the lucky couple my own good wishes as well.”
Ali tried to remember if she had mentioned the engagement news to Leland. With everything else that had been happening throughout the day, it didn’t seem likely.
“So you know about that?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Leland Brooks replied. “Mr. Reynolds came to me a couple of weeks ago with some concerns about where to take the ring to have it redesigned and resized. I sent him to see the man who used to handle all of Miss Arabella’s work. I hope he was pleased with the results.”
“I’m sure he was,” Ali said. “And I’m sure Chris appreciated having the benefit of your advice.”
Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly left out. Yes, she knew that Chris and Athena had wanted to surprise her, but her folks had both known about Chris’s engagement well in advance of last night’s ring unveiling. Obviously, the same was true for Leland Brooks.
I always tried to raise him to be independent, Ali thought ruefully. I may have succeeded too well.
When Peter woke up, he needed to pee like a racehorse and was astonished to see that he had slept for the better part of ten hours. When he was younger, he had been able to manage on far less sleep than that. It was, he supposed, part of getting older rather than better. He fixed coffee and some toast. Then he uploaded the memory stick from his camera and, after deleting some of the less-well-thought-out shots, added the remainder to his DVD.
Scrolling through them, he congratulated himself on the fact that the crimes were all different. Morgan, still dressed, lay half in and out of the swing with her face battered and bloodied beyond recognition. He had arranged Candace so she lay on the ground with her various pieces put back together in all the wrong places-like a macabre human picture puzzle gone horribly wrong. He had heard that a novice FBI profiler had claimed this indicated a highly disorganized killer. Peter had laughed outright when he heard that; he was anything but disorganized. Melanie Tyler had been shot to death with her husband’s.38, while Debra Longworth had been stabbed to death before being the victim of a vicious postmortem sexual assault. And that was another part of being smart. Never do it the same way twice.
The pictures were fine, but Peter was feeling vaguely displeased with himself as he stowed the DVD in his safe. He spent some time examining the diamond he had removed from Morgan’s finger. It was large and showy, though Peter understood enough about diamonds to know that it wasn’t as flawless as it should have been. But then Morgan hadn’t been flawless, either. With a sigh, he returned the precious diamond-loaded key ring to its customary hiding place.
After one of his exploits, Peter usually spent the next day patting himself on the back. After all, who else was going to tell him “good job”? This time he couldn’t quite manage it. Yes, by trying to track him down, Morgan Forester had posed a threat to him. As a result, she had gotten exactly what she deserved. But had it been worth it? Usually, he came back from a kill with a euphoric sense of accomplishment. Today he was left with a lingering sense of forboding.
When Rita had fallen off the mountain, he had been right there with her. Naturally, he had been a person of interest in that case, but the cops had never charged him. With the others, he had managed to make sure his name had never surfaced in the resulting investigations, and all those cases had gone cold without ever being solved. This time he worried that he might have made a mistake. He couldn’t get that asshole from Hertz out of his mind.
One of the things Peter counted on in life was that worker bees would function that way-as miserable drones who collected their paltry paychecks without caring that much about doing their job. Peter’s big problem with the
