her about the search warrant, and she probably still was. He’d talk to her later and try to smooth her ruffled feathers. She had offered to show him files purported to be from Bryan Forester’s computer. And even though he had turned her down, he should probably attempt to revisit that decision. In the meantime, he had another problem.
Dave now suspected that Bryan Forester had at least one accomplice in the plot to murder his wife. Dave was also thinking that one of those accomplices could have been Matthew Morrison. Sure, Bobby Salazar had sworn that Morrison hadn’t been behind the wheel of the car turned back in on Monday, but if Matthew wasn’t involved in the Forester homicide, why had he killed himself? Jenny Morrison had taken the position that her husband’s death was accidental. Dave’s homicide-detective gut told him it was definitely deliberate.
This wasn’t just idle speculation. Dave sensed there was some kind of connection between Matthew Morrison’s dead computer and Bryan Forester’s overwritten files. Someone had made a concerted effort to obliterate the information on three different computers. That meant the data from one of those held an important clue, a key to everything that had happened. All Dave Holman had to do was find it.
Neither Ali nor the intruder said a word while the phone continued to ring. It was maddening for Ali to know there was someone on the other end of the line. If she answered, there might be enough time for a desperate scream for help. But she knew better. By the time she flipped the phone open, she would be dead. If help came at all, it would come too late.
After ringing five times, the phone subsided into silence. The man was still standing over her, holding the gun.
“Who helped you?” he demanded again. “And where the hell are your real computers?”
Ali didn’t answer. A trickle of coppery-tasting blood ran across her tonsils. As she fought off her gag reflex, her phone jangled again. This time she knew it was announcing a voice mail-a message she didn’t know if she’d ever have a chance to hear, much less return.
“Get up,” he ordered.
Ali didn’t move. She couldn’t. After a moment he grabbed her sweatshirt again. Holding it so tightly against her throat that she could barely breathe, he jerked her to her feet and propelled her across the room and into her bedroom. As she stumbled into the room, she caught a glimpse of poor Sam dodging for cover under the bed. That was also when Ali caught sight of Leland Brooks. Duct tape pinned his arms to his body and bound his legs together. From the knees up, he appeared to be soaking wet, and so was the carpeted floor all around him. Trussed, helpless, and absolutely unmoving, he lay on the floor between the bed and the dresser. As far as Ali could tell, he wasn’t breathing. Was Leland unconscious, or was he already dead?
She struggled and twisted, trying to escape her attacker’s ironfisted grasp. “What have you done to him?” she demanded. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet, but he will be soon if you don’t give me what I want.”
She knew from the way the man said it that he wasn’t making idle threats. She knew instinctively that he was a killer who would kill again. He would murder Ali and Leland Brooks in cold blood without a moment’s hesitation.
“What do you want?” Her lips were almost swollen shut. She could barely speak.
“I already told you,” he said. “You didn’t just destroy my files, you stole them. How else would you know they were encrypted? I want them back, all of them.”
Ali said nothing.
“Even more than my files,” he added, “I want the bastard who did this.”
And there it was: the automatic and arrogant assumption that whoever had managed to do this to him-to outwit him-had to be a man. In his distorted view of the universe, only another male would be smart enough to catch him.
By then he had muscled Ali through her bedroom and into the bathroom beyond it. Still holding her sweatshirt bunched at the front of her neck, he reached down long enough to put the gun down on the side of the tub. The bathroom floor was slick with water. The room reeked of vomit, and the bathtub was full almost to overflowing with vomit-spattered water.
Ali knew then what was coming. “That’s what you did to Leland Brooks?” she gasped. “You forced him underwater?”
The man nodded grimly. Letting go of her shirt, he twisted her around so her back was to him. “Believe me, if he’d known anything, by the time it was over, he would have told me. The same way you will.”
“No,” she said, trying to desperately to pull away from him. “You can’t do this. Please.”
“Of course I can do this,” he returned calmly. “I can do anything I want. Surely you’ve heard of waterboarding. Everyone has these days. If it’s good enough for Islamic terrorists, it’s good enough for you, and it’s pretty much foolproof. When we’re done, it’ll work the same way for me that it does for the CIA. In order to keep from drowning, you’ll tell me everything I want to know.”
“You’ll never get away with it,” Ali said. “They’ll find you. They’ll put you away.”
“No, they won’t, my dear. I’ll be long gone before anyone ever finds you or your friend out there. Long gone.”
Staring down at the bathtub full of water, Ali Reynolds knew one thing that her captor couldn’t possibly know: She was petrified of water; terrified of drowning. As a teenager, she had nearly drowned on an outing to Oak Creek’s Slide Rock. She had knocked herself out on a rock and gone under. She had been unconscious when one of her friends pulled her from the water and pumped the water out of her chest. She had awakened coughing and choking.
All her adult life, she had avoided swimming pools and hot tubs, and wading in the ocean was totally off limits. She simply couldn’t bear the idea of being at the mercy of those unpredictable waves. She had enrolled Chris in swimming classes early because she had wanted him to be water-safe. She had wanted him to be able to save himself rather than looking to her for help. Only in the last few years, in the safety of this very room, had she forced herself to overcome that fear by facing it-by trying the occasional bubble bath.
But now the tub had turned into Ali’s worst horror. Staring down at it, she knew what would happen. Once he forced her head underwater long enough for the water to gush into her lungs, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know when she came back up. She would do anything to keep it from happening again-to keep him from doing to her what he had already done to Leland Brooks.
She knew that Leland Brooks’s fate should have been enough to make her capitulate right then. Maybe that was what her captor had in mind-that simple dread would make her weaker. To her astonishment, it had exactly the opposite effect. A pulse of absolute abhorrence shot through her, filling her body with a physical strength she didn’t know she had.
Ali fought him then, fought him tooth and nail, biting and scratching in a desperate attempt to maim him, to knee him in the groin or gouge out his eyes. He outweighed her, though. He was taller and far stronger. She knew going in that no matter how hard she fought, eventually, she would lose. That was inevitable.
Dave Holman’s phone rang again as he approached the exit at Cordes Junction. “Is this Detective Holman?”
“Yes. Who is this, and how did you get my number?”
“My name is Simpson-B. Simpson. I run an Internet security firm called High Noon. Ali Reynolds is one of my clients, and I have access to her files. I found your numbers listed in her contact list. Have you heard from her?”
“From Ali? Not in the last little while,” Dave replied. “I missed a couple of calls from her earlier this morning, but when I tried calling back, she didn’t answer. Why? What’s up? Is something wrong?”
B. paused before he answered. “I know the two of you have a lot of history,” he said tentatively. “And this would probably be better coming from her, but…”
