Dave came hurrying to meet them as Ali and B. limped into the substation’s conference room. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“A lot better than I could have been,” Ali said with a laugh.
“I’ve got a piece of good news for you,” he said. “Several pieces, as a matter of fact. I just heard from Detective Carson at Phoenix PD. Doris Ralston has been found alive.”
“Where?” Ali demanded.
“It seems she went AWOL in her own Jag. She was trying to drive to Palm Springs but ended up on I-8 instead of I-10. She ran out of gas. After walking away from her vehicle, she was given a ride into Gila Bend, where she spent the afternoon at a Burger King. One of the people there took pity on her and gave her a ride back home, where they discovered her house had been burned down.”
“Does Chip Ralston know?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “He does now, because I told him. Based on what we’ve learned tonight, I’ve notified Cap Horning that Dr. Ralston and Lynn Martinson need to be released immediately. Shortly after you left the crime scene, a woman showed up looking for Barry Handraker. She had photo ID, including a passport, that said she was Molly Handraker. Only, as you already know, Molly Handraker is dead.”
“He was two-timing Molly?” Ali asked.
“I’m sure she had no idea. Fortunately for us, the faux Molly has been in here talking her head off. She says she’s been living with Barry in Vegas the whole time Molly has been in Phoenix looking after her mother. It sounds like they’ve been systematically stripping everything of value out of the house and pawning what they could. They’ve also moved most of Doris Ralston’s considerable funds to a bank in Belize. That’s one of the few countries where you can still open an offshore bank account without showing up.”
“With Molly gone, Barry and Faux Molly go to Belize and live off the fat of the land while Chip rots in jail charged for a homicide that Barry and the real Molly Handraker committed.”
“I’m guessing Chip had no idea that they were systematically stripping everything of value out of his mother’s life.”
Dave nodded. “True,” he said. “I already asked him.”
“Why bother to drag me halfway across the state to kill me?” Ali asked.
“Doris was supposed to die in the fire,” Dave said. “That was the plan from the beginning. It was going to be a grease fire caused by her cooking something on the stove. I’m not sure how a fire could have gotten that far without an alarm going off. .”
“The alarms had all been disconnected,” Ali said. “Molly told me so. She said they’d had to shut them off due to too many false alarms.”
“So the first fly in the ointment was Doris taking off on her own. The second one was you showing up and asking questions about some missing necklace.”
Ali nodded. “The same necklace that got Gemma killed.”
“Barry couldn’t afford to leave you behind,” Dave explained. “He decided to bring you along. Faux Molly said that Barry told her their car, Doris’s S550, had broken down and that if she’d come pick him up, he’d fix it so it looked like you and the real Molly got into a gun fight and shot each other. Fortunately for all of us, that didn’t happen, either.”
Ali thought about what she’d been told. “If they’ve been stripping out the valuables and assets, that means they’ve been working this gig for a long time. Months. Probably since Doris’s husband died.”
“Most likely since before James Ralston died,” Dave corrected grimly. “Faux Molly tells us that the elder Dr. Ralston was given a bit of a chemical boost on his way out. Barry is a former pharmacist. He’d know how to pull something like that off without arousing suspicion, and since James Ralston was in a hospital and under a doctor’s care, they could be relatively certain no postmortem would be done, especially in view of the fact that a proper DNR was posted in James Ralston’s room.”
“Contemptible people,” Ali muttered. “Truly contemptible.”
“Yes,” Dave agreed. “Scary people. Greedy people, and picking on someone who’s mentally deficient like that. .” He shook his head.
“She may not be,” Ali said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think they’ve been dosing her with low levels of the same drug they gave me and most likely Gemma Ralston as well.”
“If they’ve been dosing her all along, that’s probably one reason why Molly was so adamant about keeping Chip away from their mother.”
Ali nodded. “He might have recognized that her confusion was something other than what they were pretending it was, namely Alzheimer’s.”
“I’ll let him know,” Dave said. “Tell him that he should probably have his mother checked out.”
“Earlier, you said you had several pieces of good news,” Ali pointed out. “What else?”
“Oh, that kid you were worried about-the one with the strongbox full of gambling chips.”
“A. J. Sanders? What about him?”
“He’s in the clear. A woman walked into the North Las Vegas Police Department this afternoon and turned herself in. Said she was the one who killed James Sanders.”
“What woman?”
“Abigail Mattson.”
“The executive director of the Mission?”
“That’s the one. She claimed that she and James Sanders had a thing going, and he knew what a struggle she was having keeping the place afloat. Recently, when he came into a bunch of money, he gave her a chunk of it to help out. It pissed her off that, instead of using his windfall to grubstake her pet project, he decided to give the lion’s share of it to his kid.
“That was when the whole thing went deadly. Abigail admitted to putting a GPS device-an illegal one-on his car, in hopes of grabbing the money before he dropped it off. Fortunately for Sanders’s son, James beat her to the punch. She also said she planted the murder weapon at A.J.’s house to implicate him, but when one of the cops in Las Vegas started asking too many questions, she crumbled. A.J. said Gemma Ralston mentioned someone named Dennis just before she died. We’re trying to sort out if he’s an associate of Barry and Molly’s.”
“I’ll bet he isn’t,” Ali said. “I’ll bet he doesn’t exist. Gemma was drunk out of her head the night she died. Between the booze and whatever drug they gave her, I’ll bet playing tennis with Molly is the last thing she remembered. Tennis/Dennis.”
“Makes sense,” Dave said. “But for the time being, we’ll keep looking for him, just in case.”
Ali leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. The doctor had given her something for the pain, and she was starting to feel drowsy. “You’re right,” Ali said at last. “That’s all good news.”
“It’s good for me, too.” Dave grinned. “The county attorney has been going after Sheriff Maxwell in a big way. One of his metrics is our closure rate, which has taken a big step up today. I think you could say the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department is currently batting a thousand.”
“Does A.J. get to keep the money?”
“As far as I can tell. There’s one more thing you probably haven’t heard. I finally got James Sanders’s autopsy results today. The official one. Two weeks ago he got a cancer diagnosis-pancreatic, stage four. Scott Ballentine had stayed in touch with him. Said he owed James a huge debt for taking the fall on that counterfeiting rap years ago. Ballentine said he had told James over the years that he had more money than sense, and if there was ever anything he could do for him, to let him know.”
“Let me guess,” Ali said. “He took him up on it exactly twice-once a year ago, so he could get A.J. a car for his sixteenth birthday, and again last week, so the kid could have money to go to school.”
“You’re pretty smart for a girl,” Dave said. They were both laughing when the door to the interview room swung open. A plainclothes cop came out, escorting a lush blonde who looked to be fifteen years younger than the real Molly Handraker.
“We’ve got a name on this one now,” the cop said, speaking mostly to Dave. “Candace Kestral. We’ve got a car outside that’s going to transport her to the jail in Kingman. If you have questions for Ms. Kestral, that’s where she’ll be. We’ve been in touch with Las Vegas PD. Turns out that earlier this evening, someone contacted an outfit called Minnesota’s Most Wanted with an anonymous tip, letting them know that Barry Handraker, one of their top fugitives, was living it up in a unit at Turnberry Towers. It turns out Ms. Kestral lives there, too. Las Vegas PD was in the process of obtaining a search warrant when all hell broke loose over here. Turns out Handraker has been on the lam for months, but they got the tip and we got Handraker at almost the same time. Odd how it all came together, isn’t it?”
Dave Holman glanced in B.’s direction and then turned back to the other detective. “It’s odd, all right,” he agreed.
The Mohave County detective examined Ali, taking in her torn and bloodied clothing as well as the bandages on her feet. “Today’s kidnapping victim, I assume?” he asked.
“One and the same,” Dave said. “Her name’s Alison Reynolds.”
“Very good,” the detective said to Ali. “Just let me get this one sent off to the slammer, Ms. Reynolds. I’ll be right back to take statements-Mr. Brooks’s statement first and then yours. Do you need anything while you’re waiting? Something to eat or drink? It’s not too late to order pizza.”
Until he said that, Ali hadn’t thought about being either hungry or thirsty, but she realized she was famished. “Pizza sounds good.”
“What kind?” the detective asked.
Now it was B.’s turn to interject. “When it comes to pizza and the lady, there’s only one kind, and that’s pepperoni.”
There was a considerable delay before the detective reappeared. While he was out of the room and they waited for the pizza delivery, Ali went over to the couch, where Leland Brooks was sitting apart from the others.
“While we were in the ER, B. told me what you did,” she said. “That he had asked you to bring him the phone, but you insisted on coming along. To hear him tell it, you practically hijacked the helicopter to be allowed on board.”
“I wasn’t about to be left out of all the excitement,” Leland said. “When we saw the situation on the ground, I told Mr. Simpson that it made sense for me to be the one dropped off to make contact with the enemy. After all, I’ve had some actual training in hand-to-hand combat. I’m afraid Mr. Simpson’s experience is more of the video-game variety, which is good as far as it goes, but when it comes time for cracking heads, I say go for someone who understands how to get the job done.”
Pizza and sodas came and disappeared. It was almost two o’clock in the morning before Ali finished giving her statement. B. had asked the helicopter to hang around long enough to give Leland Brooks and Dave Holman a lift back to Sedona. Only after they flew away did Ali and B. head for the barn.
The room in the Lake Mohave Resort was far humbler than the one in the suite in the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix, but the king-size bed was spacious, the sheets were clean, and the nonsmoking room smelled fresh. Even had the room not been comfortable, it was unlikely Ali Reynolds would have noticed.
She was far too intent on cuddling up to the warmth of B. Simpson’s long bare back and falling fast asleep.