Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (22 page)

“That is not my point.”

“How’s Ali? Has she been released into her uncle’s custody yet?”

A sigh. “There appears to be a problem.”

“What?” Damned traffic.

“I said, there appears to be a problem.”

Despite the new hands-free apparatus in my Jeep, Zellar’s statement alarmed me enough that I nearly swerved out of my lane and into the ’72 Cadillac convertible next to me. My inattention was rewarded by frantic honking.

“Don’t tell me Ali decided not to withdraw her confession!” I said, steering the Jeep back into its own lane. As the Cadillac sped away, its driver, a silver-haired granny, flipped me the bird.

“Ali did exactly what she promised she would do and signed the appropriate papers to that effect. But we are faced with one more obstacle.”

“Which is?”

“She will not disclose what she was doing the day of the, ah, incident.”

Incident
. An interesting word to describe charnel-house slaughter. “Why not?”

“I certainly wish I knew, Ms. Jones. As it stands now, our client has little chance of being released on bond. Or at least, not until we can prove she was elsewhere during the, ah, incident, and thus can satisfy the judge that she poses no threat to society. We need to remember that three people are dead, one of them a child, and Ali’s retracted confession alone does not allay the seriousness of those charges.”

No mention of Kyle there, not that I should have expected it, coming from the by-the-book Zellar, but still. Didn’t he care about the boy? Not that I didn’t already know the answer. I did, though, remind him of one thing. “The funeral is Tuesday. Were you able to get the go-ahead for her to attend?”

“With some difficulty I did, yes. Ali will be allowed to attend the memorial and the funeral both, albeit heavily guarded. And she’ll be in shackles, which I find quite abhorrent.”

“What?” A semi had taken up position on my left, and hung there belching fumes and noise.

Zellar raised his voice to a shout. “I said, she’ll be there! In shackles! Guarded!”

The image of Ali in chains, standing over her family’s graves, was so distressing that I would have wrung my hands, but I wasn’t certain that the driver of the rig next to me even saw my Jeep. Attention was required.

Then Zellar surprised me. Still shouting, he said, “Perhaps you, being a woman and all, can talk some sense into the child’s head. I’ve begun to suspect the reason she will not tell me where she was during the, ah, incident, is because she might have been involved in something that had an, ah, sexual component. With her so-called partner in crime.”

Could this case get any messier? But it was the twenty-first century, and girls will be girls. I checked my rearview mirror. No tailgaters, and the ramp leading to Loop 202 lay less than a quarter mile ahead. I put on my retrofitted turn signal.

“I’m headed for juvie now!” I screamed to Zellar. “As soon as I find out what’s going on, I’ll let you know. “

He screamed back. “Be sure and do that, Ms. Jones. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll see you at the funeral. Wear black. Not that you ever wear anything else.”

He ended the call as the Jeep cruised up the exit ramp.

***

“On Monday, July 8, where were you between noon and three p.m., when you showed up at the vet’s office with Misty?” I asked Ali.

We were in a new interview room, this one, for some indecipherable reason, painted such a bright chartreuse I was tempted to put on my sunglasses.

Ali scowled, as usual. “None of your business.”

“Didn’t your attorney explain that merely retracting your confession isn’t enough, that you need to provide an alibi, too?”

“I don’t have to talk to you.” Arms crossed, chin thrust forward.

“What’d you have for lunch today? Bile?”

“Bitch.”

God, I loved this kid. “Back at ya.”

My chipper tone must have disconcerted her, because her lower lip began to wobble. “You…you…”

“Me, what?”

“You promised you’d get us out of here, me and Kyle!”

“I said that if you retracted your confession, your attorney could start the necessary work to get you out. But when I talked to him a little while ago, he said you wouldn’t tell him where you and Kyle were when—sorry, but I have to be blunt here—when your family was murdered, so there’s nothing he can do unless you change your mind and open up. You need an alibi, Ali. Kyle’s miserable, by the way. He doesn’t have a high-powered attorney like yours, or a well-off uncle, either. All he has is you, so since you don’t want to do what it takes to help him…” Guilt card duly played, I let my sentence trail off.

She looked down at the floor. Nothing there but a drain and our shadows, cast by yellowish overhead lighting. “I can’t.”

“Any day now, you realize, some banger or other punk might decide to make an example of Kyle. He’s not locked up with a bunch of primped and powdered Valley girls.”

“Neither am I,” she muttered.

“Oh, kiddo, it’s not the same.”

I began counting through the ensuing silence, deciding that when I reached one hundred, I would get up and leave.

On the eighty-four count, she gave in. “Kyle and I, we weren’t supposed to be there.”

“Where?”

“At the party house.”

“What house is that?”

Still addressing the floor drain, she said, “You know, the house where we, you know, were. We, we were kinda breaking the law, which is why I didn’t want to say. We were, like, trespassing, and that could get us in big trouble.”

Trust a fourteen-year-old to think that trespassing was worse than a triple murder charge. But the teenage years are the time of magical thinking, aren’t they? Such as: I’m going to marry Justin Bieber; all I have to do is meet him. Or: If I admit we trespassed, me and my boyfriend will be locked up forever and ever, so I’d better keep my mouth shut.

I leaned forward. “Was anyone else there, Ali? Anyone who could testify they saw you both during the time of the murder?”

She still wouldn’t look at me, just shook her head. “We were there all day, well, I’d left my house real, real early, like nine or something to meet him, but there was nobody else around, just me and Kyle.” She finally raised her head, and stared me straight in the eye. “I swear.”

Ordinarily I don’t trust people who swear to something while looking you straight in the eye, but for Ali I made an exception. “Where is this house?”

“Maybe about a mile from mine, something like that, anyway. Takes around thirty minutes to walk there. There’s signs on the door saying the bank owns it, and the windows are, like, boarded up. All the kids use it. There’s a couple of sleeping bags, a camp stove, lots of neat stuff.”

Graffiti on the walls, too, I bet. “Give me the address.”

I finally got to see her eyes again. “I don’t know it. Thing’s just some old, boarded-up place. The owners probably lost their jobs and couldn’t keep it. Lots of that going around.”

“Old, you say?”

“Yeah.”

In Scottsdale, the term “old” is relative. The house could have been anywhere from ten to forty years old, but since it was located near Ali’s, I could estimate its age. The original Arabian horse farms had disappeared twenty years earlier, when subdivisions gobbled up the north end of the Valley. This meant the house could be no more than twenty years old, a spring chicken by most estimates in the U.S.

“You say the house is boarded up?”

“Yeah. Front and back.”

“Is it east or west of your own place?”

She raised her hand to her mouth and chewed on a knuckle. It was all I could do not to move her hand away. “Toward the rez.”

East, then. “Color?”

Some teenage eye-rolling. “Kind of a beigey-pink.”

I made a mental note to find the house and give the address to Zellar. “What were you and Kyle doing in that house?”

A flush, followed by a silence that proved Zellar’s dirty mind was right on.

“Okay, Ali, let’s see if I can guess. You and Kyle were having sex.”

The flush deepened. “Not totally. He, uh, when he got the condom on, I’d only brought one, and it split and it was like, so we, well, you know.”

“So you did something else.”

“Yeah.” She was looking at the drain again, her long hair parted to uncover one stoplight-red ear.

“Ali, where’d you get the condom? Did you shoplift it?”

“I don’t shoplift!” The genuine outrage in her voice convinced me she was telling the truth.

“Then where’d it come from? You told me you were the one who brought it to your little love tryst, not Kyle.”

Ali’s earlier embarrassment returned, this time tinged with sadness. “You won’t tell on me?”

“I promise from the heart.”

A long sigh. “I swiped it from my mother’s chest of drawers, where she keeps her sweaters. She has lots of them, all cashmere, really beautiful. Anyway, I knew she wouldn’t miss just one. Condom, I mean, not sweater. She’d miss a cashmere sweater big-time.”

A warning flag went up, but I let it go. For now, anyway. “One more thing. Give me the name of your mother’s closest friend, someone she might confide in.” It was probably Margie Newberry, but I wanted to make sure before I accused Geronimo’s great-great-granddaughter of holding out on me.

“Close? You mean like Kyle and me?”

“Exactly. Like you and Kyle.”

She thought for a moment, then smiled for the first time during the interview. “Margie.”

“Your next-door neighbor.”

“Yeah. She and Mom were, like, besties.”

“Good. I’ll be talking to her later today. Um, in the meantime, Ali, when exactly did you get to the party house and how long did you stay there?”

Relieved that I wasn’t going to cross-examine her about the ways and means of safe sex, she answered without thinking. “Like I said, I left my house around nine that morning. I told my mom I’d be back for lunch, but what with Kyle and everything, uh, you know, I forgot.”

And a good thing, too, otherwise there would have been four bodies in the Camerons’ living room. I didn’t mention that, though. She had enough to deal with.

“So you were at this party house from around nine-thirty to around two or two-thirty? That’s a long time to play around.”

“We ate some Fritos. And drank some Mountain Dew. And I slept for a while.”

Uh oh. “How long did you sleep?”

Ali shrugged, unaware of what she’d let slip. “An hour. Maybe two. Dunno.”

“What was Kyle doing while you were sleeping? Did he go somewhere?”

Her head snapped up. “He was right there! With me! He didn’t go anywhere! Not anywhere!”

Methought the lady doth protest too much. “Stop lying, Ali.”

“I…I…” She swallowed. “You won’t understand.”

“Try me.”

When her shoulders slumped I knew I was about to get the truth. She didn’t disappoint.

“We’d planned the whole day so we could be, like, together, and Kyle got to the house real early, even before, like, me, and we were, um, kinda fooling around for a…uh, for a long while, like, at least a couple of hours, maybe more, and then later we heard this dog whining, and we shouldn’t have, been able to hear a dog, I mean, because nobody around there had one, so Kyle went out to look.”

She paused and took a breath. “He was gone for a couple minutes, then he came back to the window and he was holding this little scruffy thing. He’d found it eating garbage in the backyard, and said he recognized it from all the flyers tacked up around the neighborhood saying that it got scared and ran away because of the Fourth of July fireworks. Now it was all ragged and limping bad, and like, scared-looking.” She paused for another breath. “Do you know how many dogs run off because of fireworks? It’s terrible, people should keep them, like, inside. Anyway, Kyle said he was going to return the dog to its owner because she sounded real nice on the flyer, and if it turned out not to be hers after all, he’d, like, take it to his house, ’cause Fiona, she’s his foster mom, she lets him do stuff like that.”

“What did Kyle do then?”

She flushed again. “I couldn’t talk him out of leaving, so he did. He stayed gone for a while.”

“What time did he get back?”

“Twelve-thirty? One? One-thirty?” She shrugged. “I know it was way after the time I usually had lunch, because I remember my stomach was growling and we’d run out of Fritos, so I was getting kinda starved, but I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t exactly checking my watch, you know?”

I mentally reviewed the case notes. According to the autopsy, the Camerons had been interrupted while eating a lunch of Chinese takeout, then tied up and tortured for at least an hour, possibly two. If someone other than Ali had seen Kyle during that time, it could provide an alibi. “When Kyle he got back, did he say he’d successfully returned the dog?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah! He wouldn’t quit ’til he did. It had on tags, and one of them had the woman’s phone number on it, so he, like, called the woman on his cell, and it turned out that she lived about a mile away, so because it was all limping and stuff, he had to carry it there. He said the owner was crying and kept trying to give him money, but he wouldn’t take it.” Another pause for breath. “Kyle never takes money for rescues.”

“Did he mention the owner’s name?”

“Alice something, I think. She was old, he said.”

Remembering Ali’s usual interpretation of the word “old,” I asked, “Old like me? Or old like Minerva McGonagall, in the Harry Potter movies?’

A look of surprise. “You saw the movies?”

“The first one.” I didn’t tell her I’d hated it. “Answer, please. Old like…?”

“Old like Minerva McGonagall. Like, ancient.”

“Kyle didn’t happen to tell you Ancient Alice’s address, did he?”

“I didn’t ask.”

No, of course you didn’t. You had other things on your mind, such as having another go-round with the love of your so-far life. “Maybe Kyle remembers.”

Hope flashed in her eyes. “Yes! He’s good with numbers.”

Street names, too, I hoped back. If the dog owner could provide Kyle with an alibi, there was a chance his attorney could get him bonded out. I was about to end the interview and rush off to make the necessary calls when I thought of something else. “So let’s get this straight. After Kyle returned the dog, he came back to the party house sometime around one o’clock and you were together for the rest of the day until you showed up at the scene of…ah, at your house, right?”