J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (53 page)

Dear Ali,

You’ll be glad to know that I’m finally getting my head screwed on straight, and yes, I am in treatment. Finally. I’m working on a book about Richard Lowensdale and all the women’s lives he has adversely impacted through his cyberstalking.

I’m having trouble locating information on one of the women on his list, Ermina Vlasic Cunningham Blaylock, who is either Richard’s former employer or the wife of his former employer. I’m guessing the company was in her name in order to latch on to the women-owned business gravy train in government contracts.

I started to call the company you had do the background check on Richard last summer. Then I decided that they might take the request more seriously if it came from you instead of from me. If there’s any charge, you’ll be relieved to know that I’m now in a position to pay for it myself even if I haven’t earned back the right to have my own credit card.

I’m attaching everything I know about Ermina below. Thanks in advance for your help. I expect I’ll be talking to her today and tomorrow, so the sooner I can have the info the better.

Brenda R.

After pressing send, Brenda closed the laptop and put it away. Then she hurried downstairs. Her mother’s worsening vision problems made leaving Camilla a note impossible.

I’ll call her later
, Brenda thought.

She stepped out on the front porch just as an older-model silver Lincoln Town Car pulled to a stop in front of the house. As Brenda hurried forward, the passenger window rolled down. A well-dressed woman was at the wheel.

“Brenda?” she asked.

“Yes,” Brenda answered.

“I’m Ermina,” the woman said. “Get in.”

Ermina Blaylock was lovely. Her auburn hair glowed in the cold winter sunlight that came in through the sunroof. She had a flawless complexion and fine features.

“Thank you for picking me up, Ermina,” Brenda said. “I don’t have a car right now, and that makes getting around tough.”

“No problem,” the woman said. “But call me Mina. Everybody does.”

W
aiting to see if Mina would show that Friday, Richard had a tough time concentrating. He was distracted enough that he didn’t dare do any of his usual Internet correspondence. It was important to keep all his stories straight, and he didn’t want to end up saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

He had delivered his completed programming fix to Mina the week before. He knew the test flight had been scheduled for Wednesday. He and Mina were still operating under his eyeball-to-eyeball protocol, so she didn’t send him an e-mail. She didn’t call.

She had told him that if the test flight was successful, she would bring him his bonus on Friday, so Richard waited on tenterhooks. Earlier in the morning he had briefly considered cleaning house in advance of her visit, but he had eventually decided against that. He was sitting at his desk watching for her through the living room window when she arrived, apparently on foot. She pushed open the lopsided gate and walked up the weed-littered sidewalk.

When Richard had first returned to Grass Valley, his neighbors had been incredibly curious about him. He wasn’t a very personable guy, and he’d been firm in rejecting their overtures of friendship. Over time they had adjusted to the fact that he was reclusive. If they wondered about why he ordered anything and everything online, they didn’t discuss any of that with him.

Because the neighbors were used to a steady stream of delivery folks who left their vehicles on the street below and trooped up and down the sidewalk leading to Richard’s house, he and Mina had hit upon her masquerading as a delivery person whenever she came to see him.

Today, as usual, Mina arrived on his doorstep using a faux UPS driver uniform with brown khaki trousers and a brown jacket. And as she had done on previous occasions, she carried a stack of boxes to lend credence to the disguise.

Richard didn’t want to appear overeager. Nonetheless, he hurried to the door to meet her. “It’s about time you got here,” he said. “How did it go?”

“How do you think it went?” Mina asked with a smile as she set down her boxes. “I’m here bearing gifts, aren’t I?”

“Great.” Richard could barely contain his relief. “Come on in.”

He led the way into the living room. He was halfway back to his desk when a powerful blow hit him squarely on the back of the head. Down he went.

By the time Richard struggled back to woozy consciousness, she had secured him to one of the dining room chairs with packing tape—probably his own packing tape from the dining room—and there was tape over his mouth as well. He was in a sitting position, but the chair had tipped over onto its side.

The room was surprisingly dark, as though night had fallen while he was unconscious. Mina was seated at the desk in front of his computer, her face eerily aglow in the lamplight. She was
dressed in clothing that was different than he remembered. The brown uniform was gone. Her shoes were covered with something that looked like surgical booties; she wore gloves.

Struggling to loosen the bonds, Richard tried to speak. He meant to say, “What are you doing?” but his words came out in an incomprehensible mumble.

“Quiet,” she ordered. “Be still!”

She left the computer and came back over to where he lay on his side on the floor. Picking up the hammer, she waved it in front of his face. “Do not make a sound,” she said.

Richard understood that the hammer was a very real threat. He fell silent.

“Where’s the money I gave you?” Mina said. “I want it. I also want my thumb drive.”

Richard tried to make sense of this. She was robbing him of the money she had paid him? Worried about the possibility of some drug-crazed addict breaking into his house, Richard had hidden the money, and he had hidden it well, but it had never occurred to him that Mina might be the one trying to take it away.

But it was
his
money. He had worked for it. She owed him for getting her damned UAVs back in the air, and he
would not
give her back that money, not in a thousand years. The same thing with the thumb drive. He looked at her and shook his head.

That seemed to throw Mina into a fit of rage. She ran back to the dining room and cleared his mother’s curio shelves of Richard’s entire model airplane collection, knocking them to the floor, where she stepped on them and ground them to pieces.

“Tell me,” she said.

With his mouth taped shut, he couldn’t have told her if he had wanted. But it was a grudge match now. He wouldn’t tell her no matter what. He shook his head. Emphatically.

She disappeared from view for a time. When she returned,
she was carrying his mother’s old kitchen shears. At first he thought she was going to cut through the tape and free him. Instead, she walked behind him. The pain when it came was astonishing. Even with the tape over his mouth, he howled in agony.

When he could breathe again, tears were streaming down his face. She came around and dangled the remains of one of his fingers in his face.

“Tell me,” she said.

He knew then that he was going to die, and the only satisfaction he could have was to deny this woman what she wanted. Twice more she went behind him. Twice more Richard’s world exploded in absolute agony. He passed out then. When he came to sometime later, he was aware of a peculiar racket, and the air around him was filled with the stale odor he always connected with his mother’s old vacuum cleaner.

Why is that running now?

Then she appeared again, bringing with her another of the dining room chairs. She set the chair close to his head and then sat on it.

“Tell me,” she said again.

“No,” he managed. Even with the tape over his mouth, it sounded like what he meant to say,
“N-O!”

Suddenly, out of nowhere a plastic bag appeared. With a single deft movement, she pulled the cloudy plastic down over his head.

“Tell me and I’ll let you live.”

Richard was an experienced liar. So was Mina Blaylock. He knew that, no matter what, she going to kill him anyway. So since it would make no difference, Richard would not give her his money. No matter what.

He heard her tear loose a swath of transparent packing tape. He felt it tighten around his neck. For a few moments—a minute
or so—there was enough air to breathe inside the bag. As the plastic went in and out with each breath, he could see her sitting there, watching and waiting, hoping he would give in.

He didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see her. Soon he felt himself struggling for breath as the oxygen inside the bag became depleted.

“Tell me,” he heard her say from very far away.

He shook his head once more, and had a fleeting moment of victory. He knew he was dying, but he also knew he had won and Mina Blaylock had lost.

A
li’s phone rang as she pulled out of the Sugarloaf parking lot. “Hey, Ali,” her very pregnant daughter-in-law said. “Are you busy?”

Knowing a little of Athena’s background, Ali did her best to tread lightly in the mother-in-law department. There was enough bad blood between Athena and her own parents that Athena’s folks hadn’t been invited to Chris and Athena’s wedding. The only family member who had broken ranks with everyone else and attended the wedding was Athena’s paternal grandmother, Betsy Peterson.

The rift with Chris’s in-laws was something Ali couldn’t understand. As far as she could see, Athena was a remarkable young woman. She had served in the Iraq War with the Minnesota National Guard and had returned home as a wounded warrior. She was a double amputee, minus her right arm from above the elbow and her right leg from below the knee. When her first husband divorced her—while she was still recovering from her injuries in Walter Reed—Athena’s parents for some unaccountable
reason stuck with their former son-in-law and his new wife. The previous summer Chris and Athena had made the trek to Minnesota in hopes of normalizing relations, but nothing had changed. The ex-son-in-law was still more acceptable to Athena’s parents than their own daughter.

Chris and Athena had met while they were both working at Sedona High School, where Chris taught American history and welding technology and Athena taught math. Athena was fiercely independent, and Ali admired both her spirit and her spunk. Athena had taught herself to do most things, including playing basketball, with her left hand, although she now had a realistic-looking prosthesis in place of her right arm. Getting pregnant, and especially getting pregnant with twins, had set her back some in the self-confidence department. And having two babies this early in their marriage wasn’t something that had been in Chris and Athena’s game plan either.

As far as Ali was concerned, the appearance of twins was no surprise. After all, Chris’s grandmother was a twin, so the tendency was right there in his DNA. Athena’s ob-gyn, Dr. Dixon, had allayed many of Athena’s worries by telling her that people who can
get
pregnant usually can
be
pregnant. She had also said that studies with pregnant women who had been born missing whole or parts of limbs due to the drug thalidomide had been able to carry babies successfully. Their only major difficulty had been maintaining balance late in their term.

A counselor from the VA had put Athena in touch with another young woman who was also an amputee and a new mother—although she was only a single amputee with a single baby. It helped Athena to know that she wasn’t alone, that there was someone else out there with similar problems and dilemmas.

“Just on my way home from the Sugarloaf. Why, is there something you need?”

Athena sighed. She sounded upset. “Yes. I could really use your help. I’d appreciate it if you could come by for a little while.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll be right there.”

“Just let yourself in when you get here,” Athena said. “I’m supposed to be on full bed rest.”

Ali glanced at her watch. At 2:45 Chris was probably still at school. Then instead of heading home, she drove up to her old place on Andante Drive, where Chris and Athena now lived. Ali had inherited the place from her aunt Evie, her mother’s twin, and had sold it to Chris and Athena when she moved on to Manzanita Hills Drive.

The house was actually a “manufactured home,” a nonmobile mobile that had been permanently attached to a set of footings and a concrete slab built into the steep hillside, an unusual set of construction circumstances that allowed for an actual basement, which Chris used as a studio for his metal artwork.

As soon as Ali opened the front door, she caught a whiff of fresh paint. With the twins, Colin and Colleen, due within the next three weeks, Ali knew that Chris had been intent on pulling the nursery together. Athena was lying on the living room couch with one of Edie Larson’s colorful quilts pulled up over her baby mound.

“How’s it going?” Ali asked, closing the door behind her.

“After I took that little tumble last week, Chris made me promise that I’d stay put while he was gone.”

Some of Athena’s fellow teachers had thrown a shower on Athena’s behalf. On the way back to the house, loaded down with gifts and determined to carry them herself, Athena had tripped and fallen. She had scraped both knees and her one elbow but had suffered no major damage. Chris, however, had been beyond upset.

“So what’s going on?” Ali asked. “Are you okay?”

“The twins obviously aren’t on the same schedule,” Athena said with a wan smile. “When one of them is asleep, the other one is wide awake and kicking like crazy. So I’m not getting much sleep, and neither is Chris.”

Ali smiled. “That’s going to get a lot worse for both of you before it gets better. Is there something I can do to help?”

“It’s about the nursery,” Athena said.

“What about it?”

“We had a big fight about it before he left for school this morning.”

“What about?” Ali asked.

To Ali’s amazement, Athena burst into tears. Since Athena was one tough cookie, Ali figured it was either something terribly serious or else it was about nothing more than a storm of late-pregnancy rampaging hormones.