J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (72 page)

“I can’t do that,” Mark croaked. “I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

“It’s not that difficult,” Mina said. “I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“Where is she?”

“In San Diego in the assembly room. I locked her inside the parts cage. She hasn’t had food or water since Friday, so she’s probably pretty thirsty right about now. And cold. I doubt she’ll be in any condition to put up much of a fight.”

Mark stared at Mina in apparent disbelief. “You can’t be serious,” Mark said. “You can’t possibly mean this.”

“Oh, but I do,” Mina told him. “I mean every word.”

He stared at her for the better part of a minute, then he raced for the bathroom. Mina listened while he puked his guts out. It did her heart good to hear it.

Richard Lowensdale hadn’t had a clue about the dangers of messing around with Mina Blaylock. Neither did Mark. Sadly, Richard had already learned his very important lesson on that score, and Mark was about to do the same. Even if Richard had given up
the money, Mina would have killed him anyway. The same thing was true for Mark as well, but he had yet to figure it out.

He had been a dead man walking long before he decided to screw around on her Friday night, but now there was more to it. Of course she would kill him, but before that happened she intended to toy with him a little.

He came back out of the bathroom still looking green—green and haunted. Mina knew he was a beaten man. So did he.

“Where are you going?” she asked as he headed for the outside door.

“To get my wheelbarrow,” he said. “The wheelbarrow and a shovel.”

J
ust after six on Monday morning, Mina closed the shutters on the Salton City cabin for the last time. She had every expectation that no one would go looking inside the place for a very long time. She left the house wearing a track suit and taking nothing but her purse and a single briefcase. Not that there was anything of value in the briefcase—only Lola Cunningham’s cookbook. Mina had long since smuggled the contents of her safe out of the house. Everything that could be converted to cash had been, and all the cash, in turn, had been sent along to her numbered account.

She took Highway 78 west toward Julian and Escondido. Along the way, she looked for likely places to dump a body. Mina’s original plan had been to fake Brenda’s suicide by dumping the unconscious woman into the Scotts Flat Reservoir beyond Grass Valley on Friday evening. She had managed to unload both Brenda’s purse and her shoes and was about to wrestle Brenda herself out of the trunk when everything had gone to hell. Some people—kids most likely—had turned up at a most inopportune time, leaving Mina no choice but to slam the trunk shut and drive off.

Mina prided herself on coping under pressure. With no other dumping places scoped out in advance, she’d felt she had no choice but to bring Brenda with her on the long drive back to San Diego. On the way Mina rationalized that things would probably work out for the best after all. It seemed likely that the abandoned shoes and purse would lead the local hick authorities to conclude that Brenda Riley, Richard Lowensdale’s presumed murderer, had committed suicide. That assumption would hold regardless of whether her body ever surfaced.

Mina had gotten a kick out of tormenting Mark with the idea that she expected him to do the dirty work for her, but that had never been in the cards. She had known all along that he didn’t have the stomach for it. She did.

It was a shame that Mina hadn’t hooked up with someone like Enrique Gallegos to begin with. Compared to Mark, Enrique was a far more suitable partner, someone who did what he said he would do when he said he would do it. Mina had enjoyed doing business with him.

In exchange for the UAVs, Enrique had given her money. As a side deal, he had agreed to supply her with a specific set of illicit drugs without making any inquiries as to how she intended to use them. Finally, and for a steep price, he had delivered a set of impressively well-forged documents.

Mina’s new passport, dog-eared and thoroughly worn, contained Mina’s photograph, but the bearer of same was identified as one Sophia Stanhope, the divorced former wife of a British diplomat. Sophia herself hailed from Bosnia, with a home address in Sarajevo. Mina had no idea how Enrique had managed all those little details, and she didn’t want to know, but according to the official-looking immigration stamps in the passport, Sophia had arrived in the United States via Cabo San Lucas two weeks earlier and was scheduled to depart for home on board an Air France transatlantic flight on Tuesday evening.

This evening she would have her final meeting with Enrique. He would give her receipts for the last transfers of money while she, in turn, would hand over a key to the warehouse and the alarm code. Tomorrow evening, about the time Mina was boarding her flight for Paris, Enrique would send a crew to Engineer Road to pick up the UAVs.

And sometime much later tonight, long after her meeting with Enrique ended, Mina would go to the warehouse, drag Brenda out of it dead or alive, and dump her somewhere in the Anza-Borrego wilderness where no one was likely to find the body.

Tomorrow, with all of Mina’s hard work finished, Sophia Stanhope would go shopping and field-test her brand-new credit cards and ID. Mina had left the cabin in Salton City with nothing. Had she carried loads of luggage out of the house and into the car, she might have raised suspicion. On Tuesday she would do some serious shopping, probably at South Coast Plaza, where she would know no one. It pleased her to realize that she needed everything and she could afford everything: new underwear, new lingerie, new shoes, new makeup, new perfume, new clothes. And she’d also need some new luggage to transport all her purchases.

Mina was looking forward to that leisurely shopping spree. She’d be able to take her time, without Mark rolling his eyes at the expense or pointing at his watch to move her along. When Mina and Mark were first together, he had enjoyed spoiling her. He had given her carte blanche to buy whatever she had wanted. She, in turn, had loved every minute of it. Once money got scarce, though, and Mark started pinching pennies, it wasn’t nearly as much fun. Too bad, Marky. Bye-bye.

Bottom line, most men were probably pretty much like Mark, she realized—fine to begin with, maybe even pleasant, but eventually troublesome, boring, and ultimately inconvenient. If you were lucky enough to be a woman with money of your own, why bother?

A few miles beyond the turnoff to Borrego Springs, Mina noticed a spot where the road had been straightened, leaving behind a generous pullout. She stopped there and walked over to the edge. Beyond the shoulder of the road was a steep drop-off that ended in a rock-strewn desert wash some fifty yards below. She was looking out at a stark landscape that remained largely unchanged since the days of a Spanish explorer, Juan Bautista de Anza.

Mina realized then that she would need something to contain the body. A bedroll might work, preferably a brown bedroll that would blend in with the desert surroundings. And she’d also need a way of making sure the body stayed inside the bedroll as it tumbled down the embankment.

Back in the Lincoln, Mina marked the location as a destination on her portable GPS. She’d be coming back here late tonight. This was the perfect spot, and she didn’t want to miss it in the dark.

W
hen Brenda awakened again she was wet. Or at least slightly damp. And she had befouled herself as well. She could smell it, but there was nothing she could do. That was the thing about being in the dark. Sometimes she was awake, but mostly she slept or maybe it just seemed like she slept. It was hard to tell the difference.

She tried not to think about her kidneys shutting down, but they would. Eventually she would lapse into unconsciousness. At this point, that seemed like a welcome idea. At least she wouldn’t feel the torture of hunger and thirst.

The temperature in the room hadn’t changed, but she was hot now. Burning. So she was probably running a fever. Whenever she thought about it, she tried to flex her ankles. Wasn’t that what people did on long plane trips so they didn’t develop blood clots in their legs that could go to their hearts and lungs and kill them? But again, dying didn’t seem like such a bad idea. At least it would be over.

Sometime long ago she had talked to . . . no, she had interviewed—there
had been lights and cameras—a man who had spent days lost in the snowy Sierras. He had talked movingly about how hard it had been to resist the temptation to simply lie down in the snow and let the cold have its way with him.

This was the same thing even though it was just the opposite. She had loved Uncle Joe with all her heart, but she could never live up to the standard of courage he had set. She was no longer willing to choose to live that one more day. She was done. All she wanted was one thing—for it to be over.

Once Flossie Haywood started talking, there was no stopping her.

“We’ve been coming here for years, and we’ve known Mark Blaylock all along since before his first wife died. His missus is Miss Johnny-come-lately around here. She couldn’t be bothered slumming it, and we never saw hide nor hair of her until about three months ago, when she showed up with a U-Haul truck full of furniture from their other house.”

“From the one they lost in La Jolla?” Ali asked.

It was important to put in bits and pieces of the story herself from time to time, so Flossie would feel like this was a conversation rather than a question-and-answer session.

Flossie nodded. “All kinds of fancy-schmancy stuff. And what did she do with the old stuff Mark had used for years? Tossed it out on the side of the street. Some Mexicans came by in pickup trucks and gathered it all up. Probably took it down to El Centro or Brawley and sold it at the swap meet. It was good enough to use, of course. Jimmy was going to go over and rescue some of the plastic chairs and the like. I told him if he
did that, I wouldn’t speak to him for a week. I wouldn’t give a woman like that any more reason to look down her nose at us than she already had. I’ll be damned if I’d be seen picking up her leavings. More coffee?”

Ali nodded and pushed her cup in Flossie’s direction. “Please,” she said. “Great coffee.”

Flossie nodded. “Folgers,” she said. “I can’t stand all that Starbucks rigamarole. Five bucks for a cup of coffee? No way! So where was I?”

“She was moving her furniture into the house.”

“Oh, yes. Her furniture. And that’s it. Furniture, but no appliances. No washer or dryer. I’m good friends with Selma Thurgood, who runs the laundromat. It’s one of those wash-it-and-fold-it kinds of places. I like to go there to save on water. That way we don’t have to go into town to empty our tanks as often. And it’s fun sitting around the laundromat jawing with people from all over the country while you wait for your clothes to finish up.

“Selma has a dry-cleaning service that comes over from Indio twice a week, to pick up and drop off. She told me she never did a lick of business with Mina Blaylock. She must take hers somewhere else. She sure as hell doesn’t do her own washing and ironing at home.”

“You call her Mina?” Ali asked.

“That’s what Mark calls her. Short for Ermina. I mostly don’t talk to her one way or the other. For one thing, she treats that poor husband of hers like he’s so much crap. Jimmy Haywood may not be the brightest match in the box, but he married me and stuck by me, and he gets my respect, every day of the year. You don’t see me taking off for days at a time a couple of times a month and leaving him out here batching it. That just ain’t right.

“And if you ask me, Mark Blaylock is just a regular sort of guy. His first wife died, you know, and he married Mina on the
rebound. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s lived to regret it. He used to invite us over for a beer now and then, or a barbecue, but not since she rode in on her broom.”

“What’s the deal with the shutters?” Ali asked.

“There was a big fish die-off a few years back. This whole place stunk to the high heaven. People just had to walk away and leave their places for a while ’cause they couldn’t stand to live in ’em. Of course, it wasn’t enough to keep the damned looters out. They came through and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. After that a lot of people just gave up and didn’t bother comin’ back. Not Mark. He said he’d be damned if he was going to let the bad guys chase him away. That’s when he installed the shutters. You ever seen things like that?”

“On shops in some places,” Ali said. “Never on houses.”

“It’s the neatest thing. It works on something like a TV clicker, but it’s even smaller. All you have to do is push the up and down buttons and them shutters just slide up and down as smooth as you please. I tried it once too,” Flossie confided. “But don’t tell Jimmy. He’d be mad enough to chew nails.”

“You tried it?” Ali asked.

“Sure. Mark drinks some. He came home one night and had misplaced his clicker—not his television clicker, his shutter clicker. And there he was, stuck. Had to sleep the rest of the night in his car. He was pissed as hell about it. So he went out the next day and got himself a replacement—two replacements, actually. One to keep in his car and one to keep in a fake light fixture out in his carport. He told Jimmy about the extra, in case something went wrong with his house—like an electrical fire or something—so Jimmy and I could let the firemen inside to put it out.

“So one day, when Mark wasn’t here and when Jimmy wasn’t here either, I went over and tried it for myself. Works like a charm. They go up and down as smooth as glass with just the
touch of a button. If I ever have another house that isn’t a motor home, I’m going to get me a set of shutters just like ’em.”

“My company is worried that Mina is trying to pull a fast one,” Ali said.

“You mean like take the car and make a run for it?”

Ali nodded.

Flossie shook her head. “I saw her leave. She didn’t have no luggage with her. Just her purse and a briefcase and what she was wearing. That was it.”