J. Jance - Deadly Stakes

For a moment A.J. stood transfixed and staring at this artifact that testified to a time in Sylvia Sanders’s far-distant past, back when carving their initials on a rock had been a way of declaring their love. A.J. was struck by the fact that his mother and James Sanders must have been about the same age then as he and Sasha were right now. If all that was true, if this had been a place of some teenage assignation, was that why James had summoned his son here, as a way of making amends for never having lived up to the demands of fatherhood? Was that what this was all about?

A.J. glanced back toward the idling BMW. Following his directions, Sasha had maneuvered the car into a deft U-turn and sat with the driver’s window open, watching him with interest.

Forcing his limbs to move, A.J. walked all the way around the boulder, studying the terrain. On the far side of the rock, he found evidence that the hard-packed dirt and smaller rocks had been disturbed. The ground nearby was all rock-hard caliche, but when he pushed the blade of the shovel into the earth at the base of the rock, it sank in easily. Four or five inches down, he hit something solid that sounded like metal.

He cleared out five or six heaping shovelfuls of dirt. Then, falling to his knees, A.J. dug with his hands alone, stripping away the dirt and sharp rocks from the surface and from around the sides of a rectangular metal box. As soon as he lifted it, A.J. realized that his mother had a metal box similar in size and shape to this one. She had told him that if anything ever happened to her, that was where he’d be able to find the important documents-things like birth certificates and insurance policies.

Once the box was out of the hole, A.J. hurriedly used the shovel to scrape the loose rocks and dirt back into it. Then, taking both the box and the shovel, he made a run for the car. Sasha opened the trunk as he approached. Dumping the shovel in, A.J. leaped into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. Once seated, he had to struggle to fasten his seat belt around the filthy box, which he held clutched to his chest.

When he looked at Sasha, she was grinning at him triumphantly. “See there?” she said. “You found it. What’s in it?”

“I haven’t had time to look,” he said. “Let’s get out of here first. Drive.”

He carried the box with him when he got out of the car to open and close the gate to let them back onto the freeway entrance. Earlier, he had been awash in doubt. Now that he had found the box, he worried about what he’d find inside.

“Well,” Sasha said impatiently, “are you just going to sit there, or are you going to open it?”

By then they were back on the freeway, speeding south at seventy miles an hour. With his fingers shaking, A.J. fumbled open the lock. Reaching inside, he pulled out a bright red clay disk and held it up so he could read what was printed on it. On one side were the words MGM GRAND. On the other, the printed number $1,000.

“What is it?” Sasha demanded.

“I think it’s a gambling token,” A.J. murmured. “It says it’s worth a thousand bucks.”

“A thousand bucks,” Sasha repeated. “Are you kidding? How many of those are there?”

A.J. felt the inside of the box, sifting the tokens through his fingers. “I don’t know,” he said. “A lot.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sasha said. “You need to count them.”

A.J. did so, dumping the contents onto the floor and then counting them back into the box one at a time. The whole time, he was remembering what his mother had said about the gas and insurance money James had handed over along with the title to the Camry. “Is this even real?” If his father had gone to prison for counterfeiting U.S. currency, what were the chances he might try counterfeiting gambling tokens?

“Two hundred and fifty,” he said at last.

“Whoa!” Sasha exclaimed. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

A.J. nodded.

“That means you’re rich,” she said with a laugh.

Coming from Sasha, whose family really was rich, that seemed weird, and A.J. didn’t bother mentioning his niggling worry that the tokens might be fake.

“He wanted me to use the money to go to school. He said this way I wouldn’t have to get student loans or a job-I’d be able to concentrate on studying.”

“How do you turn it into real money, so you can take it to a bank?” Sasha asked.

“I guess you have to take it back to the casino,” A.J. said. “He told me in the note that I’d need someone of age to cash them in.”

“Your mother?”

“No,” A.J. said, shaking his head. He closed the box again and latched it. “I don’t think my mother would be the one doing it.”

“Are you going to tell her about this?”

A.J. thought about that. “No,” he said finally. “You’re the only one who knows. I don’t want to tell anyone else, especially my mother.”

There was an injury accident at the junction of I-17 and the 101. Both before and after the accident, traffic crawled along. By the time Sasha dropped A.J. back in the school parking lot, it was almost seven-far later than he should have been, even if he’d gone to work. He hoped his mother hadn’t called Maddy to check on him.

Once Sasha left him, A.J. put the strongbox in the trunk of his Camry and covered it with a bag of discarded clothing that his mother had asked him to drop off at Goodwill two weeks earlier. After closing the trunk, he happened to look down at the clothing he was wearing. The jeans weren’t bad, but his shirt was a grimy mess. The reddish-brown dirt from the strongbox had been ground into the material; and no amount of wiping would remove it.

A.J. reopened the trunk and dug through the bag of cast-off clothing. He found a shirt that he’d never liked much, even though it still fit him. He traded his dirty shirt for that one. Then, unsure what if anything he would say to his mother, A. J. Sanders headed home.

Ali’s drive down I-17, from high desert to low desert, was uneventful, with light traffic in both directions, until she hit the exits to Anthem. That was also about the time Stuart Ramey called.

“Sorry to say, I don’t have much for you. I’m making nice with people at the MGM Grand in order to get a copy of the tapes. I find that diplomacy generally takes more time than hacking, but B. prefers me to use up-front methods whenever possible.”

Stuart’s abilities to wander through complex computer systems as invisibly as a cyber ghost made him an invaluable asset to High Noon Security’s anti-hacking initiative. Companies set up what they thought were foolproof cyber-security systems that Stuart routinely broke through. Although Ali had occasionally made use of Stuart’s off-the-books hacking skills, she knew what he did, although expedient, was also skirting the law. She felt more comfortable when he used front-door rather than back-door methods.

“Right now I’m on my way to Phoenix to interview James Sanders’s wife and son. I know you gave me their address earlier, but could you send it to my iPhone so I can program it into the GPS?”

“Done,” Stuart said.

A moment later, an arriving message buzzed on her phone. He rang her back. “Anything else?”

“I talked to Dr. Charles Ralston. He said his wife was enrolled in several dating websites both before and after the divorce. If we can find out which ones, we might be able to find out if James Sanders met up with her that way.”

“Hearts Afire,” Stuart said.

“I beg your pardon?” Ali asked.

“That’s the name of the main dating website Gemma Ralston was signed up with,” Stuart answered. “I already know which one, because I found her profile.”