J. Jance - Deadly Stakes

“I should have known you’d be one step ahead of me,” Ali said with a laugh.

“Gemma made no bones about looking for someone with big bucks,” Stuart continued, “and she wasn’t looking to get married. What she wanted was a meaningless relationship-preferably a high-end meaningless relationship. Since you told me Sanders didn’t have his own computer to go online, I’ll have to look through the browsing history on the Mission’s computers to find out if there’s a connection. Fortunately, almost nobody thinks to clean their caches these days, which makes my work child’s play.”

“All right,” Ali said. “Thanks for the help. You keep doing what you do, and I’ll keep doing what I do.”

She pulled off at the next exit long enough to program her GPS, then got back into the flow of traffic. The computerized voice in the dash told her to take the 101 to the 51 and then that down to Thomas. She had to jog around on surface streets in a modest working-class neighborhood until she found the correct address on East Cheery Lynn Road.

Ali stopped in front of a small white brick bungalow. The front yard was flat and unfenced. Once upon a time the yard might have boasted crops of lush green grass. Now, due to the escalating cost of water, the owners of that yard, as well as many of the near neighbors, had opted for xeriscaped patches of desert landscaping. Sylvia Sanders had moved one notch up on the scale of landscape severity by covering her entire front lawn with a layer of white gravel. Not so much as a single weed dared poke its head up through the thick blanket of tiny rocks.

In view of what had happened, Ali had expected that she would arrive to find a houseful of visiting friends and relatives. That didn’t appear to be true. Other than Ali’s Cayenne, the street in front of Sylvia Sanders’s house was empty. A single aging Passat sat parked in the two-car carport.

Dreading the encounter and unsure of her reception, Ali walked up to the door and rang the bell. The woman who answered a few seconds later appeared to be somewhere in her mid-thirties. She came to the door in a well-worn jogging suit. She looked as though she had been crying.

“Ms. Sanders?” Ali asked, holding out a business card that contained nothing but her name and her cell phone number.

Nodding, the woman opened the door wide enough to take the card. She glanced at it without appearing to take it in. “I’m Sylvia Sanders,” she said.

“As it says there,” Ali explained, “my name is Ali Reynolds. I’m very sorry for your loss, but I’m a journalist doing a story on the Camp Verde homicide-the other one,” she added quickly. “I know this is a terribly challenging time for you, but would it be possible for me to ask a few questions?”

“I’ve already spoken to the cops, and the reporter from Las Vegas just left. I don’t know how much more I can add.”

“Please,” Ali said. “Anything you can do to shed light on the situation for my client. .”

“All right,” Sylvia said with a sigh. She opened the door, stepped aside, and motioned Ali into the house, leading the way through a small entryway and into a combination living room/dining room. Sylvia directed Ali toward an old-fashioned sofa with brown and orange plaid upholstery and wide wooden arms. As Ali sat down, Sylvia resumed what was evidently her seat in a matching chair, where a coffee mug sat within arm’s reach. She glanced at her watch before picking up the coffee mug. “My son’s late getting home,” she said. “He’s usually here by now.”

“That would be Alexander?” Ali asked, removing her iPad from her briefcase-size purse and opening the cover.

Sylvia nodded. “I call him A.J.,” she said.

“This must be terribly difficult for both of you.”

Two new tears squeezed out of Sylvia’s eyes and coursed down her cheeks. “A.J. barely knew his father. I did my best to protect him from all that. . notoriety. Now, though, all the details are bound to be back in the papers. In fact, that’s what Betty Noonan was asking about.”

“And she is?” Ali asked, deftly typing notes on the iPad’s flat-screen keyboard.

“The reporter I told you about. From the Las Vegas Examiner. She left a few minutes ago, just before you got here. That’s where James, my husband, had been living and working ever since he got out of prison-in a halfway house in Vegas called the Mission.”

Ali had spent years as a television journalist. In this day of shrinking print newspapers and equally shrinking newspaper budgets, she wondered why the murder of a lowly halfway-house janitor would be important enough for a news editor to send a reporter on a three-hundred-mile one-way trip. Obviously, there was more to James Mason Sanders than anyone was letting on.

“You said James Sanders was your husband,” Ali repeated. “Does that mean you never divorced?”

Sylvia nodded. “We’re Catholic,” she said simply. “If he had ever asked me for a divorce, I suppose I would have given it to him. After all, except for those first few months, we’ve lived apart the whole time. He never asked, and I never bothered. I thought the less said about that whole situation, the better off we’d be. Having all of this come to light now that A.J.’s a senior seems worse somehow. Maybe if I’d been more open about it when he was younger. .”

“Open about what?” Ali asked. “About A.J.’s father going to prison for counterfeiting?”

She already knew the answer, but that was part of the drill. If you knew what interviewees were supposed to say, it was a lot easier to see if they were telling the truth or lying.

“We started dating when we were in high school,” Sylvia explained. “He went off to college while I was a junior. He got in to a fraternity at ASU. When he was a sophomore, one of his buddies came up with the stupid idea of trying to print money. It was just a lark. They wanted to see if they could get away with it. I don’t think any of them thought of the long-term consequences. If they’d been serious about it, they would have made hundreds instead of twenties. When they got caught, two of them hired big-shot defense attorneys and got off completely, and the third one paid a fine. James was the one left holding the bag. He’s the one who went to prison.” Sylvia paused, her gaze far away. “We found out I was pregnant just before the whole thing blew up. We got married right away, but we ended up living with his grandparents in Tempe because we couldn’t afford to rent a place on our own. James was willing to work, but no one would give him a job. A.J. was born while James was out on bail awaiting trial, and he was only three months old when his father was sent to prison.”

“For what was essentially a first offense and a victimless crime,” Ali said.

“The prosecutor didn’t think it was victimless,” Sylvia said.

“It must have been tough being left on your own with a baby.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Sylvia agreed, “but we weren’t completely adrift. My parents helped, and so did his. It was an inheritance from James’s grandparents that made it possible for me to buy this house.”

“Are you still in touch with his parents?”

“No,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “His father died a number of years ago. His mother remarried and moved to Sun River in Oregon. I called her earlier today to let her know what happened. She and her husband are leaving later today to drive down.”

“Pardon me for saying this,” Ali said, “but it’s clear to see that you still cared about the man. When he got out of prison, why didn’t he come to live with you?”

Sylvia bit her lip. “I asked him not to,” she said finally. “I was trying to keep my son away from someone I thought would be a bad influence. Maybe it was wrong, but I thought A.J. would be better off with no father at all than with a father who’d spent years of his life in prison. Kids can be so mean about stuff like that, and I didn’t want A.J. to be bullied.”