J. Jance - Hand of Evil

Listening to the news, Ali took a hit in the guilt department. She had been so caught up in her own miseries that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her friend’s difficulties. The last Ali remembered Dave’s kids had still been living in Lake Havasu with their mother and her new husband. She had no recollection about them having moved to Vegas.

How come I didn’t know about any of this? What kind of a friend am I? Ali wondered.

“How long has Crystal been gone?” Ali asked.

Dave’s face was bleak. “Since early this morning,” he said. “Rich dropped her off at school, but she never showed up for any of her classes.”

“A twelve-year-old truant on her own in Vegas?” Ali asked. Not good, she thought. Not good at all!

“They’ve issued an Amber Alert,” Dave continued. “But only just now-an hour or so ago. Somehow the school didn’t notify Roxie that Crystal wasn’t at school, and nobody worried when she didn’t show up at home as soon as school was out. When it comes to parental supervision, Roxie runs a pretty loose ship. Until it was almost bedtime, everyone assumed Crystal was off at a friend’s house. And she’s thirteen, by the way,” Dave added. “Not twelve. Just turned. Her birthday was last week. I’m terrified thinking about what might happen to her, and with a twelve-hour head start, she could be anywhere by now.”

Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away-a drive of a little under five hours. The way Dave looked right then, he could probably make the trip in far less time than that. Ali stood up, brought the pizza box over from the counter, and offered him some. Absently he took a slice of the cooled pie and bit into it.

“If all this is happening in Vegas, what are you still doing here?” Ali asked. “I would have thought you’d be on your way by now.”

“Roxie asked me not to come,” Dave replied. “Told me not to, actually. She said she had enough on her plate right now without having to worry about me showing up and making things worse.”

“But you’re a cop,” Ali objected. “How could you possibly make things worse?”

“You’d be surprised,” Dave said grimly. “You don’t know Gary, her jerk of a husband.”

Ali didn’t know Gary Whitman personally, but what little she knew about the man wasn’t good. He had been new to town-a hotshot time-share salesman-when he had taken up with Roxanne Holman, wining and dining her while Dave was off doing his second tour of duty with the reserves in Iraq. The affair had started then. The actual divorce hadn’t happened until months later, after Dave got back home from his deployment.

Just being divorced had been hard enough on Dave, but the previous fall, when Roxanne and Gary had moved from Sedona to Lake Havasu and taken the kids with them, Dave had been devastated. Ali vaguely remembered Dave mentioning that there had been trouble of one kind or another with Gary’s employment situation in Lake Havasu, but that was all she could recall. She had no idea that another move had occurred, and right that minute, none of that seemed particularly important.

“Forget about Gary Whitman,” Ali said now. “He doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out where Crystal could have disappeared to and why. And how do we go about bringing her back home?”

“I suppose Roxie’s right in a way about wanting me to stay here,” Dave admitted. “I can make more inquiries-official inquiries, that is-by going through channels on this end than I could as boots on the ground in Nevada, where I’d be outside my jurisdiction.”

Ali knew from personal experience that being outside his jurisdiction hadn’t kept Dave Holman from riding to Ali’s rescue when she had needed his help in California a few months earlier. Surely, with his own daughter at risk, there could be no question now about what he should do.

“You have to go,” Ali declared urgently. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

Dave blew out his breath as though trying to relieve some pressure. “Rich said pretty much the same thing his mom did when I talked to him a little while ago-that I shouldn’t come. He says Gary and Roxie fight about me all the time as it is. He said if I come up, it’ll only make things worse.”

“All the more reason for you to go,” Ali insisted. “True, you may not be able to do anything to help find Crystal, but at least you can be there as moral support for Cassie and Rich, and they’re the ones who need it. What did Rich tell you, by the way? Did he have any idea why Crystal might have taken off?”

“Not really. According to him she’s been quite the handful since they got to Vegas. She’s already been suspended from her new school-twice.”

“Suspended twice from middle school?” Ali asked. “What did she do?”

“I have no idea,” Dave said. “Roxie hadn’t mentioned it to me, and Rich didn’t say, either. But here’s what I don’t understand. It used to be that, of all the kids, Crystal was the one who actually liked going to school. At least, I thought she did. Up until this year, she was always a straight-A student. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her.”

“Divorces are difficult for kids,” Ali offered. “And middle school especially can be tough, especially if you’re the new kid on the block. In that case it can be downright brutal. I’m sure you’ve heard about ‘mean girls.’ But tell me about the Amber Alert. I know a little about them, but I don’t know how they work.”

“It’s like an all-points bulletin for missing kids,” Dave replied, “except more so. The announcements don’t just go out to law enforcement agencies. They’re posted on radio and television and on road signs on the interstates. They also go to bus depots and airports so busline and airline personnel are also on the lookout. The problem is, for it to do any good, it should have gone out within hours of Crystal’s disappearance.”

“So why are you still here?” Ali asked.

Dave heaved himself off the sofa and walked over to the window, where he seemed to stare outside. With the now all-enveloping darkness, his brooding features were reflected back into the room by the windowpane.

“I didn’t tell you the real reason Roxie doesn’t want me to come,” he said softly. “She’s scared.”

“Of her husband?” Ali asked. “Because of what Gary might do if you show up?”

“No,” Dave said softly. “Of me. She’s scared about what I might do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I told her I was going to get in my car, come to Vegas, and kill that son of a bitch of a husband of hers. It was bad enough that the slimeball destroyed my family the first time. Then he took them to Havasu. Now he’s dragged them all off to Vegas. You can’t just move kids around like that, hauling them from place to place like so much excess baggage. It’s too hard on them. Crystal used to be a really good kid. If she’s screwed up now, I’m blaming it on him. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all Gary Whitman’s fault.”

“You may have said you were going to kill him, but I don’t think you meant it,” Ali said.

“Didn’t I?” Dave returned gloomily. “I’m not so sure. Maybe I did mean it. But the point is, I did say it. Roxanne heard me and so did Gary. So that’s the deal. First thing tomorrow morning Roxie plans on going to court to swear out a restraining order against me. If I come anywhere near her and Gary, I’ll go to jail.”

“Screw Roxie and Gary!” Ali said forcefully. “And screw going through ‘official channels on this end.’ You need to be there, Dave. Let the cops look for Crystal. That’s their job. The people who need you the most right now are Rich and Cassie. You’re their father. In order to help them, you don’t need to go anywhere near the house. You just said Rich took his sister to school. That means he has his driver’s license now, right?”