J. Jance - Hand of Evil

“Name one,” Larry said.

“There’s the bartender,” Brooks said reluctantly. “His name is Barry-Barry Stone.”

“Anyone else?”

“Can you be discreet?” Leland asked.

“That depends.”

“Patrick Macey,” Leland said. “Judge Patrick Macey.”

“What kind of judge?”

Leland Brooks sighed. “Superior court. We’ve been involved for a dozen years. He’s married. His wife’s an Alzheimer’s patient. His kids don’t know about him. They don’t know about us.”

“Phone numbers, please,” Larry said.

Brooks reeled them off from memory, and Hank keyed the first one into his phone.

“Please,” Brooks begged. “It’s cold out here. I’m freezing. Can’t we go inside?”

With Detective Mendoza outside on the phone, Larry took Brooks into the kitchen and seated him at a table. The kitchen was surprising cold as well. At Brooks’s direction, Larry switched on the baseboard heat. The room was starting to warm up when Hank came inside several minutes later, carrying the scattered groceries.

“His story checks out,” Hank said, setting the box down on the counter. “Both Stone and Macey say he was there, from late afternoon until closing.”

Brooks heaved a sigh of relief. “I told you,” he said. “I told you I had nothing to do with it.”

“What about Mr. Ashcroft’s visit here on Sunday?” Larry said. He came across the room and removed the cuffs. “Were you privy to their conversation? Do you know what was said?”

“Thank you,” Leland said, rubbing his wrists. “As to your question, I maintain certain professional standards. That means there are some lines that are never crossed. In other words, I don’t listen outside doors, if that’s what you’re implying. Yes, I was aware of Mr. Ashcroft’s visit. I showed him in and I showed him out. I was curious, of course, but all Miss Arabella told me was that he had asked her for money. He would have been better served asking me about that since I’m the one who handles the finances, but he didn’t.”

“She didn’t go into any further detail?”

“Not until you were here on Tuesday. That was the first I heard anything about Mr. Ashcroft’s bizarre reverse mortgage proposal. I would never have let that one fly.”

“What happened after he left?” Larry asked.

“I’d have to say Miss Arabella seemed anxious and distressed, enough so that I was afraid it might trigger another one of her episodes…”

“What kind of episode?” Marsh asked.

“She has debilitating emotional episodes from time to time-has had her whole life,” Brooks replied. “A good deal of the time she stays on an even keel, but she goes a bit haywire on occasion, can’t sleep, suffers from delusions, talks to people who aren’t there. That sort of thing. At times like those I’m especially careful that she takes all her medications, and I did that this time, too. Even when you came to tell us Mr. Ashcroft had died, it just never occurred to me that she might have done something that drastic.”

“Could she have?” Larry Marsh asked.

Brooks didn’t answer for some time.

“Well?” Larry pressed.

“Perhaps,” Brooks admitted at last.

“How?”

“There was a problem with the mileage.”

“What kind of problem?” Larry Marsh asked.

“On the Rolls. I keep track of the mileage each time I get gas. On Thursday, when I went to fill up, I noticed there was a two-hundred-plus-mile discrepancy between what I had written down last week and what was showing on the odometer. I thought I’d just forgotten to make the proper notation. It never crossed my mind that she might have taken the car out and driven somewhere herself.”

“What about weapons?” Hank Mendoza put in. “Do you have any handguns in the house?”

Brooks stiffened and seemed to get a grip. “Several,” he said at once. “Mrs. Ashcroft was a very talented markswoman. And Miss Arabella is a fair shot, as well. We’ve done target practice, but only under strict supervision. And you don’t need to worry about the weapons. They’re all locked away in the safe in the library. I can show them to you if you like.”

“Lead the way.”

They followed Brooks through the house, through a dining room and living room and into a spacious library. “The light switch is over there,” he said, nodding. “And I can tell you how to move the panel, but it would be ever so much easier if you’d allow me to do it.”

“Be our guest,” Larry Marsh said. Brooks moved forward, touched a place on the wall, and a whole section of bookcase swung open, revealing a massive safe. Brooks expertly worked the combination lock then pressed the handle. The door swung wide and a light came on inside, revealing an interior as large as a laundry room. One side was hung with wall-to-wall fur coats.

Brooks frowned. “Where’s the mink?” he asked.

Walking over to a tall cabinet, he pulled out one drawer, slammed that one shut, and opened another and another and another. “Damn!” he muttered. “They’re gone-all of them. But how’s that possible? I’m the only one with the combination to the safe.”

“Evidently not,” Larry Marsh said. “So what kinds of guns are we talking about, and how many?”

“Where is she?”

“Who?” Ali asked.

“The girl,” Arabella said. “The one you told me about.”

When Ali had tried to bring up the subject of Crystal earlier, Arabella had shut down so thoroughly, Ali wasn’t even sure she had heard her mention it. Now though, with their Big Macs gone and with the Rolls back under way and driving through the forested night, Ali was surprised when the conversation returned to that topic as though there’d been no interruption.

“She’s back home,” Ali said. “Back with her family. So how would you advise her? If you could talk to her and give her the benefit of your experience, what would you say?”

“Does her mother love her?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t say that like it’s always the case,” Arabella cautioned. “It isn’t always true, you know.”

“Are you trying to say your mother didn’t love you?” Ali asked. “I met her, you know. I saw how she was.”

“There’s a difference between love and duty,” Arabella said. “Mother had a duty to take care of me, especially since, as people like to say, ‘I wasn’t quite right in the head.’ I give her credit. She did that; she’s still doing that. That’s why Mr. Brooks is still looking after me. Mother arranged all that long before she died. But don’t kid yourself. I don’t think Mother ever really loved me.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Because I was the reason she had to get married.”

“But your father…”

“Bill Ashcroft Senior gave me my name, but he was definitely not my father,” Arabella said flatly. “It was like I was dropped into a family of strangers. So what about this girl? What’s her family like, and does her mother love her?”

Ali thought about Roxanne Whitman. “Yes,” she said. “I think she does.”

“And the father?”

“He loves her, too. There’s a stepfather in the picture, though,” Ali said. “I’m worried about him.”

“The girl should tell her mother, then,” Arabella declared. “She should definitely tell her mother.”

“And what if the same thing happens to her that happened to you? What if her mother doesn’t believe her?”

“Well,” Arabella said thoughtfully, after a pause. “In that case, don’t let her have any knives.”

When the three men returned to the spacious kitchen, Brooks offered to make coffee. While Hank hurried outside to notify the other jurisdictions of the changed dynamics in the situation, Larry Marsh sat at the kitchen table and watched while the butler bustled about, starting a pot of coffee and making a platter of sandwiches. By the time Hank came back inside, the coffee was ready. He picked up one of the sandwiches, which had been cut into small pieces and stacked three deep on a delicately flowered china platter.