J. Jance - Edge of Evil

At first Ali kept a wary eye on all the customers coming and going, paying close attention to each stranger who came through the door and wondering if this one or that one might turn out to be Ben Witherspoon. Eventually, though, things got too busy for her to continue paying that kind of attention. By the time Dave Holman showed up at his usual 8:30, Ali, suffering from lack of sleep, was ready to admit defeat. She found herself watching the clock in anticipation of Susan’s arrival.

“Will I see you at the funeral today?” Dave asked as she poured his first cup of coffee.

She nodded. “But not here anymore,” she added. “I’ve been told my services are no longer required. It turns out I’m being replaced by a food-service professional.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Dave said. “I was just getting used to having you growl at me every morning. It was almost like being married again.”

Ali was searching for an appropriately biting comeback when she saw the telltale twitch in the corners of his mouth and realized he was teasing her. “You should be so lucky,” she said.

Susan Lockner showed up a few minutes later and a good fifteen minutes early. She marched straight into the kitchen and squeezed into the only 3X Sugarloaf sweatshirt to be had.

“Time to stand down, honey,” she said, barreling up to Ali and bodily removing the coffeepot from her hand. “Reinforcements have arrived.”

Ali obligingly walked around the counter and settled on the empty stool next to Dave.

“Hey, Edie,” he called in the direction of the kitchen. “Since Ali’s no longer hired help, can I buy her breakfast?”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Edie returned. “If her husband couldn’t afford her, I wouldn’t advise you to try it.”

Ali blushed. She had done her best to keep her marital situation well under Sedona’s gossip radar. Obviously Edie Larson felt no such compunction.

Dave looked at Ali in surprise. “Does that mean your marriage is on the rocks, too?” he asked.

“Looks that way,” Ali said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It could be worse,” Ali told him. “After all, I don’t have young kids to worry about the way some people do.”

Dave nodded. “Lucky for you,” he said. “But still, if I had known, I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time.”

“It’s okay,” Ali replied. “I can take the heat, but in compensation, I will let you buy me breakfast. Besides, I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Order first,” he said. “Let’s see what this new girl can do.”

The term girl didn’t exactly fit. After all, Susan was about as far into her seventies as Jan was. She was also pushing three hundred pounds, but once behind the counter, she knew exactly what to do, and she was more than capable of trading banter with the rowdy cable installers in the far corner booth.

Ali chose oatmeal and whole-wheat toast.

“What questions?” Dave asked when she finished ordering. “About Reenie? …Did you ever have a chance to talk to Lee Farris?”

“I did,” Ali answered, “but nothing much came of it. As far as he’s concerned, she committed suicide and that’s it. Case closed.”

“But you’re still not convinced.”

“Let’s just say I have some concerns,” Ali said.

“You think someone else is responsible?”

Ali nodded. “Maybe.”

“Who?”

“Her husband has a girlfriend, for one thing,” Ali said. “What about him? Maybe he got greedy. With half a million dollars in insurance proceeds there for the taking, Howie and his new pal are going to be left with a lot more money to throw around in view of Reenie’s sudden death. Had her ALS had been allowed to run its course, Howie probably would have been looking at all kinds of medical bills in co-pays alone.”

“Could have been,” Dave corrected. “But that’s only one concern. What else?”

“The supposed suicide note,” Ali said. “The alleged suicide note. It was written on a computer. There’s no signature on it. Anyone could have typed it, printed it, and planted it in Reenie’s vehicle. And there’s no indication Reenie wrote it on her own computer, by the way, at least not the one at work. There’s no trace of it in any of her files.”

“You know that for sure?” Dave asked. “My understanding was that Lee had taken charge of her computer.”

“He did,” Ali said. “But Andrea Rogers, Reenie’s secretary, had a back-up copy of Reenie’s files. So she looked. According to her there was no sign of any note.”

“What about a home computer?” Dave asked. “She could have used one she had there.”

“Detective Farris says not,” Ali said. “His idea was that maybe she stopped off at a Kinkos and wrote and printed the note there while she was down in Phoenix, but I don’t think so.” Ali didn’t bother mentioning the greeting card issue. That was a non-starter. “And then there’s the thing about possible treatments,” she added.

“What treatments?” Dave asked. “I didn’t think there were any treatments for ALS.”

“There aren’t any cures, that’s for sure,” Ali admitted. “There are some things that may help stave off symptoms for a while. And although there’s lots of research going on, there’ve been no real breakthroughs. A lot of what’s out there may be outright frauds-things that play on people’s hopes and fears. One in particular has an initial entry fee of $80,000. What you get back for that amount of money, I have no idea.”

Dave Holman whistled. “That much? Was Reenie involved in anything like that?”

“Maybe. I talked to her father about it last night. According to Ed Holzer, she was considering signing up for something. That he expected she’d fight ALS to the bitter end. I thought so, too. Which brings me to the bank.”

“What bank?”

“I have no idea. Andrea Rogers says she talked to Reenie after she finished up with her appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. She told Andrea she would be stopping by a bank on her way home.”

“So?” Dave asked.

Ali gave him a sharp look. “Why would she need to go to a bank at all if she was planning to drive off a cliff in a few hours time?”

“Maybe she needed cash to buy gas for the trip home.”

“I thought she might have been thinking about signing up for one of the treatment programs,” Ali said. “According to Detective Farris, though, there was no activity on any of the Bernards’ Bank of America accounts that day and nothing at any of the branches.”

“So Lee’s already checked this out?” Dave asked.

“As much as he’s going to,” Ali conceded. “But what if there’s another bank involved, one we don’t know about?”

Ali’s breakfast arrived. “If things were rocky at home,” Dave mused after a pause, “maybe Reenie was starting a new account somewhere else. That’s what my ex did,” he added. “She left enough money in the joint account to keep it open then she started a new account of her own, one that didn’t have my name on it.”

Ali thought about Howie Bernard and Jasmine Wright. “That is a possibility,” Ali said.

“But doing that is bound to leave a trail of some kind,” Dave said. “There’d be e-mails or phone calls or names in her address book. I know Reenie’s cell phone was smashed to pieces in the wreck, but I wonder if anyone’s taken a look at her phone records from her cell or from work, either one. If she was starting up a new banking relationship, we’ll be able to trace it by tracking down the phone calls. And if we learn which bank she visited, we may start filling in some of the missing hours between the time she left the doctor’s office and the time she went off the cliff.”