J. Jance - Trial By Fire

The attendant had made it all sound so routine, as though having someone drop by to give Sister Anselm a ride was an everyday occurrence

But this isn’t every day, Ali thought grimly. Sister Anselm may have thought she was getting a ride back to the hospital, but she never made it.

When Ali’s Cayenne showed up, she clambered into the driver’s seat. Not wanting to betray the emotions that were roiling around inside her, she left the hotel the same way the unidentified Honda had-through the driveway at the back. Stopping at the light, Ali looked up and down Twenty-fourth. She knew that the first thing to do was go back to the hospital to make sure Sister Anselm hadn’t shown up there, but if she hadn’t-if someone had made off with her against her will-whoever it was had at least a forty-five-minute head start.

A few blocks to the west, just beyond Saint Gregory’s, speeding traffic on Highway 51 ran north and south at sixty-plus miles per hour. If the Honda had made for that, it could be miles away from here by now, and there was no way of guessing which direction the vehicle had gone.

The light changed and Ali moved into traffic. As for who might have been at the wheel, it must have been someone known to Sister Anselm or she wouldn’t have gotten into the vehicle. Or would she? Had she been forced? And if so, by whom?

That wasn’t hard to figure out. Sister Anselm had spent the better part of two days with a dying woman. Hal Cooper himself had said that Mimi had moments of clarity when she emerged briefly from her morphine-induced sleep. The people who had done this were probably terrified that during one of those lucid moments Mimi might have passed the identity of her attackers along to Sister Anselm.

And there are most likely at least two of them, Ali reminded herself, because there were two people in the vehicle that dumped Mimi’s Infiniti in Gilbert.

As Ali waited impatiently for the left-hand turn signal to allow her onto Camelback, she realized there was a fallacy in her reasoning.

It doesn’t matter if Mimi told her or not, Ali realized. If they think Sister Anselm knows, they need to get rid of her before she has a chance to pass that information along to someone else.

“Damn!” Ali exclaimed aloud. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

Leaving the Cayenne with the hospital’s parking valet, Ali raced upstairs. The waiting room of the burn unit had turned into bedlam. Serenity and Win Langley, now accompanied by Serenity’s assistant, had taken over the corner of the room not currently occupied by Mark Levy. Win and Donna were both doing their best to comfort Serenity, who was once more weeping uncontrollably. A glance at Mimi’s door showed the DNR sign still in evidence, which most likely meant that Mimi was still hanging on.

Hearing Serenity’s sobbing, Ali couldn’t help wondering if Serenity’s tears didn’t have more to do with her fractured relationship with her mother than it did with Mimi’s impending death.

James’s family, still relatively united, had taken possession of the middle of the room, including the table with the unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Mark sat apart from the rest of them, keeping to himself in the far corner, with Ali’s laptop open on his lap.

Before Sarah and Roy ’s earlier arrival on the scene, the television set in the room had been on, but at such a low volume that no one had paid attention to whatever was showing. That had changed with Roy ’s arrival. He had turned the volume up to high. He sat in front of the set, still fully engrossed in his baseball game-or was it a new baseball game? Ali couldn’t tell.

What was obvious, however, was that Roy was using the game to absent himself from the battle between Sarah and her recently arrived younger sister, Carol. The two of them were going at it hot and heavy over what could have been done or should have been done to keep their older sister from falling asleep with a cigarette in her hand, thus setting herself on fire.

As Ali walked past the argument to reach Mark Levy, she caught a whiff of a distinctive odor, which made her suspect that Carol had already taken a nip or two of her daily allotment of demon rum.

Mark closed the computer at her approach. “I hope you don’t mind me using it,” he said, handing it over. “I was checking my e-mail.”

“No,” Ali said. “That’s fine. Did Sister Anselm come back?”

“Nope. At least she didn’t come through here.”

“And Hal?” Ali asked.

Mark shook his head. “He hasn’t been out since you left, but you might want to check your e-mail. It sounded like several new messages came in while I was online.”

Dropping into the chair next to Mark’s, Ali clicked on her mail program. Her in-box showed ten new e-mails. Three of them made her hair stand on end. SRA@SOP.com. Sister Anselm writing from a Sisters of Providence Web site.

While Ali had been waiting for and expecting a text message, Sister Anselm had sent her an e-mail instead.

When Ali pushed Read, she expected a regular e-mail to appear on the screen-something complete with words and text. Instead a map popped up on her screen, a map of Scottsdale, at least one with the far northeastern edge of Scottsdale showing on the screen. There was a red dot on the Beeline Highway northeast of Scottsdale. In the upper left-hand corner was a speedometer with a reading of 63 miles per hour. In the upper right-hand corner was a compass showing a northeast heading.

For a moment Ali couldn’t make out what was happening. What did it mean? She checked the next message. The same map appeared. In that one the pin was still on Highway 87, but a little to the north of the location in the previous message.

Suddenly Ali understood. Sister Anselm was employing one of the more exotic applications on her iPhone-she was using her navigation system to broadcast where she was. In a moving vehicle, heading north by northeast.

Weeks earlier Ali had heard Chris and B. Simpson discussing this latest add-on in iPhone technology, but she hadn’t paid much attention. Now she was on full alert. Sister Anselm needed help, and she was sending out a wireless SOS, most likely to the most recently used address in her phone-Ali’s. Maybe she couldn’t risk attempting to leave a voice message right then for fear of being overheard, and perhaps ordinary texting was too cumbersome for some reason, but this worked. The most recent e-mail had come in a mere five minutes earlier.

Ali had been on the Beeline Highway on occasion. Once you were on it, there weren’t all that many places to turn off. You either went north to Payson or south on the Apache Trail past Roosevelt Dam.

Ali glanced around the room. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. If Mimi’s children were involved in this latest plot somehow, they were doing an excellent job of giving themselves cover. If they were ever asked about it, they would be able to answer quite honestly that at the time Sister Anselm was being driven north by person or persons unknown, they had been sitting in a hospital waiting room, minding their own business, and expecting any moment that their dying mother would be pronounced dead. That would count as a foolproof alibi.

Mark leaned over the arm of his chair and peered at the map. “Hey, that’s one of those new G-spot things, isn’t it?” he said. “Cool.”

Ali put her finger to her lips. “I’m going down to the lobby,” she said aloud.

As soon as the elevator door closed behind her, Ali hit the speed dial that went directly to Sheriff Maxwell’s cell phone.

“Hey, I’m in a meeting now,” he said when he picked up. “Can I get back to you?”

“No! You can’t,” she declared. “I need to speak to you now.”