Clawback (6 page)

“I will,” Ali agreed. “I'll let him have it with both barrels.”

“Good,” Edie said. “He might just listen to you.”

When Edie ended the call, Ali glanced at her watch and saw that it really was almost noon. After being shut up in a dreary, windowless space all morning long, she decided that a brisk walk was in order. She stopped off in the break room long enough to pick up the egg salad sandwich her majordomo, Leland Brooks, had made that morning and sent along for her to have at lunch. With sandwich and a Diet Coke in hand, Ali left the building and stepped out into the warm sunshine.

It was June. There were no clouds dotting the bright blue sky overhead. How did that almost forgotten old poem go? Ali recited part of it aloud as she marched along, not caring if passersby thought she was nuts and talking to herself. It didn't matter:

“And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days . . .”

As far as Ali could see right then, it seemed like a perfect June day, and it kept right on being perfect—until the moment it wasn't.

D
elayed by countless phone calls, it was late midmorning before Haley finally arrived at the office. By then the strip mall's parking lot was already loaded with cars, including two separate media vans, one from a television station in Flagstaff and the other from one in Phoenix.

A disorganized crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the front door, milling restlessly on either side of an unmarked delivery truck parked directly in front of the agency's main entrance. The door itself had been propped open. Under the direction of Agent Ferris, two men in matching coveralls were busily carrying armload after armload of Bankers Boxes out of the office and packing them into the truck. It was all Haley could do not to break down and weep. In no small way, those boxes represented her life's work.

As Haley moved through the crowd, people began hailing her by name and shouting angry questions in her direction. She knew most of the hecklers by sight. Some were insurance customers only, worried about what would happen to their coverage if Frazier Insurance went out of business. Several of them, folks she knew to be OFM customers, had arrived in full protest mode, carrying handmade placards that said, “HEY, DANNO. SAY IT AIN'T SO!”

Frank Merrick, one of the placard-bearers, waved his sign directly in Haley's face, forcing her to retreat.

“What's the matter?” Frank demanded. “Is Dan Frazier such a coward that he can't come out and talk to us himself? He had to send you?”

Haley had never liked Frank Merrick. Because he was a customer, she forced herself to tolerate his frequent bouts of rude behavior. She often ran interference for the other girls in the office by handling Frank's visits herself rather than subjecting other employees to his routine boorishness. Even under these difficult circumstances, she did her best to be courteous.

“Good morning, Mr. Merrick,” she said. “I'm here because I'm supposed to be here. This is where I work.”

Unfortunately, by then Merrick had succeeded in getting the crowd's undivided attention. The people gathered around him fell unnervingly silent, listening to Haley's reply.

“Where's Dan?” Merrick insisted.

“Not here at the moment, as you can see,” she said mildly. “How can I help you?”

“How come the office is shut down?” The question came from someone near the back, someone Haley couldn't see. “Who are these people? Why are they emptying your office? Are you leaving?”

“We're closed today, and I'm not exactly sure when we'll reopen. No doubt you've all heard about the situation with Ocotillo Fund Management. The files are being removed, temporarily, as part of an ongoing SEC investigation. We should be back up and running in a day or two. In the meantime, for those of you who have insurance coverage, please be assured that there will be no lapses in your coverage.”

“I wouldn't be so sure about that,” Frank interjected. “If there was cheating going on with the investment side, what are the chances the same thing was happening on the insurance side? What if we all think we have coverage but we really don't? And what about you, Haley Jackson? Are you being paid to be here? If so, is your paycheck coming straight out of our money? You're part of all this mess. Dan cheated us, and I'll bet you did, too.”

Haley's face flushed with shame. In her heart of hearts, she knew it was true. She hadn't knowingly cheated anyone, but she had sent some of her insurance clients to OFM. If their investment money was gone, she was certainly partially responsible.

“As I said before,” she insisted. “There is nothing wrong with your insurance coverages. Ocotillo Fund Management is an entirely separate entity.”

There was a jostling in the crowd. A moment later, Julia King, a client who also happened to be Dan Frazier's across-the-street neighbor, appeared at Haley's elbow. “Something's wrong,” Julia whispered urgently in Haley's ear. “You need to come with me.”

“Excuse me,” Haley said back to the crowd. “I need to attend to something.”

That wasn't an end to the matter. Frank Merrick was still shouting insults in Haley's direction as she followed Julia through the crowd.

“What is it?” she said. “What's wrong?”

“Something bad is happening at Dan and Millie's house.”

“What?”

“I don't know. There are cop cars everywhere and ambulances, too. They've blocked off the street.”

“I'll go get my car,” Haley said at once.

“No, that won't work,” Julia insisted. “You need to get in mine. They're allowing residents through at this point, but no one else. The only way you're going to get there now is to ride with me.”

Haley did as she was told. Approaching Elberta Drive, Haley noticed that the media vans she had seen earlier in the parking lot outside the office had been redeployed and were now on either side of the entrance to the cul-de-sac. Stopped at a roadblock, Julia had to pull over to allow a white van with flashing orange lights to drive by. When Haley saw the lettering and logo on the side of the van—
YAVAPAI COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER
—her heart constricted. “If the ME's here,” she breathed aloud, “someone must be dead.”

The cop manning the roadblock tried to turn them back, but when Julia showed him her driver's license with an Elberta Drive address, the officer waved them through. Haley's whole focus was on the driveway leading up to Dan's house. It was crowded with cop cars surrounding an aging, faded red Bronco with old-design plates—white letters on a red background. She recognized that vehicle at once because it belonged to one of her clients—Bob Larson.

As Julia turned down her own driveway, Haley looked back toward Dan's house in time to see a cop car come barreling down the hill. Hopping out of the car, she hurried back to the top of Julia's driveway, just as the patrol car swung on to Elberta and raced away. Haley arrived in time to see Bob Larson's unmistakable profile in the backseat.

“Hey, lady,” another cop farther up the driveway called out to her. “We're dealing with a double homicide here. You need to go back down the hill and mind your own business.”

A double homicide? Haley was aghast. That could only mean one thing: Dan and Millie Frazier were both dead. And she had seen Bob Larson being driven away from the scene in the back of a patrol car. Could that nice old man be the one who had done it?

Blinded by tears, Haley stumbled back down the steep driveway, where she fell, weeping, into Julia's comforting arms.

“They're dead,” she sobbed brokenly. “Dan and Millie Frazier are both dead.”

G
overnor Dunham was good to her word. By the time Ali returned to her office there was a message saying she should give Adele Harris a call. Ali did so immediately.

“Evidently I was mistaken,” Adele said in an aggrieved tone Ali's mother would have referred to as “snippy.”

“It seems the superintendent of schools has received a call from the governor's office saying that in the case of the Johnson children, records from the family Bible will be considered sufficient,” Adele continued. “That does not mean, however, that we will be waiving the requirement for each child's vaccination record to be up to date.”

“That's easy, then,” Ali said. “I just happen to have those records at my disposal. If you'll give me a fax number, I'll send them right over.”

“Usually parents are the ones who supply shot records,” Adele objected.

“Not in this case,” Ali answered.

Ali downloaded the necessary documents and fed them into the fax machine.

“Yay,” she said aloud as the last one was sent.

“Yay what?” Sister Anselm Becker asked, slipping quietly in through the open door to Ali's makeshift office.

Sister Anselm was a tall, spare woman with iron-gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in her customary fashion—a navy blue pantsuit paired with a crisp white blouse complete with a button-down collar. Only the crucifix she wore on the outside of her blouse hinted that she might belong to a religious order. A Sister of Providence, Sister Anselm was based at St. Bernadette's Convent in Jerome, Arizona, where she acted as an in-house counselor to nuns dealing with personal and/or mental health issues. She also devoted much of her time to traveling the state and functioning as a patient advocate for seriously ill or badly injured indigent folks who needed help navigating complex medical issues.

Ali and Sister Anselm had met years earlier at the bedside of a badly burned woman who subsequently died. Since then, they had become good friends. They had also both been caught up in the drama surrounding the Dunham Massacre. In the aftermath of that, Sister Anselm had devoted almost as much time and effort to helping The Family's dispossessed victims as Ali herself had.

“Governor Dunham just brought another foot-dragging school district official to heel,” Ali answered with a smile. “Christine Johnson's kids' lack of birth certificates is suddenly no longer a barrier to their being enrolled in Albuquerque public schools. I just finished sending over their vaccination records, which was the last ‘t' that needed to be crossed. You'd be surprised how fast things move when one governor picks up the phone and calls another one.”

“No I wouldn't,” Sister Anselm answered, smiling too. “I wouldn't be surprised at all.”

“What brings you to town?” Ali asked.

“I had a meeting at the hospital earlier this morning,” Sister Anselm answered. “Before heading back to Jerome, I stopped by to see how our girls are settling into their new digs.”

Ali's main focus had been two-pronged—finding employment for the women and getting the children enrolled in schools. Initially, emergency housing issues had been handled with help from a local domestic violence shelter, Irene's Place. Now, though, when it was time to find permanent housing, Sister Anselm had applied her considerable organizational skills to the problem.

Weeks earlier, with the help of her benefactor down in Phoenix, Bishop Francis Gillespie, Sister Anselm had scored an amazing deal on a run-down rental property near the NAU campus. The place had been in such bad shape that she'd been able to negotiate a favorable long-term lease in exchange for doing an extensive cleanup and rehabbing whatever needed fixing. An army of volunteers had tackled the project, and the last city inspector had signed off on the rehab work the week before. Now Sister Anselm had a relatively low-cost four-bedroom home that The Family's refugees could cycle through as needed.

Because the first tenants would be coming directly from emergency housing with little more than whatever clothing they could carry, much of Sister Anselm's weekend had been devoted to furnishing the place with donated and secondhand goods. The kitchen was stocked with dishes, pots and pans, silverware, and utensils as well as a new microwave while Ali and B. had personally seen to it that both the fridge and pantry were generously supplied with groceries.

A day earlier—move-in day—Sister Anselm and Ali had accompanied the new tenants on their goggle-eyed initial walk-through. For them the mismatched secondhand furnishings seemed like heaven itself, and the colorful Bed Bath & Beyond artwork decorating the walls constituted incredible luxury.

One of the four, Enid Tower, was a sixteen-year-old with a three-month-old baby whose father had died in the massacre. The ground-floor master bedroom, large enough to accommodate a crib, had been designated as Enid's and Baby Ann's. When Ali ushered them into the room, Enid was nothing short of astonished. She ran her fingers along the smooth surface of the crib rail and then touched the arm of the well-used but highly varnished wooden rocking chair with something close to reverence.

“All of this is just for us?” she asked in wonder. “You mean we don't have to share it with anybody else?”

“It's just for you,” Sister Anselm had assured her.

When it came time to tour the kitchen and the women discovered that both the fridge and the pantry were brimming with food, another of the women, Agnes Gray, simply burst into tears. After a failed attempt to run away from The Family, Agnes had been designated as a Brought Back girl, The Family's version of an untouchable pariah. As such, she and another would-be runaway, Patricia Glenn, had been forced to live in squalid conditions in an unheated Quonset hut where they were required to look after a herd of pigs and survive on near-starvation rations that consisted of a single meal of table scraps grudgingly passed to them at the kitchen door after everyone else had eaten their evening meal.

“I never knew there could be this much food,” Agnes had sobbed. “Food we can eat whenever we want.”

Ali and Sister Anselm had shared a knowing nod at that comment. The other two roommates, Donna Marie and Christina Gray, were Agnes's half sisters. Sold into a human trafficking ring and shipped to Africa, they had somehow managed to stick together. Stranded in Nigeria, they had survived for years without passports or papers by working for free in the orphanage that had initially taken them in. Inseparable, they preferred to share a single room rather than having rooms of their own.