J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent (86 page)

“Who was driving that 9-7X?” Chris asked. “He’s got great taste in cars. Which reminds me, you and Dave don’t seem to be spending that much time together lately. Is this a new boyfriend, by any chance?”

“Hardly,” she answered. “His name’s Simpson—B. Simpson.”

“Oh, him,” Chris said. “I remember now. He’s that friend of Grandpa’s who’s the computer security guru. I didn’t know guys like him made house calls”

“He stopped by because he found a Trojan horse on my laptop.”

“Whoa!” Chris said. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” he added with a laugh. “But a Trojan horse? I’ve heard of them, but where did you pick one up?”

It wasn’t lost on Ali that there were certain similarities
between having her computer infected with a virus and picking up an STD after an anonymous one-night stand. Not eager to admit to her son about having logged on to an Internet dating site, Ali shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“Still, he stopped by to help you get rid of it?” Chris asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “There may be some kind of identity theft scheme at work. He’s planting a couple of countermeasures on my computer, and he dropped off one of his spares for me to use as needed in the meantime.”

Before Chris could respond, Ali’s phone rang. It wasn’t late, but it was after nine. Thinking it might be bad news, Ali hurried to answer.

“Is this Ali Reynolds?” an unfamiliar woman asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Beverly Forester,” the woman answered. “Bryan’s mother.” Her trembling voice faltered.

“Is something wrong?” Ali asked. “Are you all right?”

“No. We’re not all right,” Beverly managed, pulling herself together. “We’re still at the Best Western. The cops were here a little while ago. They put my son in handcuffs, loaded him into the back of a patrol car, and drove away.”

Ali’s heart fell. If Dave had gone so far as to place Bryan under arrest, then the evidence he had collected from the back of the truck must have been damning.

“The girls didn’t see that,” Bev Forester continued. “But they’re dreadfully upset that their father isn’t here with them right now, and I don’t know what to do. Lindsey’s crying like her poor little heart’s broken. Lacy’s locked herself in the bathroom and won’t come out. They’ve been through so much the last few days, but I can’t do a thing with them, and right now I’m at my wits’ end!”

“I’m sure if you just talked to them—” Ali began.

“I already tried that,” Beverly returned. “So did Harold, Bryan’s father. He didn’t get anywhere, either. We were wondering if we could convince you to come see them.”

“I can’t see how that would help,” Ali objected. “I don’t even know them.”

“Oh,” Beverly said with a disappointed sigh. “Bryan speaks so highly of you, I thought maybe you knew his girls as well.”

“I don’t, but it’s possible I know someone who does,” Ali said. “I met their teacher at a function last night. Her name is Mindy Farber. Her roommate is my son’s fiancée. Mindy seemed to be concerned about the girls. Maybe she could help.”

“Do you have her number?”

“Let me call her and explain the situation,” Ali said.

Once off the phone with Beverly, Ali called Athena’s number. While Chris listened with considerable interest, Ali enlisted Mindy’s help and made arrangements to come get her.

“Thank you for picking me up,” Mindy said twenty minutes later as she buckled herself into the Cayenne’s passenger seat. “You didn’t have to. I know where the Best Western is. I could have driven there myself.”

The truth was, Ali wanted to go, too. Bryan Forester was part of her life; so were his girls. If there was anything she personally could do to help them, she would. As a consequence, on the drive there, Ali filled Mindy in with as much background information as she’d been able to piece together.

At the hotel, Ali drove around the building until she spotted Bryan’s Dodge Ram. A man smoking a pipe stood leaning against the front bumper. “Mr. Forester?” Ali asked as she stepped out of her car and into the parking lot.

He straightened. “Ms. Reynolds?” he asked. “Thank you for
coming. Bev’s not very good at this kind of thing. Completely out of her league. I don’t know how much more she can take.”

“Where is she?”

“Bryan and the girls were staying in the next room over,” he said, pointing toward the adjoining door. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that tonight. We can’t very well leave them there by themselves.”

As Ali walked through the low-lying cloud of pipe smoke, Mindy Farber was already knocking on the door. “Come in,” Bev Forester called.

As soon as Mindy opened the door, Ali saw a gray-haired woman sitting on the edge of a bed. A little girl lay on the far side of the bed, crying inconsolably. When the woman reached out to touch her, the girl shrank away. The woman stood up, then, wringing her hands, she hurried to meet Mindy.

“She’s been like this ever since her father left,” Bev Forester said. “What should I do?”

In answer, Mindy walked past her and took Bev’s place on the bed. “Lindsey,” she said softly. “It’s Miss Farber. Are you all right?”

Without warning, Lindsey sat up and flung herself at Mindy and buried her tearstained face in her young teacher’s breast. “Did you hear?” she hiccuped through her sobs. “Our mother is dead. Somebody murdered her. I heard some people talking. They were saying that they think Daddy is the one who did it. I wasn’t supposed to, but I was peeking out the window when he left. They put handcuffs on him, put him in the back of a car, and drove away. Oh, Miss Farber, if Daddy’s in jail, what’s going to happen to us? Where will we live? Who will take care of us?”

“Maybe your grandparents—”

“They don’t like us,” Lindsey sobbed. “They don’t like Lacy.”

“That’s not true,” Bev interjected. “Of course we like Lacy, we just don’t understand—”

Just then the bathroom door swung silently open. Without so much as a glance in Bev Forester’s direction, Lacy emerged from the bathroom. She went straight to the bed and sat down next to her sister. With a dignity that belied her age, Lacy silently took one of Lindsey’s hands and held it tightly with both of hers while two fat tears tumbled down her own cheeks.

Ali knew Lacy to be a troubled child. Her willingness to emerge from the bathroom in hopes of comforting her grieving sister seemed like a display of raw courage.

Mindy Farber was already holding Lindsey. Ali worried that if Mindy tried to draw Lacy into the same hug, she’d once again withdraw. Mindy must have sensed the same thing. She continued to cradle Lindsey but made no effort to reach for Lacy.

“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions,” Mindy said softly to both girls. “But I do know this much: Wherever you are, I’m sure you’ll be together.”

Ali held her breath. The words were simple enough to say, but if, for some reason, Bryan’s folks were unable to care for the girls and Child Protective Services stepped into the picture, Ali knew that promise might not be easily kept. Where the girls would end up then was anybody’s guess.

While Mindy Farber dealt with the two girls, Ali took Bev by the arm and led her outside, where she sank into her husband’s arms and burst into tears herself. “What are we going to do?” she asked him. “The girls don’t know us, really. Lacy especially refuses to have anything to do with us. How are we going to manage, Harold? And what will become of Bryan?”

“I’ve got a call in to Mitch,” he said. To Ali, he added, “Mitch Gunn used to be our attorney when we lived here. I left him a message. So far he hasn’t called back.”

“Is Mitch Gunn a criminal defense attorney?” Ali asked.

“I’m not sure what his specialty is. Mitch has handled business agreements as well as our wills—that kind of thing,” Harold Forester said. “Up till now, that’s the only legal help we’ve ever needed.”

“If your son has been arrested for murder,” Ali told the Foresters, “he’s going to need a lot more than that.”

“If you know someone who would be better, tell us,” Harold said. “Whatever it costs, we’ll find the money. We have to. He’s our son.”

In the past several years, a series of tough circumstances had forced Ali to retain a whole series of defense attorneys, all of whom had proved reasonably effective. The first one, however, a local named Rick Santos, had been by far the most affordable. Once Harold Forester was on the line with Rick, Ali went back into the girls’ room, where Mindy Farber had somehow convinced Lindsey and Lacy to don pajamas and climb into bed.

“Are you going to stay with us?” Lindsey asked her teacher.

Mindy shook her head. “Not overnight. Your grandparents will be here with you. I have to go home so I can get ready for school in the morning.”

“Can we go back to school, too?” Lindsey asked. “I hate being here. So does Lacy. It’s boring. There’s nothing to do.”

Bev Forester had followed Ali into the room. “Of course you can’t go back to school,” she announced. “Not right now. Not until after the funeral on Friday. What would people think?”

Mindy turned to Bev. “These girls are seven,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter what people think. Let them come back to
school, Mrs. Forester. Their whole lives have been disrupted. Going to school will give their days some structure. It will also give them something familiar to think about besides what’s happened to them.”

“But—” Bev began.

“Please, Grandma,” Lindsey interrupted. “Please let us.”

“She’s right,” Harold told his wife from the doorway. “They’ll be better off at school than stuck here with us all day long, worrying or else watching CNN.”

“What’s a funeral?”

At first Ali thought Lindsey was the one who had asked the question, but then she saw Lindsey turn toward her sister in drop-jawed amazement.

“What?” Lindsey said.

“What’s a funeral?” Lacy repeated.

Lacy’s unprecedented excursion into the verbal world may not have surprised her sister, but it had left all the adults in the room dumbstruck. Mindy Farber was the first to recover.

“A funeral is like a church service,” she explained. “Funerals are held when people die. They give the people who are left behind a chance to say goodbye. This one will be for your mother.”

“But I don’t want to say goodbye,” Lacy said. With that, she rolled away from them and covered her head with her pillow, signaling with some finality that her brief conversation was over.

Lindsey was determined. She turned back to her grandmother. “So can we go to school or not?” she asked.

“We’ll see,” Bev said, but Ali could tell the woman was wavering. So could Mindy.

“Tomorrow, then,” Mindy said, patting Lindsey’s shoulder as she stood to leave. “See you there.”

When Mindy and Ali exited the room a few minutes later, Bev Forester followed. “You had no right to say that,” she sputtered. “You had no right to tell the girls that you’d see them tomorrow.”

“Did you happen to notice a miracle just happened?” Mindy demanded in return, rounding on the older woman. “Your granddaughter, who has never spoken a single word in my hearing, suddenly said something—something important. She’s not ready to say goodbye, and not just to her mother, either. She’s not ready to say goodbye to life as she knew it. Please let the girls come to school tomorrow.”

“But what if some of the other kids say something to them?” Bev objected. “What if they tease the girls or make fun of them?”

“No doubt the kids will say something,” Mindy agreed. “Ours is a small school, and what happened on Monday was and is very big news. By tomorrow people will probably know that the girls’ father is in custody. But Lacy and Lindsey will be better off if they start dealing with comments—kind or unkind—earlier rather than later. That’s also part of saying goodbye.”

“I’ll take them,” Harold said, cutting short the discussion. “What time does school start?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“All right, then,” he said. “The girls will be there. I’ll drive them there myself.” He turned to his wife. “Now, you go on to bed, Bev. The manager’s going to bring down a roll-away bed. I’ll be here with the girls in case they wake up.”

Shaking her head, Bev disappeared into the other room while Ali and Mindy headed for Ali’s Cayenne.

“You were really good with the girls,” Ali said. “With both of them.”

“Thank you,” Mindy said. “But what’s going to happen after tonight? If their father ends up going to prison, what will happen to the girls? The grandfather’s probably okay, but the grandmother? Yikes!”

“From what Bryan Forester said to me, I doubt his mother is very good with little kids under the best of circumstances, which these definitely are not,” Ali said. “Bev’s daughter-in-law has been murdered, and her son has been placed under arrest. We should both try to cut the woman some slack.”

“And I’ll do what I can for the girls when they come to school tomorrow,” Mindy added.

“Exactly,” Ali said.

When she pulled up in front of Mindy and Athena’s apartment, there were no lights on inside, but Chris’s Prius was parked on the street out front. “It looks like the lovers got over their little spat,” Mindy said with a laugh as she opened the door to step out of the vehicle. “Thanks for the ride.”

“And thanks for all the help,” Ali said. “I don’t know how Bev and Harold Forester would have managed if you hadn’t been there.”

Once Mindy had gotten out, as Ali drove on, she found herself thinking about her mother. Ali had always admired and envied Edie’s ability to do the right thing in the face of almost any crisis. Well, almost any crisis. The uproar over the engagement party counted as a major exception to her mother’s otherwise unblemished record.

Ali had been operating on pure instinct when she’d invited Mindy Farber into the fray to help deal with Lindsey and Lacy Forester. It had turned out to be the right thing to do.
Maybe I’m my mother’s daughter after all,
she thought.

It wasn’t until she was back at the house that she remem
bered the thumb drives. But having just had a serious lesson in computer security, she was no longer willing to insert either one of them into the backup computer B. had lent her. If the virus on her computer had come from Singleatheart, wasn’t there a good chance that Morgan Forester’s files had also been infected? Before doing something potentially damaging to B.’s computer, she would have to bring him into the picture.