J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent (93 page)

This wasn’t just idle speculation. Dave sensed there was some kind of connection between Matthew Morrison’s dead computer and Bryan Forester’s overwritten files. Someone had made a concerted effort to obliterate the information on three
different computers. That meant the data from one of those held an important clue, a key to everything that had happened. All Dave Holman had to do was find it.

Neither Ali nor the intruder said a word while the phone continued to ring. It was maddening for Ali to know there was someone on the other end of the line. If she answered, there might be enough time for a desperate scream for help. But she knew better. By the time she flipped the phone open, she would be dead. If help came at all, it would come too late.

After ringing five times, the phone subsided into silence. The man was still standing over her, holding the gun.

“Who helped you?” he demanded again. “And where the hell are your real computers?”

Ali didn’t answer. A trickle of coppery-tasting blood ran across her tonsils. As she fought off her gag reflex, her phone jangled again. This time she knew it was announcing a voice mail—a message she didn’t know if she’d ever have a chance to hear, much less return.

“Get up,” he ordered.

Ali didn’t move. She couldn’t. After a moment he grabbed her sweatshirt again. Holding it so tightly against her throat that she could barely breathe, he jerked her to her feet and propelled her across the room and into her bedroom. As she stumbled into the room, she caught a glimpse of poor Sam dodging for cover under the bed. That was also when Ali caught sight of Leland Brooks. Duct tape pinned his arms to his body and bound his legs together. From the knees up, he appeared to be soaking wet, and so was the carpeted floor all around him. Trussed, helpless, and absolutely unmoving, he lay on the floor between the bed
and the dresser. As far as Ali could tell, he wasn’t breathing. Was Leland unconscious, or was he already dead?

She struggled and twisted, trying to escape her attacker’s ironfisted grasp. “What have you done to him?” she demanded. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet, but he will be soon if you don’t give me what I want.”

She knew from the way the man said it that he wasn’t making idle threats. She knew instinctively that he was a killer who would kill again. He would murder Ali and Leland Brooks in cold blood without a moment’s hesitation.

“What do you want?” Her lips were almost swollen shut. She could barely speak.

“I already told you,” he said. “You didn’t just destroy my files, you stole them. How else would you know they were encrypted? I want them back, all of them.”

Ali said nothing.

“Even more than my files,” he added, “I want the bastard who did this.”

And there it was: the automatic and arrogant assumption that whoever had managed to do this to him—to outwit him—had to be a man. In his distorted view of the universe, only another male would be smart enough to catch him.

By then he had muscled Ali through her bedroom and into the bathroom beyond it. Still holding her sweatshirt bunched at the front of her neck, he reached down long enough to put the gun down on the side of the tub. The bathroom floor was slick with water. The room reeked of vomit, and the bathtub was full almost to overflowing with vomit-spattered water.

Ali knew then what was coming. “That’s what you did to Leland Brooks?” she gasped. “You forced him underwater?”

The man nodded grimly. Letting go of her shirt, he twisted her around so her back was to him. “Believe me, if he’d known anything, by the time it was over, he would have told me. The same way you will.”

“No,” she said, trying to desperately to pull away from him. “You can’t do this. Please.”

“Of course I can do this,” he returned calmly. “I can do anything I want. Surely you’ve heard of waterboarding. Everyone has these days. If it’s good enough for Islamic terrorists, it’s good enough for you, and it’s pretty much foolproof. When we’re done, it’ll work the same way for me that it does for the CIA. In order to keep from drowning, you’ll tell me everything I want to know.”

“You’ll never get away with it,” Ali said. “They’ll find you. They’ll put you away.”

“No, they won’t, my dear. I’ll be long gone before anyone ever finds you or your friend out there. Long gone.”

Staring down at the bathtub full of water, Ali Reynolds knew one thing that her captor couldn’t possibly know: She was petrified of water; terrified of drowning. As a teenager, she had nearly drowned on an outing to Oak Creek’s Slide Rock. She had knocked herself out on a rock and gone under. She had been unconscious when one of her friends pulled her from the water and pumped the water out of her chest. She had awakened coughing and choking.

All her adult life, she had avoided swimming pools and hot tubs, and wading in the ocean was totally off limits. She simply couldn’t bear the idea of being at the mercy of those unpredictable waves. She had enrolled Chris in swimming classes early because she had wanted him to be water-safe. She had wanted him to be able to save himself rather than looking to her for help. Only in the last few years, in the safety of this very room, had
she forced herself to overcome that fear by facing it—by trying the occasional bubble bath.

But now the tub had turned into Ali’s worst horror. Staring down at it, she knew what would happen. Once he forced her head underwater long enough for the water to gush into her lungs, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know when she came back up. She would do anything to keep it from happening again—to keep him from doing to her what he had already done to Leland Brooks.

Who could already be dead,
she reminded herself.
Who told this monster nothing because he had nothing to tell.

She knew that Leland Brooks’s fate should have been enough to make her capitulate right then. Maybe that was what her captor had in mind—that simple dread would make her weaker. To her astonishment, it had exactly the opposite effect. A pulse of absolute abhorrence shot through her, filling her body with a physical strength she didn’t know she had.

Ali fought him then, fought him tooth and nail, biting and scratching in a desperate attempt to maim him, to knee him in the groin or gouge out his eyes. He outweighed her, though. He was taller and far stronger. She knew going in that no matter how hard she fought, eventually, she would lose. That was inevitable.

Yes,
Ali thought as he forced her down on her knees beside the tub and pressed her face toward the water. Dreading what was coming, she took one last desperate gasp of air, filling her lungs as he grabbed the back of her neck and plunged her head underwater.

Dave Holman’s phone rang again as he approached the exit at Cordes Junction. “Is this Detective Holman?”

“Yes. Who is this, and how did you get my number?”

“My name is Simpson—B. Simpson. I run an Internet security firm called High Noon. Ali Reynolds is one of my clients, and I have access to her files. I found your numbers listed in her contact list. Have you heard from her?”

“From Ali? Not in the last little while,” Dave replied. “I missed a couple of calls from her earlier this morning, but when I tried calling back, she didn’t answer. Why? What’s up? Is something wrong?”

B. paused before he answered. “I know the two of you have a lot of history,” he said tentatively. “And this would probably be better coming from her, but…”

“What would be better coming from her?” Dave asked impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

“I have a name for you,” B. said. “A name for the case you’re working on. The man’s name is Winter—Dr. Peter Winter. I just Googled him. He’s an ER physician at Phoenix General.”

“Which case would that be?” Dave asked.

“Morgan Forester’s murder,” B. answered.

“And how exactly is this Dr. Winter supposed to be related?”

“Earlier this week I discovered that a worm had taken up residence in Ali’s computer. I was able to neutralize it before it could do any irreparable damage, and we assumed it was just a case of attempted identity theft. A little while ago, Ali brought me a pair of thumb drives Bryan Forester had given her for safekeeping. They contained copies of files from his computer and from Morgan’s as well. The same worm had been planted in the thumb-drive files. If they had been opened on a computer with access to the Internet, those files would have been destroyed, the same way the files were destroyed on the two computers you picked up on your search warrant. Once again, I’ve neutralized the worm before it was able to do any damage.”

“Wait,” Dave said. “You’re saying the same worm that was on the Foresters’ computers was also on Ali’s? How can you be sure?”

“How does an epidemiologist know one strain of flu from another?” B. returned. “By analyzing the makeup of the virus that causes each individual case. This is the same thing. All three worms come from the same basic source—in other words, from the same programmer. Had the worm actually been unleashed, the end result would have been slightly different. For instance, the Trojan in Ali’s system was set to simply crash the computer. The worm on the Foresters’ computers was set to overwrite files. But it’s still the same guy.”

Dave’s heartbeat quickened. The guy was a doctor? That might explain the single unexplained needle mark the ME had found at the back of Morgan Forester’s neck, in a spot where it couldn’t possibly have been self-administered. And now there was another crashed computer? Anxious not to give anything away, the next time he spoke, Dave was careful to keep his voice and his questions firmly neutral. “What does this Winter character have to do with any of this?”

“That’s the thing,” B. said. “I gave Ali a choice. I told her we could pursue legal recourse, or we could go after the guy on our own.”

“Don’t tell me,” Dave said. “I already know where Ali Reynolds came down on that one.”

“Yes,” B. agreed, “you do. So we sent the guy a worm of our own and picked up all the files from his PC in the process.”

“In other words, you used an illegal wiretap. Evidence from that wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law.”

“Maybe not,” B. agreed. “But it’s good enough for an anonymous tip. Most of Winter’s files are encrypted. I’m working on breaking the code. So far I haven’t had much luck, but I did
come across one unencrypted file—one he somehow missed: his initial licensing agreement with Microsoft from back when he first purchased the computer. That’s where I got his name. He’s apparently connected to an Internet dating site called Singleatheart. Ali’s computer was infected after she registered at that site. I believe Singleatheart may also have some connection to the Forester murder.”

Listening intently to every word, Dave fought to avoid betraying his eagerness. Maybe the files Ali had offered him were the Foresters’ real files after all. If someone besides Bryan had tried to destroy them, maybe Dave had missed something. It was possible that this Winter guy was in on everything with Bryan Forester. It was also possible Dave was wrong.

As the Cordes Junction exit came up, Dave switched on his turn signal. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see about looking into this all this, Mr.—” He paused. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Simpson. B. Simpson.”

Once he was off the exit ramp, Dave pulled over. “And how do I get back to you?”

B. gave him a phone number. After ending the call, Dave wasted no time putting in another one—to Phoenix General Hospital. His first call, to the ER, came up empty. Dr. Winter was not due in today, and the person who took the call said he was expected to be away for an indefinite period. Dave’s next call was to the hospital’s administration office. It took a while before he managed to work his way up the chain of command and found someone who seemed to know what was going on.

“Yes, Dr. Winter is on staff here,” a woman named Louise Granger told him. “But he’s currently on leave. His mother was taken ill overnight and was transported to an ICU. Dr. Winter flew out to be with her first thing this morning.”

“Did he say where?” Dave asked.

“I don’t remember the exact location. He may not have even mentioned it to me, but I believe it was somewhere in upstate New York. Buffalo, maybe.”

Dave ended the call and then looked at his watch. He wanted to go back to Phoenix and start following up on this lead, but he had told the people at the office to wait for him—that he wanted to be on the scene when it came time to execute the search warrant. Since it wasn’t possible to be in two places at once, he picked up the phone and punched in the number for Detective Sean O’Brien of the Scottsdale PD.

“Hey,” O’Brien said once Dave had identified himself. “Have I got some hot news for you. Mr. Morrison’s got nothing to do with that homicide case of yours.”

“What makes you say that?” Dave asked.

“After you left, I went back to Jenny Morrison. I convinced her that with Mr. Morrison’s computer broken, and in order to ascertain that her husband hadn’t committed suicide, we needed access to his e-mail accounts, which she was happy to give me. It turns out that the day before he died, Mr. Morrison went through his mail account and deleted a large number of messages. Unfortunately for him, the deleted messages were still stored on his ISP. He wasn’t in Sedona on Monday morning. He was actually down in a new development called Red Rock, where he was hoping to meet up with a sweet little real estate babe he met over the Internet. He was all hot to trot and hoping to get lucky, but she stood him up.”

“What real estate agent?” Dave asked.

“A woman named Susan,” O’Brien answered. “From an Internet dating site.”

“Was it a place called Singleatheart, by any chance?” Dave asked.

“As a matter of fact, it was,” O’Brien replied. “How did you figure that out?”

“Luck,” Dave said. “Combined with an anonymous tip. But now I’ve got someone else I need you to track down. An ER doc from Phoenix General. His name’s Peter Winter, and he supposedly flew out of Sky Harbor this morning on his way to visit his ailing mother in upstate New York.”

“That’s all you know about him?”

“So far. Except that I’ve been told he’s also involved in Singleatheart, and I need you to find him.”