“No new crisis,” Beatrice allowed, “just the ongoing one. From what Lynn has told me, I’m sure Chip resents the neverending financial difficulties from the divorce settlement. He’s a middle-aged man, and having to start over at that age is tough. Of course, there will be some money coming to him when his mother dies. I understand that his parents were very well-to-do. His father died relatively recently and suddenly. A stroke, I believe. Chip and his sister are their only kids. Not kids, of course. Their only heirs.”
Ali noticed that all the while Beatrice Hart was answering questions, she was stowing away the bowl of stew. She finished it off by sopping up the last of the gravy with the remains of a thick slice of Leland’s bread. She may have been worried about her daughter, but that hadn’t affected her appetite. B. was offering her a second helping when Ali’s phone rang. She excused herself and went as far as the dining room so she could answer with some assurance of privacy.
“Hey,” Dave Holman said. “I saw that you called, but I’ve been knee-deep in two different homicide investigations all day long. It turns out the county attorney has put a deal on the table for one of them, so it’s up to the lawyers to do their stuff. That means I’m on my way home and returning calls as I go. I trust you’ll forgive me for calling back without listening to your message. What’s up?”
Ali was sure she knew which investigations had kept him occupied all day, but she wasn’t at all sure how he would react to hearing the identity of the visitor sitting in her library and savoring Leland’s beef stew. “I was actually calling on behalf of someone, a woman named Beatrice Hart.”
“Lynn Martinson’s mother?” Dave demanded after a moment of stark silence. “How the hell did that happen?”
Although the name was one Dave clearly recognized, Ali thought it best to recount the whole story.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Dave said when Ali finished. “Who’s this Brenda Riley?”
“A friend of mine from back in my old news-broadcasting days. She’s originally from Sacramento. Now she and her new husband live in Ashland. She’s the one who got mixed up with the cyberstalker in California a couple of years ago. The guy’s name was Richard Lowensdale/Lattimore/Loomis/Lewis. He had any number of aliases, and Mrs. Hart’s daughter, Lynn, was one of his many victims. Given what Mrs. Hart describes as Lynn’s unfortunate track record with men, Beatrice seems to think her daughter might be in danger right along with the new boyfriend’s ex-wife. For some reason, she was reluctant to call you directly.”
“I wish she had,” Dave grumbled, “but it’s too late for that now. I’m about twenty minutes out. If you can keep her there, I’ll stop by your place before I head home.”
“She’ll wait,” Ali assured him. “B.’s plying her with Leland’s beef stew.”
“If there’s any left, I may ask for some, too,” Dave said. “Priscilla’s bent out of shape that I’m missing dinner again, but that’s what she gets for marrying a cop.”
“What should I tell Beatrice?” Ali asked.
“That I’m on my way,” Dave said.
“How bad is it?” Ali asked, more than half expecting to hear that Lynn, like Gemma, had come to grief.
“About as bad as it can get,” Dave answered. “Lynn Martinson is in jail and in a jumpsuit. So is her boyfriend, Mr. Ralston, or should I say Dr. Ralston? Cap Horning, the county attorney, is waiting to charge them, but he just made both of their attorneys the same offer. Whoever talks first gets charged with a lesser offense that takes the death penalty off the table. The plea deal expires at the end of twenty-four hours. If neither of them takes it, they both get charged with murder in the first degree, and all bets are off.”
“You said ‘both’ attorneys?” Ali asked. “Does that mean Lynn has one and Chip has another?”
“That’s correct. Dr. Ralston’s attorney arrived from Phoenix wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit and driving a silver Porsche Carrera. Ms. Martinson is evidently in a somewhat different economic league. She has a court-appointed defense attorney named Paula Urban. Paula isn’t exactly a greenhorn. She’s done a boatload of drug charges, domestic violence cases, and grand theft autos. As far as I know, this is her first homicide case.”
Ali knew those were words that Beatrice Hart wouldn’t find the least bit reassuring.
“So what are you going to tell her?” Dave asked.
“That the lead investigator from the Gemma Ralston case is on his way from Prescott and that he’d like to speak to her.”
“Fair enough,” Dave said. “See you in a couple.”
Pocketing the phone, Ali returned to the library.
Beatrice looked up at her anxiously. “Well?” she asked.
“I spoke to someone from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department,” she said. “I didn’t mention it before, but Dave Holman is the county’s lead investigator in the Gemma Ralston case and he’s on his way here from Prescott. I asked them to have him stop by the house to talk to you. He should be here in the next fifteen minutes or so.”
“What about Lynn?” Beatrice insisted. “Does he know if she’s all right?”
Having already embarked on a little white lie, Ali didn’t have much choice but to stay the course. “I didn’t speak to Detective Holman directly,” she said. “I was being patched back and forth. You’ll need to ask him that when he gets here.”
“He didn’t tell you that something had happened to her, did he?”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Ali replied. In a manner of speaking.
“She’ll probably be upset when she finds out I’ve been interfering in her private life,” Beatrice said wistfully, taking a sip of coffee from a recently refilled cup.
Ali said nothing. There was no point in giving Beatrice the bad news. It most likely won’t be private for long.
When Ali’s phone rang again a few minutes later, Dave was calling from the gate at the bottom of the drive. She buzzed him in and then went to the door to meet him. “Don’t rat me out,” she warned. “I claimed I hadn’t spoken to you directly.”
He nodded. “Thanks,” he said.
Ali led him into the library and made the introductions. “I’ve been given to understand you’re Lynn Martinson’s mother,” Dave said, settling down on a polished mesquite-wood armchair.
“You know her?” Beatrice asked hopefully.
Dave nodded. “So what’s going on?”
“I haven’t heard from her all day long,” Beatrice answered. “That’s so unlike her, and given what else has happened, I’ve been terribly worried.”
“What do you mean by ‘what else’?” Dave asked.
“Gemma Ralston’s murder,” Beatrice said quickly. “As soon as they announced the name of the victim, I was scared to death-afraid that if Lynn’s boyfriend had done something to harm his ex-wife, he might have done something to Lynn as well.”
“You’re saying that once you knew Gemma Ralston had been murdered, your immediate assumption was that her former husband might have had something to do with it?”
“That’s often the case, isn’t it?” Beatrice replied. “Husbands kill their former wives; wives kill their former husbands. It happens all the time, at least on TV.”
“Are you aware of any specific threat Dr. Ralston might have made in that regard?”
“Not really. Lynn and I don’t talk about him much. She knows I don’t necessarily approve.”
“Of her relationship with Dr. Ralston?”
Beatrice nodded.
“Why not?”
“Because he was my deceased husband’s doctor, for one thing,” Beatrice said. “I think there’s something suspect about doctors who become romantically involved with their patients or their patients’ family members. I’m under the impression that Chip’s family doesn’t approve of Lynn, either, probably for the same reason.”
“What makes you say that?” Dave asked.
“All the sneaking around, for one thing,” Beatrice said. “Lynn goes to his house late in the evening, after Chip’s mother has gone to bed, and she comes home early most mornings for the same reason-to be out of his place before Chip’s mother is up and around. That’s a sad commentary. Here they are, middle-aged people sneaking around like a pair of moony teenagers. But all you’ve been doing is asking questions. Do you know anything about my daughter, about where she is and if she’s okay?”