Gemma stepped out of that filthy crib and into what previously was her mother’s life. Caroline’s room became Gemma’s room. The playhouse that once was Caroline’s was now Gemma’s. Caroline’s piano teacher became Gemma’s piano teacher. Most important, Caroline’s parents became Gemma’s parents-Natalie her caring but disciplining mother and Daniel her doting father.
Soon after Gemma’s arrival, the household’s economic situation took a hit when Parkinson’s forced Daniel into early retirement and he had to give up his medical practice. It was essentially the same stable home with the same two loving parents, but the results with Gemma were very different. She was bright and beautiful but cooperative, whereas her mother had fought her parents and teachers every step of the way. As far as Natalie and Daniel were concerned, raising Caroline had been a nightmare; raising Gemma was a piece of cake.
Unlike her mother, Gemma breezed through high school and graduated near the head of her class. When it came time for her to leave for her freshman year at Arizona State University, Natalie Hooper offered Gemma her own road map to success.
“When your mother was your age, Caroline was out smoking dope, protesting the war, and burning her bra. You can see how well that worked out for her,” Natalie counseled Gemma. “So do what I did. Find yourself some dependable young man, preferably a premed student, and marry him. You can see that worked for your grandfather and me. Daniel was only a GP. You’d be better off finding yourself a surgeon. Those are the guys who make the big bucks.”
Unlike her mother, Gemma listened to every one of her grandmother’s words and took them to heart. Unfortunately, because she really was Caroline Hooper’s daughter, she put her own particular spin on Natalie Hooper’s heartfelt advice. Daniel Hooper’s pet name for Gemma may have been Sugar, but she knew that when it came to sugar and spice and everything nice, she didn’t come close. She also understood that it was entirely possible to act nice without actually being nice, though it was the best way to get what you wanted.
Growing up, Gemma had understood her mother’s mistakes, and she had no intention of repeating them. As she packed her possessions to head to Tempe, Gemma instinctively accepted the idea that her grandmother had laid out an excellent game plan.
It was left up to Gemma to work that plan to the best of her ability, and she had done a masterful job. Now, after years of making the best of what she had come to consider a useful starter marriage, she was ready to reap some of the rewards.
Yes, she thought, sitting back and waiting her turn at Video-Glam. It’s about time.
1
Several miles across town, Ali Reynolds sighed and looked at her watch. She had known when she had agreed to do the shoot at the Phoenix FOX affiliate that it would be the same day and time that her mother, Edie Larson, would be speaking before a luncheon meeting of local Sedona Rotarians as part of her run for mayor. Edie had done a number of informal coffee-hour appearances, but this would be her first major speaking engagement, one in which she would be going head to head with her thirtysomething opponent. As Edie’s campaign manager, Ali felt she needed to be there to handle the background issues and put out any fires that cropped up. Unfortunately, the scheduled shoot for FOX’s new Scene of the Crime news magazine had been chiseled in granite.
“You go do the shoot and don’t worry about me,” Edie had assured her daughter earlier that morning. “Brenda Riley is counting on you.”
“But so are you,” Ali had objected.
“You can’t afford to miss the taping,” Edie said firmly. “Besides, with Brenda’s book due to come out the same week the show is scheduled to broadcast nationally, she has a lot more riding on this than I do. I’ll be speaking to that bunch of Rotarians, most of whom I know on a first-name basis. How bad can that be? Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Ali shook her head in resignation. What her mother wasn’t saying was that both candidates had been invited to speak at the luncheon, and this was the first time Edie would be trading campaign rhetoric with an opponent socked with a supply of well-rehearsed replies.
“Why do I always end up with people counting on me?” Ali asked.
Edie smiled. “Because that’s the way your father and I raised you,” she said, “and we love you for it.”
As a consequence, Ali had left her house on Sedona’s Manzanita Hills Road a little before noon on that Tuesday morning to drive down into the sunbaked oven known as the Valley of the Sun. Since it was already pushing the nineties in Sedona, she knew Phoenix would be a scorcher. She didn’t even attempt to put on camera-ready makeup for the drive down. Instead she took along the traveling makeup kit she had used back in the old days, when she was an on-air reporter and later a television news anchor.
For the better part of two years, she had known that her friend Brenda Riley, also a former newscaster, had been working on a book about a cyberstalker named Richard Lowensdale who, operating under any number of aliases, had victimized dozens of lonely women from all over the country, romancing them with digital sweet nothings that had promised the world and delivered only humiliation and heartache.
Richard’s preferred victims were vulnerable women considered high-profile in their various communities. Ali had first met Brenda Riley when they were working as news anchors, with Ali at a news desk in L.A. while Brenda was at a sister station in Sacramento. Brenda had been drawn into Richard’s clutches in the aftermath of a difficult divorce, along with a sudden sidelining from her newscasting job when she outlived her on-camera shelf life. For Brenda, those two major losses had resulted in a booze- and drug-fueled midlife crisis. Ali had been dragged into the fray when Brenda asked for help in doing a simple background check on the new man in Brenda’s life. Unfortunately, that supposedly simple check had uncovered the existence of Richard Lowensdale’s full contingent of fiancees, all of whom, like Brenda, had been wooed through cyberspace.
That revelation, coupled with all the other losses, had been enough to send Brenda off on an almost fatal series of benders. When Brenda finally sobered up and wised up, she set out to expose the man for what he was. Before she could do so, however, someone else beat her to the punch. Unfortunately for Richard, one of his erstwhile victims, Ermina Vlasic Cunningham Blaylock, happened to be a serial murderer in her own right. She had lured him into doing an illicit engineering job with the promise of a large payday when in fact she had every intention of taking him out once he was no longer useful.
Ermina had carried out the cold-blooded killing with utter ruthlessness, leaving evidence that should have put the blame for Lowensdale’s murder at Brenda Riley’s door. All of that might have gone according to plan had it not been for the timely arrival of Ali and a Grass Valley homicide detective named Gilbert Morris. Brenda’s mother had alerted Ali to the fact that her daughter had gone missing. Between Ali and Detective Morris, they not only managed to capture Ermina, they also rescued Brenda, who was found, close to death, locked in the trunk of Ermina’s rented Cadillac.
Their timely rescue had been good for Brenda but not so good for an FBI surveillance team also on the scene, intent on bringing down both Ermina and the drug cartel movers and shakers who were the intended end customers of her illegal stock of supposedly dismantled drones. When offered a possible plea deal, Ermina arrogantly refused. Rather than walking away with what would have been a hand slap on three separate charges of homicide, she chose to go to trial. As a result, juries in two different California jurisdictions and one in Missouri all returned guilty verdicts.