Cold Betrayal

But what about Sister Anselm and me? Ali wondered as she turned off Manzanita Hills Road and onto her driveway. What happened may be Governor Dunham’s responsibility, but it’s ours, too.

38

The space at the top of the driveway was full of cars—Chris and Athena’s new Ford Flex, Ali’s mother’s blue Buick, and a bright red Ford Fusion Ali thought belonged to Cami Lee from High Noon. Colin and Colleen came racing out of the house, followed hard upon by Bella. The kids were in the lead as they left the porch, but Bella beat them to and through the gate. By the time Ali opened the car door, Bella made an impossible leap, scrambling into the vehicle and up onto Ali’s lap. Laughing through a barrage of doggy kisses, Ali exited the Caye

“Where were you?” Colleen demanded, greeting Ali with a serious frown. “Mommy was worried about you and so was Daddy.”

B. arrived on the scene and swung Colin up onto his shoulders. “And well they should have been,” he told them. “It’s been a tough night.”

“Daddy said you were chasing bad guys. Did you get them?” Colin wanted to know.

“I think so,” Ali told him. “I hope so.”

By then the adults had made their way out of the house. First came Ali’s parents. Edie Larson pulled her daughter into a tight hug. “You’ve got to quit scaring us this way,” she ordered.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ali said. “Didn’t mean to.”

Bob Larson hugged his daughter, too. He said nothing, but his silent reprimand made Ali feel far more guilty than her mother’s straightforward chiding.

To Ali’s surprise next up were Stuart Ramey and Cami Lee. Somehow Ali managed to keep from mentioning how surprised she was to see Stu out of his natural habitat in front of a computer terminal.

“How come you guys went dark on us?” Stuart grumbled. “Aren’t we supposed to be on the same team? I know everything went to hell in a handbasket up there, but as yet no details are being made public. Once your call to me ended, we’ve been shut out of the information loop along with everyone else.”

Stuart liked to sit at his computer terminal and feel like he was in tune with everything that was going on. Being out of the know didn’t work for him.

“I’m afraid that’s all Governor Dunham’s doing,” Ali said. “When we headed north to Colorado City, she made us all shut down our devices so they couldn’t be traced, and I’m sure the information embargo is part of her game plan, too.”

“Right,” Stuart said. “Everything was fine when they needed information from our drone. Now, though, it’s all hush-hush. That’s not fair.”

Ali turned next to her daughter-in-law and was surprised to see Athena’s eyes suddenly fill with tears.

“What’s wrong, Athena?”

“I started trying to call you about eight o’clock, right after I got off the phone with Gram. When it kept going to voice mail and I couldn’t reach B., either, I called Stuart. Gram told me some of it. Stuart told me the rest—that my mother’s been stealing money out of Gram’s accounts. Mom also has a boyfriend who happens to be the doctor who’s supposed to do the competency evaluation on Monday. When I learned all that, I was ready to get on a plane last night and go home to punch Mom’s lights out. Chris made me promise that I wouldn’t go until after I talked to you and B.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Chris said, stepping up for his turn. “I told her she needed cooler heads to weigh in on all this. Yours and B.’s are the coolest heads I know.”

Considering what had just happened in Colorado City, Ali almost objected to Chris’s kind words. Instead she turned back to Athena.

“We’ll talk this over,” Ali said. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All of it.”

Leland Brooks appeared on the porch. “Come on in,” he said. “Breakfast is served.”

Colin and Colleen stayed in the kitchen eating their chocolate chip Mickey Mouse–shaped pancakes under Leland’s occasional supervision while everyone else tucked into coddled eggs and croissants at the dining room table.

“There’s a breaking news alert on TV about what happened last night,” Leland a

“Any word on the governor?” Ali asked.

“Hospitalized,” Leland said. “Guarded condition.”

No one leaped up to go see what the talking heads had to say. It would most likely play out as “another act of random gun violence, with thirty-one dead, including the shooter.” That’s how the media usually portrayed such things. News commentators would make a big deal of the governor’s involvement, debating whether or not this was a case of governmental overreach. By the time the DNA details were sorted out and the human trafficking issues at the background of the case came to light, the media would have lost interest and moved on to something else. After all, who cared what went on in some remote corner of northern Arizona?

“What’s going to happen to all those people, the women and children who have been left behind?” Athena wanted to know. “Where will they go? How will they live?”

“I have no idea,” Ali said. “Whether they stay where they are or move into town somewhere, they’re going to need huge amounts of assistance. The governor said she’d do everything in her power to help them.”

“If she lives,” Bob Larson cautioned. “But what makes you think she’s a straight shooter?”

“The gun that was tucked inside Richard Lowell’s pants was evidently one Governor Dunham took out of her purse when he demanded his hostages turn over their cell phones and weapons. While he was busy killing Sheriff Alvarado, she tried to take him down with that.”

“Okay then,” Bob said heartily. “Any woman brave enough to try to take down a guy armed with an AK-47 is a woman who gets my vote.”

“Mine, too,” Ali said. “But she’ll have to run for something in order for that to happen.”

39

After that, the conversation veered back to the situation with Betsy Peterson. In the end, the breakfast table discussion convinced Athena that it would be a good idea to have at least one cooling-off day before she went rushing off to Bemidji to kick butts and knock heads. They arranged for a further council of war on the following day, one where they would have access to any additional information Cami and Stuart might have dredged up in the meantime.

Once the company left, B. and Ali were done. They went into the bedroom, fell into bed, and slept. Neither of them noticed when Bella burrowed under the covers with them, but she was still there, late that afternoon, when they finally woke up. There had been no phone calls to awaken them. B. had had brains enough to turn off the landline extension before they crawled into bed, and if anyone was attempting to reach them by cell phone, those calls were being put through to devices locked in an evidence locker somewhere far out of hearing distance.

Prowling out to the kitchen, they found a note from Leland saying that he had thawed out the last two of the pasties he’d made earlier in the week. They were on a plate in a warming drawer and ready to eat. Ali remembered the day the pasties had been hot and fresh out of the oven and she had taken a pair of them along to Flagstaff to share with Sister Anselm. That seemed like an impossibly long time ago.