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AFTER BEING AWAKE MUCH OF the night, Ava Richland was still sleeping when her phone rang late that morning. “Did you catch the kid?”
“Yes.”
“And the shipment?”
“Got it,” Henry said, “but it wasn’t easy.”
“As much as I pay you, it doesn’t have to be easy. Where was it?”
“The kid had passed it along to a friend of his. I’ve got both of them stashed in a safe place. I won’t be able to take care of them until later tonight.”
“That is not okay, Henry. Tim José for sure knows who you are, and the other kid can probably identify you as well. They need to be gone.”
“I didn’t have time. I was working. I had to grab the second kid right in the middle of my shift, and I didn’t want to finish off the first one until I was sure he wasn’t lying to me about where he had ditched the diamonds. I’ll unload the two boys tonight.”
“Where are they? What if they get loose? How do you know someone won’t find them before you can take care of them?”
“They’re bottled up in the bottom of my truck, which is locked up tight in my garage out at the airport. Even if they managed to get loose from their restraints, they won’t be able to open the box. It’s padlocked shut.”
“But what if someone stops by the building? Won’t they be able to hear them?”
“Nope, no way.”
Ava wasn’t pleased with Henry’s answer, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “What about the shipment?”
“Drop it off at the usual place?”
“That’s probably best,” she said. “As long as the kids are safe where they are, come by as soon as you finish your shift. You probably want to be paid, and I’m feeling generous today. You’ve cleaned up what could have been a huge mess for me last night and today. You can expect a substantial bonus.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Henry said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. But what about Max? I’m worried about him. Once he hears about Carlos and Paul . . .”
“I already told you. Don’t worry about Max José. He’s handled. He’ll be gone tonight, too.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “The usual place, then. I’ll be there.”
That’s the wonderful power of greed, Ava thought as the call ended. It was the one constant in life. It worked like a charm, and it made people do stupid things.
Ava got out of bed and put on her robe. Then she went in search of Harold. She found him where she expected to, sitting in the sun on the back patio with his walker parked nearby. An untouched copy of the Wall Street Journal lay on the table next to him. They still subscribed to it. The paper came every day and Harold made sure that it went with him wherever he was, but he had long since stopped maintaining the fiction of pretending to read it.
It saddened Ava to realize that Harold was a doddering old man now, little more than a husk of the man he had been even as short a time as two years ago. His decline in the past few months had been surprisingly swift. Once she had supposed that she’d have to deal with him before she exited stage left, but that was no longer necessary. Even had he known something, he’d be of little use to any investigators. Besides, having him alive and unwell would give her flexibility in making good her departure with as little hue and cry as possible.
She walked over to the table, kissed Harold on the top of his bald head, and then poured herself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the cup-laden tray the housekeeper had left on the patio table. Then she sat down across from him.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Harold said.
That was a good start. At least he seemed to know who she was this morning; that wasn’t always the case. Not having to begin by explaining who she was made the coming conversation easier.
“I think I’d like to drive down to San Carlos later today,” she said. “It’s been months since I’ve been there. I want to look in on the condo and see to it that everything is in order. I need to make sure the housekeepers are doing their jobs.”
Harold frowned and seemed momentarily mystified. “You know,” she prompted. “Our place in Mexico—the one on the beach.”
Harold’s nurse came out then to escort him into the house lest he get sunburned. “I’ll be gone for a few days,” Ava told her. “I’m going down to San Carlos. If you need anything or if Harold does, Mrs. Sanchez, the housekeeper, can see to it.”
“Of course,” the nurse said. She didn’t wear a name tag, and Ava had no idea what her name was. A succession of home health nurses had come and gone with very little fanfare. There was no reason to try remembering who they were.
With Ava’s intentions clear to all concerned, she went about a leisurely job of packing. It wasn’t a matter of emptying her walk-in closet. She didn’t want to take too much. It was important that everyone believe she didn’t plan on being gone more than a couple of days. She did, however, clean out the safe, taking all her traveling money as well as her various forms of forged government ID. Those went into the false bottom of her midsize Louis Vuitton case.
Once she had the last shipment of diamonds in hand, the gems would need to be cleaned and dried. These days she could barely stand the smell of peanut butter, much less the greasy feel of the stuff, but after it was scrubbed away, the last of diamonds would go into that hidden compartment as well, beneath her casual beachwear clothing, underwear, and day-to-day makeup. The false bottom wasn’t good enough to pass muster with a TSA inspection at an airport, but she’d be able to breeze through the highway checkpoints with no problem.
The larger Louis Vuitton bag was loaded and ready to go. It contained her various costume changes—a collection of outfits, along with various wigs, scarves, and makeup. All those, taken together, created any number of disguises that coincided with each of her IDs. The woman who went through one Border Patrol checkpoint would appear to be someone else entirely when she arrived at the next one.
Ava had always known this day would come—a time when she would need to disappear. Now that it was here, she was both excited and wistful. She’d enjoyed living in this place at the top of the heap, but she was tired of having to look after Harold—not that she did the caretaking herself. She was tired of being responsible for him and for his caretakers.
If she’d had clear title to the house, Ava might have hung around long enough for Harold to die so she could inherit the place and live there from then on as Harold’s well-set widow. But Harold’s son, Jack, had queered that deal. Marital trust my ass! Nope, Ava Richland was leaving, and not on a jet plane, either.
Her intention was to drop her luggage off at the safe house, then drive across the border into Mexico at Nogales in broad daylight. Appearing as Ava Richland herself, she’d be thoroughly inspected and photographed at the border. After that, she’d abandon the car in Nogales, Sonora, with the keys inside. With any kind of luck, it would end up in somebody’s chop shop. After walking back across the border with a whole other set of ID, she’d meet a ru
As for Ava Richland herself? With the car gone or found stolen, she’d simply go missing. If the media could be believed, hapless American tourists went missing in Mexico all the time, and that’s where they would search for her—in Mexico. By the time the search started, she’d be back across the border into the United States, and dropped off at her safe house in Tucson. From there she’d be long gone.
Her unsafe safe house was situated in a dodgy neighborhood on the south side of town—a run-down place she’d picked up as a foreclosure during the real estate collapse. She had bought the place for a song and furnished it on the cheap with secondhand furniture from several of Tucson’s many resale stores. The person who had bought the house and the furniture—one of Ava’s many stand-in characters—was a frail little old lady named Jane Dobson.