Clawback (18 page)

He drove out of the lot, easing onto the highway. It was after eleven, so there was very little traffic. Within a mile or so he began to feel more confident. And purposeful.

Years earlier, long before IRAs came along, Dan Frazier had stopped by for an appointment, bringing with him a briefcase loaded with a rate book and blank applications. By then Bob and Edie were running the Sugarloaf as equal partners. When Dan had suggested they purchase keyman insurance on him so Edie would be covered in the event of Bob's death, Edie had balked. “What about keywoman insurance?” she had demanded. “Bobby would be in every bit as much of a bind if he lost me as I would be if I lost him.”

In the end Bob and Edie had purchased two policies—twenty-year-pay whole life policies for $250,000 each, with the idea being that the cash value inside the policies could be used to augment their retirement. The policies, still in effect, had been paid off long ago, and the suicide exclusion was long since over with as well. Fortunately, the cash values inside both policies—whatever those amounted to—hadn't been handed over to Ocotillo Fund Management. Receiving $250,000 death benefit from Bob's policy as well as the cash value in her own policy wouldn't make Edie whole from the monies lost to OFM, but the two payouts would amount to almost a quarter of their retirement fund shortfall. Not only that, left on her own, Edie would be paying for only one person at Sedona Shadows rather than two. If need be, she could elect to move into a smaller unit or maybe ask to have a roommate. Either way, she wouldn't have to face the prospect of being summarily booted out of a place where she was comfortable and happy.

Bob stayed on the highway until after the entrance to Tlaquepaque. Turning left, he came to a stop in front of the cattle guard at the entrance to Schnebly Hill Road. The gate beyond the cattle guard wasn't closed. That meant that the county had finally gotten around to grading out the rockslides and washouts that made the road impassible for much of the winter.

Not wanting to call attention to his presence there, Bob turned off the headlights and engine, then he buzzed down the window and sat there thinking about why he was here and what his intentions were. He'd done almost the same thing in front of Dan Frazier's house all those hours earlier. That had been less than twenty-four hours ago, but with everything that had happened in between, it seemed like a lifetime.

There were no headlights or streetlights in view, and gradually his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The moon was up, palely lighting the dirt road ahead until it disappeared over a small rise. Farther beyond that, he could see the narrow pencil line of graded shoulder debris winding its way up the rock face toward the canyon rim far above. His eyes roamed along the path he knew the road followed, in sight and out of it, looking for any signs of headlights or other vehicles. Bob didn't want any unexpected company while he was doing what needed to be done.

He knew he wouldn't have to go far, but he couldn't be sure how the low-slung two-wheel-drive Regal would handle on a surface that, even newly graded, could be challenging in his sure-footed Bronco. Once the road started climbing, he'd only have to manage three or four switchbacks to gain enough altitude to do the job.

Edie would be devastated, of course. That went without saying, but she'd have Ali and B., her son, Chris, and Athena, and the twins all rallying around her. She'd be okay. Eventually, she might even be able to forgive him for not only dying but for wrecking her damned Buick in the process. Ali wouldn't be devastated—she'd be pissed, thinking he'd taken a coward's way out rather than facing up to the problem and accepting the help she and B. had so generously offered.

Bob understood that this was all a matter of pride—his pride. What was that verse Edie was always quoting? “Pride goeth before a fall.”

In this case
, he told himself,
that's literally true
, and then he laughed aloud at his own dark humor.

Up on the rim, a tiny pinprick of light came into view—a stationary kind of light rather than a moving headlight. Bob had stood on that very spot in the past when he'd been up visiting his “guys,” and he had little doubt that he was seeing a campfire from the homeless encampment.

How many times had Bob rushed up there to the rescue when someone was in crisis, sitting there in the cold and dark, counseling with people who were ready to give up—people who had nothing left to live for and were ready to do themselves harm?

Bob didn't know the exact number. There had been plenty of them over the years. And what had he told them, sitting by the dying embers of campfires? Trite things, mostly. Clichés. Don't give up without a fight. You have a purpose. There are people somewhere who love you—people who will miss you if you're gone forever. Sometimes Bob had helped place a reconciling phone call to long-estranged loved ones, putting family members back in touch after years of absence. Sometimes he had helped compose the letters they needed to write, and once written, Bob had mailed them himself. Some of the homeless guys had benefits due them, and Bob would help them fight their way through the paperwork jungles.

And why had he gone to all that effort? Because he cared, that's why.

And what was Bob contemplating now? Giving up, that's what—doing exactly what he had begged all those other guys—and they usually were guys—not to do. For the first time in his whole life, Bob Larson could see that what he planned to do would turn him into something he had never been before—a hypocrite. A damned hypocrite!

A new burst of anger shot through his body. Bob Larson would not be the kind of guy who didn't have balls enough to take his own advice. No way THAT was going to happen! Instead, he located the ignition button, restarted the engine, and then moved the gearshift into reverse.

“Time to go home,” he told himself aloud. “If you're not going to ship out, then you sure as hell had better shape up.”

On the way back to Sedona Shadows, he drove past Safeway and was surprised to see that it was still open. At the next light, he pulled a U-turn and went back. At the floral section he found a single red rose. They had bouquets containing a dozen or more, but he only needed one. As he started to pay for his purchase, he realized his wallet was still missing. Patting his pockets, he was relieved to find a long-forgotten five dollar bill.

That pinprick of campfire up on the Rim had made all the difference, and it also meant that Edie wouldn't have to come to a morgue to do a next-of-kin identification.

With his transaction complete, Bob's loose change tumbled into the container. “Will there be anything else?” the clerk asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is,” Bob said. “Do you happen to have any job applications?”

W
hen Ali finally went to bed that night, she slept without dreaming or even moving. She awakened at 6:30 to discover that her right arm was numb from the shoulder down and that she and Bella were alone in bed. B., still in his robe, was seated at the small desk in the corner with both an open laptop and an iPad in front of him and a printer spitting out pages in the background.

“You're up early. What are you doing?”

“Printing out a transcript of what your father told us last night.”

“A transcript? What transcript?”

B. held up his cell phone. “I recorded it and ran it through voice-to-text. Now I'm printing it. I'm also sending copies to you, Stu, and Dash so you'll all have access to it as needed.”

“You recorded everything Dad said? He won't be thrilled when he finds out about that.”

“Too bad,” B. said. “I wanted to have access to the information he gave to Detectives Drinkwater and Sotomeyer. The only way to do that was to get him to tell us the story. And even though he'd already been through a hellish day, we needed to hear what he had to say while it was still fresh in his mind. Your father's already made his position clear about where he stands on electronic eavesdropping of any kind. Given that, I knew that if I asked permission to record what he was saying, he would have said no on principle. So no, I didn't ask. I recorded the interview anyway, and it turns out that was a good thing.”

“Why?”

“Because we now have a way of demonstrating, in real time, that Bob's version of what happened is the real one.”

“How is that possible?”

B. grinned. “My ace in the hole. Remember that sophisticated tracking system Stu and Lance put on all of our phones?”

“I remember,” Ali said dryly. “I also remember we had to have Mom's help and go behind Dad's back to put it on his while he was showering.”

“What's good about this system is that it doesn't just ping off cell sites. It gives actual tracking information. Remember your dad saying that both Hank Sotomeyer and Eric Drinkwater had asked why it took him so long to get from Sedona Shadows to Dan Frazier's place?”

“Yes,” Ali replied. “Dad said something about stopping several houses away from Dan's place and sitting there for a while, trying to figure out what he was going to say. Why?”

“I remembered that, too, so I asked Stu to overlay your father's phone's movements over a satellite photo of the whole neighborhood. Take a look at this.”

Ali walked over to where B. was sitting and peered at the screen over his shoulder. “Here's where Bob stopped initially,” B. explained, pointing. “That's two houses away from Dan Frazier's house. The phone remains stationary in that position for the better part of twenty minutes. Then it travels on up the street, presumably while still inside your dad's Bronco, turns left, and stops here.”

Ali leaned in closer to get a better view. “That building has to be Dan Frazier's garage.”

“Correct,” B. replied. “Bob said he parked close enough to the garage that if Dan had backed out of the garage without looking, he would have slammed into the Bronco. Now look at this. Do you see all these little lines going in and out of the garage and the house?”

“What are they?”

“That's your father going in and out of the garage and in and out of the house. All of those little lines coincide with the timing of Bob's 911 call. After the call ends, the phone moves over to here, somewhere in the vicinity of this tree.”

“That's probably where the patrol car was parked, the one where they locked him inside.”

“Yes,” B. said. “The phone remains in that location for the better part of two hours. When it moves again, you can follow it as it travels directly to Sedona PD, which also tells us exactly how long he was there.”

Ali leaned down and kissed the back of B.'s neck. “So all of this backs up Dad's story. Do we drop this information in Eric Drinkwater's lap first thing this morning and tell him to have a nice day?”

“No, we'll let him stew in his own juices for the time being, but we will pass all of the tracking information along to Dash Summers. From the looks of this, your father's situation isn't nearly as dire as we first thought, and we'll let Dash handle that, although working on behalf of your father's defense team gives High Noon carte blanche to stick its nose into any number of things that would be off-limits otherwise.”

“So what's the plan?”

“As I said last night, in order to find where McKinzie hid the money, we need to know everything there is to know about him. He's a guy who has devoted a lot of time and effort toward maintaining a large media footprint. Stu's already located a mountain of material that we'll need Edie to collate and sort.”

“A large media footprint should make it harder for McKinzie to go dark,” Ali suggested.

“It should,” B. agreed, “but so far it hasn't seemed to slow him down. Stu is looking in all the usual social media places, including dating Web sites.”

“Are we looking into Dan Frazier's media presence, too?” Ali asked.

“That search is already in process,” B. said, “but there's far less electronic information out there on him. What we find out about Dan will mostly have to be done the old-fashioned gumshoe way—by talking to friends and associates.”

“Do we know who those are?”

“Stu's making a list of all the employees at the office here in town. They should all be interviewed. Someone, namely you, will need to talk to them. Getting an employee list from Ocotillo Fund Management is a little more problematic at the moment.”

“You're saying that looking into Dan Frazier's home team is up to me?” Ali asked.

“Looks like.”

“In that case, I'd better hit the shower. Once I'm under way, I'll let my folks know that they've been hired as our researchers in chief—Mom for sure, and Dad, too, if she can bring him around. After that I'll see what I can find out about Dan Frazier. In the meantime, you and Bella are on coffee duty.”

C
amille Lee sat at her desk reading through the transcript of Bob Larson's interview B. had e-mailed to her earlier. The day before she'd been actively involved in the search for Bob Larson when he'd gone missing, but today she was benched. When she'd come into the office at seven a.m., she'd asked Stu if there was something he wanted her to do.

Hunched over his keyboard, he'd responded with a snarky growl. “I'm looking for this McKinzie guy, the one who robbed these poor people blind. Leave me alone and let me work.”

Cami did just that. When she'd first signed on with High Noon, Mr. Simpson had warned her that Stu could be “a bit prickly.” It turned out that on some days he was a veritable porcupine. Rather than be a target for today's temper tantrum, she hid out behind her computer, found her copy of the interview, and read through the whole thing.

In the course of her several months at High Noon, Cami had met both Bob and Edie Larson on occasion—met them and liked them. Bob Larson a murderer? No way! Couldn't be.