Sedona Law 2 Read online

  “Yeah. Don’t you people ever listen? There could be a dead body inside or something,” Irwin scoffed.

  “But you just said—” Vicki tried.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” Irwin accused while he shot to his feet.

  “Yeah, are you calling him a liar?” Jarvis echoed as he jumped into the middle of the conversation

  Vicki opened her mouth to say something, but with a subtle palm gesture I stopped her.

  Jarvis turned to Irwin. “I think they’re calling you a liar.”

  “I think they are,” Irwin agreed with a nod.

  “I think they need to leave,” Jarvis told his partner.

  “I think they do, too,” Irwin shot back before he turned to us with a stern expression. “I think you need to leave.”

  “Alright.” I held my hands up. “I’ll see you in court.”

  “Oh,” I heard as we made it out to the car. “‘I’ll see you in court.’ Can you believe that one?”

  We got into the car, and Vicki sighed. “Wow. What a bunch of pricks.”

  “Classic narcissistic behavior,” I remarked with a shrug. “It’s a manipulative technique called gaslighting. They tell you one thing one minute, change it the next, and make you doubt your own memory.”

  “So what do we make of them?” she asked.

  “They’re definitely dirty,” I said. “Let’s run full background checks. See what we come up with. Find out where they work, the whole thing.”

  Vicki’s phone beeped with an e-mail. “I already ordered one for Irwin Montague before we left. It just came in.”

  “What do we have?” I asked as I leaned over.

  She scanned the document, and her eyes grew wide.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she breathed. “His mother is Reba McQuaid.”

  I whistled with shock.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re going to need that autopsy.”

  We got back to the office, and AJ was still at the county clerk’s office. So, Vicki started researching Reba McQuaid, and I called the prosecutor’s office. Chet wasn’t in, so I had to deal with some flunky.

  “We need an autopsy for the Clifton Melbourne case,” I said to the girl on the phone.

  “Yeeeeahhh … ” Her voice was flat, and I could hear her typing through the phone. “We don’t have it,” was her definitive answer.

  “What do you mean you don’t have it? We’ve got a suspect being charged with manslaughter. Don’t you think an autopsy would be … important?”

  “Yeah we don’t have it,” she repeated.

  “Okay,” I said as I attempted to drum up patience. “When do you think you can have it?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “It looks like it’s not been done.”

  “I know it’s not been done,” I sighed as I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We talked to the coroner earlier today. When can we get it done?”

  She sighed back in return. “Chet will be in tomorrow. You can call him then.”

  “I will do that,” I said. Then I got off the phone and turned to find Vicki was deep into her research.

  “Interesting,” she mused as she scrolled down her laptop screen. “It looks like Reba McQuaid worked for a party planning agency in Phoenix for a while, until she was fired for suspected embezzlement.”

  “Whoa,” I said. Then I looked at the screen and skimmed while she read aloud.

  “Okay,” Vicki read. “Apparently, she handled all the invoicing. There was a vendor they used named Sun State Rentals. They paid her an unnamed bonus every time she ordered through them, but the bonus never made it on the books. It was paid in cash … and she pocketed the money.”

  “Jesus,” I said as I shook my head. “This family.”

  “Right?” she chuckled. “Eventually she got caught, but they couldn’t prove anything because it was all cash. So, they just fired her.”

  “Now, with Clifton gone, she’s about to take over the film festival,” I concluded. “

  “And all that grant money,” Vicki finished, “gets ‘restructured.’”

  “Like I said,” I repeated. “These people are dirty.”

  “But it still doesn’t mean they killed Clifton,” she pointed out.

  Chapter 5

  With all of our leads on hold, we decided to shut down for the night. We went back to our cottage, and as we got there Vicki’s phone buzzed with a text.

  “Harmony texted me,” she announced. “She wants me to meet her and her friends for drinks.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And what, pray tell, might you discuss with my sister?”

  She laughed. “Oh, please. Narcissist much? We have better things to discuss than you.”

  “That does little to quell my curiosity,” I replied with a frown.

  “Relax,” she said as she rolled her eyes. “That guy Freddie she was dating dumped her for his ex, and now he wants her back. So, she wants to get back out there before she ends up taking him back.”

  “I never did like that guy,” I remarked.

  “Me neither,” she agreed with a shudder. “He creeped me out.”

  “Just don’t get drunk and leave me for some tree hugging activist who plays authentic African bongos in his mother’s basement,” I teased.

  She laughed again. “You watch too many movies.”

  “Eh, maybe I do,” I said as I shrugged.

  It wasn’t long before she left. With Vicki gone and the house quiet, I went for a stroll through downtown Sedona. The stars were out, and they looked like glitter against the clear black sky. It was beautiful and soothing.

  In my reverie, I ended up in an odd corner of town I didn’t think I had ever been in. I stumbled across some dingy dive bar on the side of the road and went in for a drink.

  It was a French Bohemian style bar called The Oblivion. The room was dimly lit, with dark wood furniture and paneling absorbing what little light the French modernist lanterns provided. There was a stage at one end with velvet curtains that had red and gold fringe and tassels.

  I ordered and settled into a barstool. Long haired ex-hippies sat at lonely tables lost in drunken stupors. A janitor dressed in a long trench coat and top hat swept the floor in a hypnotic motion. He turned around, and I noticed he wore full mime makeup with gold and purple glitter accents.

  Overhead, a haunting melody played, some sort of soundtrack from the darkest periods of French theatre. An emcee came onto the stage and announced a performance act. It was a petite young woman with a bobbed haircut and olive skin, and she wore a full bodied brown pioneer dress and bonnet. I kept the drinks coming out of sheer morbid curiosity.

  The story was about a mother in the 1800’s who had her breast milk stolen by slave traders that ran a breeding farm of slave children. As soon as the mothers delivered the babies, they were wanted right back at their post, and the traders would take over the care of the infants to raise into profitable machines. The slavers didn’t want to keep the mothers around, but with all the mothers back on the farms, the slavers didn’t have milk for the babies. So they kidnapped a poor white mother and forced her to pump like a cow to provide milk for the slave farm. In exchange, the slavers made sure her own children were generously provided for and even sent them to prestigious universities.

  Eventually, the white mother escaped and had the slave traders arrested. At this point, a film segment showed a courtroom period drama, where the slave traders were sentenced to prison. She also demanded reparations from the traders, stating that they owed her a percentage of their business since she had assisted in product development. The judge agreed, and the woman became very rich with slave money.

  The irony of the story was that, in her quest to seek justice for slavery, she became part of the system. It was a commentary on how we can fight the system just to join it. I thought it also had to do with animal cruelty in regards to food supply. The mostly drunk audience somewhat applauded, and the pioneer girl bowed and disappeared backstage.

/>   I was starting to get a nice little buzz when the pioneer girl showed back up at the bar, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt.

  “Hey, Barney,” she addressed the bartender as she eased on the bar stool next to mine, “just a beer.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  She eyed me, smiled, and looked away. I shifted in my seat. Was she hitting on me? I pulled out my phone and aimlessly browsed apps to look busy.

  She laughed. “Relax, you don’t have enough tattoos to be my type, so you can stop pretending to be on Facebook.”

  I laughed and awkwardly put the phone away. “Henry,” I greeted and offered her my hand.

  “Erin,” she replied and shook it.

  The bartender brought her a bottle and a small pile of cash from the register. She put the money in her pocket and thanked him.

  “You did great,” Barney told her. “Clean, fresh take tonight.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “Last night was rough. Tonight, though, I was more on it.”

  “It was definitely a spot on performance,” I said. “Very complicated to do alone.”

  “Thanks,” she responded with a shrug. “It’s just something I do.”

  Barney laughed. “Don’t let her fool you. She’s gonna be on Broadway someday.”

  Erin blushed. “Barney, don’t.”

  “Really?” I said. “You want to make it in New York, huh?”

  She shrugged again. “I’ve been trying to all my life,” she said. “I just can’t seem to make it out of Sedona for some reason. I’m trying to save up money to move. I should have it by the end of the year. I can spend Christmas in New York.”

  “Well, good luck,” I said. “An act like that is aggressive.”

  “Thanks,” she replied. “I’ve had a lot of people look over the script. It’s been several years in the making. That’s going to be my audition piece.”

  “You’re auditioning for Broadway with that piece?” I asked as I gestured toward the stage.

  “Well, it’s this theatre group in New York that feeds into Broadway a lot,” she answered. “This is all rehearsal for the video shoot for my audition piece.”

  “Nice.” I nodded. “Well, if you’re going to audition with it, can I offer you one little tweak?”

  “Go ahead, shoot.” She waved her hand at me as if in permission.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m an attorney,” I told her, “so I was interested in a lot of the courtroom and legal aspects to the piece.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” she said as she concentrated on my words. “Did it ring true?”

  “Pretty close,” I admitted. “Close enough. But, if you want to be most accurate, you’re not going to have a civil and criminal suit for the same case going on at the same time.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked with a furrowed brow.

  “Well, the judge is going to try the traders for the criminal offenses, kidnapping and whatever else,” I explained, “but for the personal damages, she would have to file for separately at a later date.”

  Erin shook her head vehemently. “But that’s how it happened.”

  “That’s a true story?” I asked as my eyebrows rose toward my hairline.

  “Well, not exactly,” she confessed. “It wasn’t slave traders and breast milk. It was a real case in Sedona in 1918. It’s not that interesting, so I changed the details to make it more interesting and have a meaning more relevant to today. It was about cattle rustlers who stole all this cattle from these ranchers and made a lot of money to breed them. Eventually, the ranchers who owned the cattle had the rustlers arrested, but in order to prove they were breeding them and making money off them, they needed to have all the books from the rustlers’ ranch. So, the ranchers petitioned the judge to let them try both at the same time, and they did. It all happened even in the same trial.”

  “Where did you learn this?” I asked curiously.

  “My great-great-great uncle on my father’s side was one of the ranchers,” she explained with a shrug.

  “What was the name of the case, do you know?”

  “It was State of Arizona v. Cramer Gear, and Frances Maricopa v. Cramer Gear,” she replied.

  “And this was in 1918?” I questioned.

  She nodded. “July 1918,” she confirmed.

  At that point, a man showed up at her side and put his arm around her waist on the barstool. He caught my glance, and his eyes widened.

  “Freddie,” I said as I recognized my sister’s ex-boyfriend.

  “‘Sup,” he greeted me.

  Freddie had a shaved head and a deep, dark, almost inhuman look in his eyes that looked like he could slice someone and still get a full night’s rest.

  Tonight he wore a sleeveless shirt for some sort of metal band, and it showed off his fully sleeved tattooed arms. He wore a silver hoop in his nose, and I had never once seen him smile, including now.

  “I see you met my girl Erin,” he said as he nodded to the woman.

  “You know him?” Erin asked Freddie, and she turned to look between the two of us.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Freddie mumbled before he ushered her out of the bar.

  “How do you know him?” I heard her trying to ask as they walked away.

  “I said don’t worry about it,” he repeated.

  I hated getting involved in other people’s love lives. It never ended well, but I sent Vicki a quick text about Freddie being with Erin and hoped to be free of the endeavor. She would know better how to break it to Harmony.

  After that, I went home and went to bed. That was enough shenanigans for me for one night. I heard Vicki slip in sometime later, and I groggily greeted her.

  “How was Harmony?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Not everyone has what we have.”

  “I know,” I said as I smiled in the dark. “How the hell did I get so lucky?”

  She laughed softly. Then she climbed into bed with me, snuggled close, and we both fell into an exhausted, contented sleep.

  The next morning I woke early to go for a jog. Vicki was still asleep when I left, which was fine. I needed space to think.

  At just before seven a.m., the sunlight over the desert was a light pink. I didn’t often wake up early enough to see it, so I was happy to look over the flat plain and appreciate the views.

  On one side of the sky, the light was clearly still the black of night, and on the other side, the hue changed from pink to yellow. In between the two sides was a nebulous gray area. I always thought it was a great metaphor for something. It was like right and wrong were on either side of me, and I lived in that gray area, tediously sorting it all out.

  I reached the end of our little neighborhood and turned down the street toward our office. Since I left my old firm in Los Angeles and started the firm full time here, it had been a drastic reduction in income for me, and it had caused some stress.

  I wasn’t worried about going broke, but I’d wanted the firm to be able to provide a good living for us, and that pressure was always in the back of my mind.

  I hit my max heart rate, and the molotov cocktail of endorphins coursing through my system started to kick in. My body felt tingling and alive, and all the colors became brighter as my mind began to focus.

  Time to think about the case.

  Horace had the body in his possession and definitely had a motive. Since we didn’t have an autopsy yet, we didn’t know how Clifton was killed or how Horace had done it, but the big tattooed man lived in the same neighborhood as Clifton, and the houses are all older. It would have been easy to break in.

  At least, that was probably what the prosecution would say. I was going to have to figure out a way around that.

  Irwin had a good motive in Reba. He was also the one who supposedly found the body. But had he “found it” really? Horace swore up and down he had never seen the suitcase. It was likely he was telling the truth. Why else would he try to sell a suitcase with a dead body inside? He certainly wouldn’t have forgo
tten which suitcase he was hiding the body in if the murder had just happened. So was the body planted there? If so, by whom? Irwin’s double story certainly pointed to him as the planter.

  Brook and Shawn definitely had the opportunity and could have had the means, but I hadn’t quite figured out a motive with them. Brook said he had no money and no assets, so what could she have gained from the old man’s death? Freedom? He was ninety-four years old. How much longer was he going to live anyway? And even if she had killed him, what would she have gained from the suitcase caper? If she wanted to kill a ninety-four year old man, there were much simpler ways to do it.

  There were still way too many questions, but Vicki was right the other day when she said to follow the money trail. That was where we would probably find evidence of Clifton’s real killer, but whose money do we track? The only entity with any money here was the festival organization.

  I was coming up on our office now. I planned to get to the end of the street, turn around, and head back home.

  Then I saw the office, stopped dead in my tracks, and let out a loud groan.

  The place was trashed. The windows were busted in, and the door was wide open. I walked inside over the glass of the broken windows, and the shards crunched beneath my feet. The desks were overturned, and office supplies littered the floor.

  I immediately called Vicki. She was groggy when she answered the phone.

  “What?” Her voice was drunk with sleep.

  “You gotta get out to the office,” I said. “We had a break-in. It’s bad.”

  I called the police next, mainly for insurance purposes. I had little hope they would find or do anything, but we needed to have a report to file the claim.

  I surveyed the damage while I waited for Vicki and the cops. Right now I was really grateful Vicki chose the minimalist theme. We had very little hard copies of anything, and all carried our laptops with us.

  Then I noticed the back wall. In red spray paint, were the words: Sedona to Irving: GO HOME. WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE.

  My first thought was that it was pretty well communicated for a spray paint vandal. It did take up the whole wall. It seemed like if they wanted to tell me that, they could have just sent me an anonymous email or something. It would have given them much more room to elaborate on their sentiment, as I am sure they would have liked to. I also thought the proper punctuation and change in case were impressive for such a lowbrow venture. This criminal was intelligent, yet was for some reason stooping low.