As Ali puzzled about that, the dog fell silent. Arriving in the kitchen doorway, Ali saw why. Stu had taken a piece of string cheese from the fridge and was using small pieces of that to silence the dog. Bella was now happily eating out of his hand.

  Stu glanced up as Ali entered the room. “We need to hurry,” he urged. “I-17 is shut down in both directions. Traffic is being diverted through Cottonwood. If we go the back way through Sedona, we’ll miss some of the logjam, but we’ll be in the thick of it once we get closer to Cottonwood.”

  “We’re going the back way, then?” Ali confirmed.

  Stu nodded. Realizing that route would take them directly past her mother’s place, Ali made up her mind and called her mother.

  “Happy New Year,” Edie said as she came on the line.

  “Thank you,” Ali said, “and the same to you, but I need your help. There’s been an accident on I-17. B. has been injured and is being airlifted to St. Gregory’s in Phoenix. Stu and I are on our way there, and Alonzo is out of town. Would it be okay if I dropped Bella off with you?”

  “Oh my goodness!” Edie exclaimed. “Of course, come right over.”

  After that, Ali handed her luggage to Stu while she collected a grocery bag containing dog essentials—two metal dishes, some kibble, and a leash. Then, lugging both Bella and the dog-care bag, Ali followed Stu out of the house.

  “Your mom’s place, then?” Stu asked, once Ali clambered into the passenger seat of Stu’s enormous Dodge Ram.

  She nodded. “Alonzo can pick Bella up from there when he gets home from Phoenix.”

  As Stu drove, Ali held Bella close to her chest, letting the dog’s presence calm her enough to ask questions. “Okay,” she said finally, “what happened?”

  “Cami heard about the accident over my scanner,” Stu explained. “She tried calling you first. When you didn’t answer, she called me. I had just gotten home from Payson. I must have exited the freeway just minutes ahead of the accident.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Just south of the Sedona interchange on I-17.”

  “What caused it?” Ali asked. “The weather’s fine. The snow and ice all melted. Did they have a blowout?”

  “I don’t know,” Stu replied. “According to Cami, the accident is being reported as a single-vehicle rollover.”

  “But why would a single-vehicle accident in the southbound lanes have the freeway shut down in both directions?”

  “A mile or so south of the original incident, a second vehicle caught fire and started a fast-moving brush fire. That’s what caused the closure.”

  Ali was barely listening just then. She was caught up in remembering the last words she had whispered to B. as she kissed him goodbye: “Travel safe.”

  “Any details about the injuries?” she asked after a pause.

  “Cami says the word ‘serious’ came through over the scanner.”

  “Serious rather than life-threatening?”

  “Let’s hope,” Stu said. “I’ve turned Frigg loose on the case. As soon as she has anything definite on that, she’ll report in. I also asked her to locate B.’s electronic devices, back them up, and brick them. We can’t afford for any of High Noon’s proprietary information to be sitting in the back of some unsecured cop car or locked up in an evidence room for the duration of an accident investigation.”

  Frigg was the pet name used to refer to Stu’s private artificial intelligence. The fact that his AI could remotely access and control B.’s electronic devices was a scary proposition as far as Ali was concerned, but in this case, her ability to do so counted as a blessing.

  “Good thinking,” Ali said.

  Moments later they pulled up to the entrance of Sedona Shadows, her mother’s assisted-living facility. Edie was standing just inside the sliding front door. Before Stu’s truck came to a full stop, she dashed out to meet them.

  “How bad is it?” Edie asked anxiously as Ali climbed down from the truck. “Is B. going to be all right?”

  Ali shook her head. “I don’t know. Details are pretty scarce right now, but I’ll let you know how he is once I find out. But thank you for doing this,” she added, handing over both the dog and her accompanying bag of goods. “Alonzo is due home this evening, and he’ll come collect her, but here’s some food for her to eat in the meantime.”

  With the exchange made, Ali hugged her mom and then climbed back into the truck. Moments later she and Stu were on their way.

  CHAPTER 6

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 2:00 p.m. (PST)

  Frank didn’t exactly advertise that he was fresh out of prison, not at the gym and not at his apartment complex, either. He doubted that any of his fellow tenants guessed their neighbor was a recent parolee because he did his best to fit in. He was pleasant when meeting people on the stairs or in the breezeways. And that’s what he did on his first New Year’s Day on the outside, too—he did his best to fit in. He greeted the people he met with a cheerful “Happy New Year.” Since everybody seemed to be ordering up pizza and/or wings to be delivered for the game, so did Frank.

  By kickoff time, he had all the necessary trappings on hand, including a freshly opened bottle of Coors. Once the game started, anyone walking past his living room window would have spotted a seemingly devoted football fan seated in front of his flat-screen TV, totally engrossed in the game. Except he wasn’t—not at all. Frank’s mind was a good seven hours away from Vegas, back in Lompoc—back in the pen.

  There had been all kinds of rules in prison, most of which, Frank soon discovered, were meant to be broken. Inmates were not supposed to have access to electronic devices or the Internet, but some of them did, and with the exchange of a sufficient amount of bartered goods, the haves were often willing to share with the have-nots.

  Once Frank managed to move beyond the terror of being a dishonored cop on the inside, something unexpected happened. Suddenly the degree in criminal justice he had earned all those years earlier became a valuable commodity. Inmates had legal questions. The prison library was stocked with a collection of law books, but when it came to finding answers, most of Frank’s fellow prisoners had no idea where to start.

  Lompoc was a federal correctional facility. Many of the people imprisoned there were guilty of financial transgressions—fraud, corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, drug dealing, and the like. There were a number of disgraced lawyers in the prison population, including an impeached superior court judge and a prosecutor or two. Any of those folks would have had more legal expertise than Frank did. At first he was surprised that prisoners brought their legal questions to him, but finally he figured it out.

  Every one of those incarcerated legal beagles were there on reduced sentences after negotiating plea deals. To a man, all of them had named names. Given a choice between doing business with a crooked cop who wasn’t a snitch or a crooked lawyer who was, Frank Muñoz was the hands-down winner.

  Over time he realized that he had moved up the ranks and was now a member of Lompoc’s elite ruling class. That gave him access to any number of goods and services. It was also how Frank learned about Gregg Atkins.

  Atkins went to Lompoc as the founder of a now-defunct Ponzi scheme. When it went bust, no one was more dismayed than Gregg himself, but not because the money from his fraudulent investment scheme was missing from his clients’ accounts—that had been the intention from the beginning. What infuriated him was that the funds from those ill-gotten gains that he had expected to keep for himself were gone, too—and not just gone—they had ended up in someone else’s pocket. Gregg had been under the impression that his wife, June, his loving partner in crime, had been transferring those funds into accounts the two of them held in common. That assumption had turned out to be wrong.

  Instead, those monies had ended up in accounts owned jointly by June and her boyfriend, a handsome, much younger man named Stefan, who had been the couple’s off-shore banker. When the feds closed in to shut down the Ponzi scheme, June and Stefan had fled to his home country, the off-shore banking haven of Montenegro, leaving Gregg alone to take the rap. While he ended up being sentenced to a seventeen-year stretch in prison, June and Stefan appeared to be living happily ever after, safely out of reach of US extradition proceedings. As soon as he ended up in Lompoc, he told anyone willing to listen that the moment he got out, he would make it his life’s work to get even with June and her boy toy.

  But then along came Gregg’s cancer diagnosis—pancreatic, stage four. Everyone who heard about it—inmates and prison staff alike—expected Gregg to petition for compassionate release, but he didn’t. Instead he stayed right where he was—inside the walls of Lompoc—and went on the warpath from there.

  Gregg was no fool. Before the Ponzi scheme’s collapse, he had squirreled a bit of money away in something June had regarded as entirely bogus—cryptocurrency. At the time it had been a relatively small amount, and he’d made only that single deposit. Shortly after that, however, cryptocurrency had exploded. Dismissed and forgotten by June, the value of that one deposit had mushroomed. It was accessible to anyone with the proper codes and an Internet connection.

  As his health deteriorated, Gregg let it be known that he was in the market for a hit man, and he had money to pay for the same. Not only that, time was of the essence.

  As it happened, if you knew the right people and had the means, hit men were among the goods and services available on the open market inside the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex.

  Less than two weeks later, the bodies of June Atkins and Stefan Lazovich were found in their luxury hotel room inside the fortified fishing village of Sveti Stefan off the coast of Montenegro. They had both been stabbed to death. Three days later, when Gregg Atkins breathed his last, there was a smile on his face, and the Lompoc inmates who were in the know all understood why.

  Although Gregg was a prime suspect in the double homicide, he was dead and gone long before the authorities came calling. As far as Frank knew, the case remained unsolved, and even though a number of prison inmates knew all about what had happened, no one breathed a word.

  Frank was not directly involved in any of this, but he was well aware of it. It pleased him to know that not only had Gregg succeeded in getting even with the people who had wronged him, he had also gotten away with it, and that gave Frank Muñoz something else to think about. Up to that point, he’d been totally focused on getting fit and getting out. Now he was focused on getting even.

  When a ringing phone jarred Frank back to the present, he was astonished to discover it was already halftime. He’d watched the first half of the football game with his eyes wide open and his mind elsewhere. Naturally, his caller was Melinda.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Where I said I’d be,” he told her, “at home.”

  “I thought maybe you were headed for a sports bar and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

  “No sports bar,” Frank said. “I’m eating pizza and wings instead of tamales.”

  “Okay,” she said, “just checking.”

  When the call ended, Frank sat there for a while thinking about Melinda and wishing she’d mind her own business and leave him the hell alone.

  CHAPTER 7

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 11:00 a.m. (MST)

  Under normal circumstances, the drive between Sedona and Phoenix takes a little under two hours. That day it took close to four. As Ali and Stu headed out of Sedona on 89A, there was already more traffic than usual. By the time they hit Cottonwood and turned onto SR 260, it was bumper to bumper with more than one fender-bender along the way making things worse.

  Once on the road, Ali tried calling the hospital. Whoever answered the phone, citing HIPAA regulations, had been unable to provide any information on B.’s condition. When that didn’t work, she was forced to wait for Frigg’s hacking abilities to access St. Gregory’s admission records.

  The idea that the AI could do so made Ali almost as uncomfortable as Frigg’s being able to remotely access and deprovision B.’s electronic devices, but desperate as she was to know what was happening, Ali was willing to turn a blind eye. With Stu driving and talking to Frigg, Ali dialed the Yavapai County sheriff, Dave Holman, to ask if he could give her the inside scoop.

  Years earlier, while Dave was still a homicide cop, he and Ali had been involved in a brief romantic entanglement, one that had ended amicably. In the years since, they had both married other people while managing to remain friends. Now he had been elected sheriff.

  “I heard about what happened,” Dave told her, “but I’m short on details. I didn’t want to try calling you until I knew more. Priscilla and I are on our way home from Palm Springs. With I-17 still closed, we’re heading back to the department in Prescott by way of Wickenburg. No telling how long that will take.”

  “Who was the first deputy on the scene?” Ali asked.

  “Deputy Hawkins,” Dave answered.

  Ali had hoped the officer in question would be someone she knew, but this wasn’t a name she recognized. “Maybe I could call and see if he could provide any additional information.”

  “Not him,” Dave corrected. “Deputy Merrilee Hawkins is definitely a her. I’ll have Priscilla text you her number as soon as we get off the phone. That’s the best I can do from here. Fingers crossed that B.’s okay.”

  “Thank you,” Ali breathed. When call-waiting buzzed with Cami’s name showing in caller ID, Ali dropped Dave’s call and took the second one.

  “Have you heard anything?” Cami asked.

  “Not yet,” Ali answered. “I tried calling the hospital and didn’t get to first base. Stu has Frigg working on the problem.”

  “Keep me posted. How’s traffic?”

  “Worse than expected. Feels like we’ve been on the road forever, and we’re barely through Cottonwood.”

  Moments later Priscilla’s text arrived. At that point Ali switched over from Cami’s call and dialed Deputy Hawkins. When no one answered, Ali left her name and number. Then she settled back in her seat and attempted to corral her thoughts.

  What if she lost B. without warning the same way her mother had lost her dad? Ali knew Edie was struggling to put one foot in front of the other, but her folks had been retired for a number of years. Ali would be left with a complex business to run. Would she be able to manage it on her own?

  High Noon had been B.’s baby from the beginning. He had built it from the ground up into the multimillion-dollar enterprise it was today. In addition, he had sought out the loyal bunch of talented techie misfits who worked for them and kept the wheels turning on the bus. Ali herself was a journalism major without a hint of tech credentials on her CV. If she were left in charge, would anyone—customers and competitors alike—take her seriously? And if she failed at taking the helm and High Noon was forced to shut its doors, what would become of their employees?

  Cami would be all right, Ali supposed, but what about Lance Tucker and Mateo Vega? Would prospective employers take their talents and skill sets into consideration, or would they focus on their unfortunate histories—Lance’s juvenile incarceration or the sixteen years Mateo had spent behind bars on a wrongful conviction for second-degree murder?

  And then there was Stu. She glanced over at the man himself. His hands were glued to the steering wheel and his eyes focused on the traffic-clogged road ahead of them. His formal education had ended with his earning a GED, but he was nonetheless a self-taught computer whiz who had been B.’s right-hand man for the better part of two decades. Would anyone take his natural talent into account, or would they focus on his lack of formal credentials and his somewhat odd personality traits and simply write him off?

  The buzz of her cell phone interrupted Ali’s train of thought. “Hello?”

  “Deputy Merrilee Hawkins,” a wary voice said. “Who are you, and how did you get this number?”

  “I’m Ali Reynolds, and Sheriff Holman gave me your number,” Ali answered. “My husband, B. Simpson, was a passenger involved in that rollover accident on I-17.”

  “I thought you said your name was Reynolds.”

  “It is. B. and I don’t share the same last name. I’ve not been able to get any information from the hospital, and since you were the first deputy on the scene, I was hoping you might be able to fill me in.”

  “It was a terrible wreck,” Deputy Hawkins said, “and you’re probably worried sick, but I can’t be of much help. By the time I got there, DPS was already on the scene and had taken control of the situation. They shifted me over to traffic detail. I was still doing that when the Air Evac helicopter took off, but I managed to pick up a few details. Someone said that although the driver was still unresponsive, the passenger seemed to be coming around. He was confused and injured, yes, but at least he was communicating.”

  Ali allowed herself a relieved breath. Communicating was good, and this was more than she’d known before.

  “Thank you so much, Deputy Hawkins,” she murmured.

  “Sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Deputy Hawkins said. “I was returning from responding to a domestic dispute outside Camp Verde. Coming north I remember seeing two vehicles parked on the far shoulder of the freeway. It looked like someone might be stranded with car trouble. At the time there was no sign of a fire. I was about to pull over to check when I heard about the rollover. I went there instead.”

  “Again,” Ali said, “thank you for the good news, Deputy Hawkins. It means the world.”

  “What good news?” Stu asked once the call ended.

  Ali repeated what Merrilee Hawkins had told her. “You’re right,” Stu agreed. “If B. was awake and talking at the scene, that’s an excellent sign.”