“Okay, then,” Tommy said. “We’re not paying it. Somebody who’s driving around in a Jaguar can cough up towing charges a lot easier than we can. We’ll just take her home and drop her off. After that, I’ll take you to Applebee’s for dinner.”
Dinner together without the kids? Lucy thought. What could be better?
Seemingly worn out by her adventure at Burger King, Doris slept the whole way home.
“I still don’t understand how she wound up on I-8,” Tommy said. “If she was going to Palm Springs, like she said, why wasn’t she on I-10?”
“She probably got confused at one of the freeway interchanges,” Lucy said. “When they stack one road over another, it’s easy to get mixed up.”
The guy at the towing company had been kind enough to give them printed MapQuest directions to follow back to Doris’s house. As they were going up the hill from Lincoln Drive, Doris sat up in the backseat. “Almost home,” she said, looking around. “It’s just a few more blocks.”
Except when Tommy tried to turn off Upper Glen Road, they found the driveway blocked by a fire truck and an officer who told them they couldn’t proceed.
“What is it?” Doris asked, alarm in her voice.
“There’s been a fire, ma’am,” the officer said. “No one’s allowed on the property until after the fire investigators finish their work on the scene.”
“But that’s my house,” Doris insisted. “I live there.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am. I’m afraid nobody lives there anymore. What was your name again?”
“Doris,” she said firmly. “I’m Doris Ralston.”
“Well, I’ll be!” the officer exclaimed as a smile spread across his face. “If you’re Doris, I need to call the detective right away. Everybody thought you were dead!”
Doris bristled at that. “As you can see, I’m not at all dead. Now, if you’ll just get in touch with my daughter, we can straighten all this out.”
Except it turned out that wasn’t the least bit true. It was another hour before Tommy and Lucy were able to divest themselves of Doris and her problems.
“She told me she was scared of someone,” Lucy told the detective who came to collect her. “She said she didn’t want to go home. And she said something had been stolen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the detective said. “We’ll look into it.”
It was almost ten o’clock by the time Lucy and Tommy stopped at Applebee’s on their way out of town.
“Thank you for helping me with Doris,” Lucy said. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have bothered with a poor old woman like that.”
“Yes,” Tommy said with a grin. “I don’t think your pal Richard from work would have lifted a finger.”
“Are you kidding? That jerk was ready to call the cops on her for sitting in the booth and not buying food, like she was trespassing or something. But what’s going to happen to her now?” Lucy worried. “With her house gone and her daughter missing, who’s going to take care of her?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “We did what we could. Now we need to look after us. What would you like to eat?”
“Anything at all,” Lucy Ramirez told him with a smile, “just so long as it isn’t a Whopper.”
35
Dave came hurrying to meet them as Ali and B. limped into the substation’s conference room. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“A lot better than I could have been,” Ali said with a laugh.
“I’ve got a piece of good news for you,” he said. “Several pieces, as a matter of fact. I just heard from Detective Carson at Phoenix PD. Doris Ralston has been found alive.”
“Where?” Ali demanded.
“It seems she went AWOL in her own Jag. She was trying to drive to Palm Springs but ended up on I-8 instead of I-10. She ran out of gas. After walking away from her vehicle, she was given a ride into Gila Bend, where she spent the afternoon at a Burger King. One of the people there took pity on her and gave her a ride back home, where they discovered her house had been burned down.”
“Does Chip Ralston know?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “He does now, because I told him. Based on what we’ve learned tonight, I’ve notified Cap Horning that Dr. Ralston and Lynn Martinson need to be released immediately. Shortly after you left the crime scene, a woman showed up looking for Barry Handraker. She had photo ID, including a passport, that said she was Molly Handraker. Only, as you already know, Molly Handraker is dead.”
“He was two-timing Molly?” Ali asked.
“I’m sure she had no idea. Fortunately for us, the faux Molly has been in here talking her head off. She says she’s been living with Barry in Vegas the whole time Molly has been in Phoenix looking after her mother. It sounds like they’ve been systematically stripping everything of value out of the house and pawning what they could. They’ve also moved most of Doris Ralston’s considerable funds to a bank in Belize. That’s one of the few countries where you can still open an offshore bank account without showing up.”
“With Molly gone, Barry and Faux Molly go to Belize and live off the fat of the land while Chip rots in jail charged for a homicide that Barry and the real Molly Handraker committed.”
“I’m guessing Chip had no idea that they were systematically stripping everything of value out of his mother’s life.”
Dave nodded. “True,” he said. “I already asked him.”
“Why bother to drag me halfway across the state to kill me?” Ali asked.
“Doris was supposed to die in the fire,” Dave said. “That was the plan from the beginning. It was going to be a grease fire caused by her cooking something on the stove. I’m not sure how a fire could have gotten that far without an alarm going off. .”
“The alarms had all been disconnected,” Ali said. “Molly told me so. She said they’d had to shut them off due to too many false alarms.”
“So the first fly in the ointment was Doris taking off on her own. The second one was you showing up and asking questions about some missing necklace.”
Ali nodded. “The same necklace that got Gemma killed.”
“Barry couldn’t afford to leave you behind,” Dave explained. “He decided to bring you along. Faux Molly said that Barry told her their car, Doris’s S550, had broken down and that if she’d come pick him up, he’d fix it so it looked like you and the real Molly got into a gun fight and shot each other. Fortunately for all of us, that didn’t happen, either.”
Ali thought about what she’d been told. “If they’ve been stripping out the valuables and assets, that means they’ve been working this gig for a long time. Months. Probably since Doris’s husband died.”
“Most likely since before James Ralston died,” Dave corrected grimly. “Faux Molly tells us that the elder Dr. Ralston was given a bit of a chemical boost on his way out. Barry is a former pharmacist. He’d know how to pull something like that off without arousing suspicion, and since James Ralston was in a hospital and under a doctor’s care, they could be relatively certain no postmortem would be done, especially in view of the fact that a proper DNR was posted in James Ralston’s room.”
“Contemptible people,” Ali muttered. “Truly contemptible.”
“Yes,” Dave agreed. “Scary people. Greedy people, and picking on someone who’s mentally deficient like that. .” He shook his head.
“She may not be,” Ali said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think they’ve been dosing her with low levels of the same drug they gave me and most likely Gemma Ralston as well.”
“If they’ve been dosing her all along, that’s probably one reason why Molly was so adamant about keeping Chip away from their mother.”
Ali nodded. “He might have recognized that her confusion was something other than what they were pretending it was, namely Alzheimer’s.”
“I’ll let him know,” Dave said. “Tell him that he should probably have his mother checked out.”