Read Online Hand of Evil by J. A. Jance - Free Book Online

right, but not Crystal. Roxie called me about it just a little while ago.”
    Listening to the news, Ali took a hit in the guilt department. She had been so caught up in her own miseries that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her friend’s difficulties. The last Ali remembered Dave’s kids had still been living in Lake Havasu with their mother and her new husband. She had no recollection about them having moved to Vegas.
    How come I didn’t know about any of this? What kind of a friend am I? Ali wondered.
    “How long has Crystal been gone?” Ali asked.
    Dave’s face was bleak. “Since early this morning,” he said. “Rich dropped her off at school, but she never showed up for any of her classes.”
    “A twelve-year-old truant on her own in Vegas?” Ali asked. Not good, she thought. Not good at all!
    “They’ve issued an Amber Alert,” Dave continued. “But only just now—an hour or so ago. Somehow the school didn’t notify Roxie that Crystal wasn’t at school, and nobody worried when she didn’t show up at home as soon as school was out. When it comes to parental supervision, Roxie runs a pretty loose ship. Until it was almost bedtime, everyone assumed Crystal was off at a friend’s house. And she’s thirteen, by the way,” Dave added. “Not twelve. Just turned. Her birthday was last week. I’m terrified thinking about what might happen to her, and with a twelve-hour head start, she could be anywhere by now.”
    Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away—a drive of a little under five hours. The way Dave looked right then, he could probably make the trip in far less time than that. Ali stood up, brought the pizza box over from the counter, and offered him some. Absently he took a slice of the cooled pie and bit into it.
    “If all this is happening in Vegas, what are you still doing here?” Ali asked. “I would have thought you’d be on your way by now.”
    “Roxie asked me not to come,” Dave replied. “Told me not to, actually. She said she had enough on her plate right now without having to worry about me showing up and making things worse.”
    “But you’re a cop,” Ali objected. “How could you possibly make things worse?”
    “You’d be surprised,” Dave said grimly. “You don’t know Gary, her jerk of a husband.”
    Ali didn’t know Gary Whitman personally, but what little she knew about the man wasn’t good. He had been new to town—a hotshot time-share salesman—when he had taken up with Roxanne Holman, wining and dining her while Dave was off doing his second tour of duty with the reserves in Iraq. The affair had started then. The actual divorce hadn’t happened until months later, after Dave got back home from his deployment.
    Just being divorced had been hard enough on Dave, but the previous fall, when Roxanne and Gary had moved from Sedona to Lake Havasu and taken the kids with them, Dave had been devastated. Ali vaguely remembered Dave mentioning that there had been trouble of one kind or another with Gary’s employment situation in Lake Havasu, but that was all she could recall. She had no idea that another move had occurred, and right that minute, none of that seemed particularly important.
    “Forget about Gary Whitman,” Ali said now. “He doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out where Crystal could have disappeared to and why. And how do we go about bringing her back home?”
    “I suppose Roxie’s right in a way about wanting me to stay here,” Dave admitted. “I can make more inquiries—official inquiries, that is—by going through channels on this end than I could as boots on the ground in Nevada, where I’d be outside my jurisdiction.”
    Ali knew from personal experience that being outside his jurisdiction hadn’t kept Dave Holman from riding to Ali’s rescue when she had needed his help in California a few months earlier. Surely, with his own daughter at risk, there could be no question now about what he should do.
    “You