Left for Dead Read online

  PRAISE FOR FATAL ERROR

  “Jance keeps firm control of a believable yet complex plot that spins on contemporary issues of cyber stalking and the economic downturn … the plot never stalls and leads to a logical and exciting finale.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “In her inimitable, take-no-prisoners style … main character Ali manages to disarm.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “A captivating page-turner.”

  —LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR

  “An exciting and carefully fashioned plot, [resolved] with a very satisfying ending.”

  —I LOVE A MYSTERY

  ALI REYNOLDS INVESTIGATES two shocking cases of victims brutally left for dead in New York Times bestselling J.A. Jance’s latest mystery-thriller.

  When Santa Cruz County deputy sheriff Jose Reyes, Ali’s classmate from the Arizona Police Academy, is gunned down and left to die, he is at first assumed to be an innocent victim of the drug wars escalating across the border. But the crime scene investigation shows there’s much more to it than that, and soon he and his pregnant wife, Teresa, both fall under suspicion of wrongdoing.

  Ali owes Reyes a debt of gratitude for the help he gave her years earlier when she was dealing with a troubled friend. When she’s summoned to his bedside at Physicians Medical Center in Tucson, it’s impossible for her to turn away. And knowing Reyes as well as she does, Ali finds it hard to believe that he’s become mixed up in the drug trade, despite evidence to the contrary. Upon arriving at the hospital, Ali finds that her good friend, Sister Anselm, is there, too—working as a patient advocate on behalf of another seriously injured victim, an unidentified young woman presumed to be an illegal border crosser, who was raped and savagely beaten.

  Ali becomes determined to seek justice in both cases and secure safety for both victims. Together with Sister Anselm and a conscientious officer who won’t let the case drop despite pressure from above, Ali digs for clues to find the true culprits.

  Fast-paced, tension-filled, and intriguingly complex, Left for Dead is J.A. Jance at her riveting best.

  J.A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the Ali Reynolds series, the J.P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, and four interrelated southwestern thrillers featuring the Walker family. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

  www.JAJance.com

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  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  ALSO BY J.A. JANCE

  ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

  Edge of Evil

  Web of Evil

  Hand of Evil

  Cruel Intent

  Trial by Fire

  Fatal Error

  JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

  Desert Heat

  Tombstone Courage

  Shoot/Don’t Shoot

  Dead to Rights

  Skeleton Canyon

  Rattlesnake Crossing

  Outlaw Mountain

  Devil’s Claw

  Paradise Lost

  Partner in Crime

  Exit Wounds

  Dead Wrong

  Damage Control

  Fire and Ice

  J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

  Until Proven Guilty

  Injustice for All

  Trial by Fury

  Taking the Fifth

  Improbable Cause

  A More Perfect Union

  Dismissed with Prejudice

  Minor in Possession

  Payment in Kind

  Without Due Process

  Failure to Appear

  Lying in Wait

  Name Withheld

  Breach of Duty

  Birds of Prey

  Partner in Crime

  Long Time Gone

  Justice Denied

  Fire and Ice

  Betrayal of Trust

  WALKER FAMILY MYSTERIES

  Hour of the Hunter

  Kiss of the Bees

  Day of the Dead

  Queen of the Night

  Brought to you by KeVkRaY

  www.bolt.cd

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Touchstone hardcover edition February 2012

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Renata Di Biase

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jance, Judith A.

  Left for dead: a novel / J.A. Jance.—1st Touchstone hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Reynolds, Ali (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Arizona—Fiction. 4. Mexican-American Border Region—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.A44L44 2012

  813'.54—dc23 2011029102

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2858-6 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2862-3 (eBook)

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  LEFT FOR DEAD

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Prologue

  2:00 A.M., Thursday, April 8

  Phoenix, Arizona

  Seventeen-year-old Breeze Domingo lay on a sagging leather couch in a filthy apartment that Thursday morning and tried to slee
p, but sleep eluded her. She tossed and turned and spent the time wishing her life had been different. She wished she had listened to her mother and stepfather and stayed in school. She wished she had never set foot on Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix and discovered how easy it was to make money if you didn’t care what you had to do to get it. And she wished she had never hooked up with Chico Hernández.

  Some of the other girls had warned her to stay away from him, but Chico was a smooth operator. When she first met him, she’d been new to the life, a fourteen-year-old runaway living on the streets. Chico was the one who had told her what she wanted to hear—that she was beautiful and that he would take care of her. That was the day a john had busted her in the jaw rather than fork over his money. Chico had taken her to urgent care and waited while she got stitched up. After that she owed him. After that she was his. She had ditched her given name of Rose in favor of becoming Breeze Domingo. Three years later, she still was.

  In a way, Chico was like Breeze’s stepfather: As long as she did as he said and didn’t give him backtalk, they got along fine. For a while everything seemed A-OK with Chico, too. His girls stayed in three apartments in a not too rundown building near downtown Phoenix. All she had to do to earn her keep was put out on demand and turn over whatever money she earned to Chico. Breeze noticed that girls who tried to short him in the money department tended to disappear without a trace, so she made sure she paid him every last cent.

  But then Chico got in some kind of money trouble. The girls who had lived in three separate apartments now found themselves crammed into one. Premium cable TV went away right after the two additional apartments. The food got worse. So did the clothing. That was bad for business, because if the girls didn’t look the part, they didn’t bring in the same kind of cash.

  Having that single apartment made for difficult sleeping arrangements. Four of them shared the two queen-size beds in the bedroom with one sleeping solo on the sagging leather couch in the living room. That night Breeze’s john had been old and drunk. He couldn’t get it up. When he passed out, she had left him in his room at the Hyatt and caught a cab back to the apartment, where she had arrived early enough to lay claim to the couch.

  The place was a disgusting mess, with dirty dishes piled in the sink; with fast-food containers and leftovers covering every surface, attracting swarms of cockroaches that scurried out of sight when the lights came on; with clothes strewn everywhere; with garbage and trash cans overflowing. At first, remembering her stepfather’s amazingly clean house in Buckeye, Breeze had tried to clean up and make the others do their share, but she finally gave up. Chico didn’t care. As long as the girls showed up for work clean, smelling good, and ready for action, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the squalor they lived in.

  Tonight, when sleep wouldn’t come, Breeze thought about home, her real home, less than twenty miles but forever away.

  It was hard to remember how life had been back then, when she was an innocent but rebellious girl named Rose Ventana. She had run away when her mother’s new husband, Jimmy, had taken a look at her report card. Once he discovered she was flunking four subjects, he immediately canceled plans for her quinceañera celebration. First he returned the dress, a gorgeous thing and the only formal dress she had ever owned. Then, even though he’d already put down money for the caterer and the DJ, Jimmy canceled those, too, losing his deposits in the process. When Rose objected, Jimmy told her that the traditional party in honor of the fifteenth birthday was a privilege, not a right, and that she hadn’t kept her part of the bargain.

  It was true. Jimmy had warned her back in September when school started that if she wanted the party, she had to keep up her grades, help out with her younger sisters, and be home by curfew—ten o’clock on school nights; midnight on weekends. Rose’s problem was she thought he was bluffing, the same way her mother, Connie, usually bluffed back when she was a single mother trying to raise three daughters on her own with the slim income she earned working part-time and irregular hours in a series of tattoo parlors.

  Life with Connie alone had been one of not enough food and plenty of empty promises and equally empty threats. By the end of her long odd-hour workdays, Connie was too worn out by keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to carry through on anything she said. The three girls had learned to function in a world where no one kept their word or did what they said they’d do.

  Then James Fox, an electronics engineer who worked at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, had shown up in their lives. He had come to the tattoo parlor, where Connie Ventana had inked a bright red fox on his arm. The next week he came back for another tattoo. Before Rose and her sisters knew what was happening, their mother had up and married the guy. Jimmy, as he told Connie’s girls to call him, was someone who always did exactly what he said. He had promised them braces for their teeth, and he had delivered. He had moved them from the small Section 8 apartment that was all Connie could afford into his spacious air-conditioned home in Buckeye, where they had a heated pool to swim in and where Rose and her sisters each had a room.

  In Jimmy’s house, there was always plenty of food on the table. Rose and her sisters had new clothes to wear to school without having to shop at the Salvation Army thrift store. They no longer had to face the humiliation of eating “free” lunches at school, which every kid in the universe understands aren’t really free at all. From that point of view, Rose’s life had improved immeasurably when Foxy, as her mother liked to call him, became part of the family equation.

  As far as Rose was concerned, however, all those improvements had come with a very steep price. Jimmy expected Connie’s girls to mind; to be respectful; to listen to their mother; not to talk back; to do their homework; to do chores around the house. Three years later, a prostitute named Breeze Domingo could see that all Jimmy had done was try to impose some order on a chaotic family that had little to none before his arrival on the scene.

  To the oldest child in the family, the sudden introduction of structure and discipline was something of a shock. Rose Ventana had been used to playing substitute parent to her younger sisters, and she resented the loss of authority a lot more than she appreciated the loss of responsibility.

  Jimmy had told her he wanted to give her a chance to be a girl again, but she hadn’t understood what he meant at the time, and she hadn’t valued it, either. Now that she finally did realize what he had been trying to do, it was too late. She had been on the streets for too long even to think of going home. She had seen what happened to girls who tried to get out of the life. They usually didn’t make it because their so-called families no longer wanted them.

  A year earlier, while flipping through the channels on the second anniversary of the day she ran away, Breeze had been shocked to come across her parents being interviewed on a local television newscast. They both looked a lot older than she remembered. There were deep lines around her mother’s eyes and dark shadows under them that Breeze had never seen before. All through the news segment, Jimmy had stood next to Connie, looking sad and patting his wife’s shoulder encouragingly while she spoke into the microphones and cameras, asking anyone with knowledge of her daughter’s whereabouts to please come forward.

  Nobody did, because no one in Breeze’s present life knew or even guessed who she once was. Rose Ventana had been replaced. Even before she changed her name, Rose had changed her looks. One of the first things she did when she landed on Van Buren Street was to dye her hair. With her naturally tanned skin, she made a convincing and striking blonde. She was also young and on her own in a very rough part of town. That made her a target, and Chico Hernández was the guy who had come to her rescue.

  As part of Chico’s stable, Rose was rechristened with the name Breeze. Chico liked his girls to have unusual and often weather-related names: Breeze, Stormy, Dawn, Rain, Sunny. Weird names aside, working for Chico wasn’t such a bad thing. His girls were regarded as call girls rather than whores, and he forked over the money n
eeded for them to dress the part. He had a particular clientele made up of guys who liked their partners to be girls, the younger the better, and Chico had people who usually handled the “bookings.”

  Rose had always been self-conscious about being underendowed in the boob department, but in her new line of work, being small was an advantage. It made it easy for Chico to pass her off as several years younger than she was, and Breeze had the added advantage of being pretty. The braces her stepfather paid for served her in good stead. In a business where lots of the competition came with meth mouth, Breeze’s mouthful of straight white teeth offered yet another mark in her favor.

  Breeze had been a part of Chico’s team for three years, but tonight she found herself wishing she were back in Buckeye in a clean room with clean sheets and with nothing to do the next morning except get up and go to school.

  At last she managed to fall asleep. All her roommates were home and sleeping when Breeze’s cell phone rang at nine A.M.

  “Okay,” Chico said. “I’ve got you a date in Fountain Hills. Meet me down in the lobby at ten. And don’t tell the other girls where you’re going.”

  An hour later, with her roommates still sawing logs, it was easy for Breeze to do as she was told. She hurried downstairs without saying a word to anyone and found Chico waiting out front in his aging Lincoln Town Car. He gave her an appraising look as she climbed into the front seat.