Minor in Possession Read online

  Dedication

  To Dick and Cynthia,

  with whom we share

  far more than an anniversary

  and

  To St. Thomas,

  who brought the words home to us

  Contents

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by J. A. Jance

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER

  1

  It was ten to eleven, almost time for lights-out. Mad as hell and far too wound up to sleep, I lay in the October chilled darkness of my authentically rustic cabin listening to a new squall of rain drum a wild tattoo on the noisy tin roof. Sunny Arizona my ass!

  Sunny Arizona. That’s what my attorney, Ralph Ames, had told me when he was extolling the virtues of Ironwood Ranch, a posh drug and alcohol rehab establishment that had risen from the ashes of a failed dude ranch outside a small, god-forsaken town called Wickenburg in the wilds of central Arizona.

  I, Detective J. P. Beaumont, a Washington boy born and bred, had never set foot in the state of Arizona until the day I came to Ironwood Ranch. Driving north from Phoenix’s urban sprawl in my rented Grand AM and passing through a forest of grotesque three-and five-armed cactus, I felt like the Alaska Airlines MD-80 had taken a wrong turn and dumped me on some alien planet. I was overwhelmed as much by the empty desolation of the desert as by my reason for being there. And that was before I got a look at Ironwood Ranch itself, before it had rained for three solid days and nights, and before I had met my roommate—Joseph (Joey) Rothman. The little shit.

  I was lying there on the bed, leaning against my lumpy wagon-wheel-motif headboard, and waiting for Joey to come home for the night so I could pin his ears to the back of his head. My whole body ached to get with the program.

  Roommate selection in rehab places is pretty much like that in jails or families—you’re stuck with whatever you get for the duration. The luck of the draw had deposited me in a drafty cabin along with an arrogant nineteen-year-old punk whose attorney had plea-bargained a drunk-driving offense down to a minor-in-possession charge. According to the plea agreement, Rothman’s MIP would be worked off by a six-week stay at Ironwood Ranch with the entire hefty fee payable by the carrier of Joey’s daddy’s health insurance.

  I didn’t know any of that in the beginning. What I will say is that our introductory conversation didn’t exactly get us off to a flying start. Fresh out of the detox wing and still relatively shaky, I was busy unpacking my lone suitcase and trying to settle in when a young man bounded into the cabin, shedding a wet bathing suit as he went and leaving it in a puddle in the middle of the worn hardwood floor. (Ironwood Ranch’s pool, stables, tennis courts, and shuffleboard courts are all holdovers from the old golden days of dude ranching, while the five-man hot tub is an upscale concession calculated to keep the place current with prevailing social practices.)

  “I’m your roommate, Joseph Rothman,” he announced casually. “Joey for short.” He stood in the middle of the room, pulling on first a pair of boxer shorts and then a heavy terry-cloth robe. “You must be the cop,” he added, disappearing into the bathroom.

  His parting remark left me with a sudden lurch in my gut regarding Ironwood Ranch’s ongoing commitment to patient confidentiality.

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  A moment later he reappeared carrying a comb—my tapered barber comb. I regarded his presuming to use my property as a fundamental breach of roommate etiquette. It also violated one of my mother’s fundamental edicts about never sharing combs or brushes with anybody. When I reached out to take it from him, he blithely handed it over, feigning surprise, as though he had picked it up by accident and failed to notice that it wasn’t his.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I musta left mine up in the dressing room. What’s your name?”

  “Beaumont,” I answered. “J. P. Beaumont. People call me Beau.”

  Joseph Rothman was a little less than six feet tall, with the tanned good looks and sun-bleached blond hair of a well-heeled California surfer. Expansive shoulders and a muscled chest topped the narrow waist and hips of a dedicated body builder. My first impression was that he was probably in his mid-twenties. Later I was shocked to discover that he was still one month shy of his twentieth birthday.

  “Where from?” he asked, settling easily onto one of the two monkishly narrow beds that stood against opposite walls. The action spared me having to ask him which bed was mine.

  The frankly appraising look he turned on me was equal parts derision and curiosity, as though I were some kind of laughable old relic that had turned up on a dusty museum shelf. Nothing in either his question or his attitude inspired me to volunteer any extra information.

  “Seattle,” I said tersely.

  The grunted one-word answer kept a lid on a growing urge to explain that I was a homicide cop who had been busting punks like him since well before he was born. Instead, I concentrated all my attention on sorting a tangle of hastily packed socks into matching pairs. Almost. I ended up with two extras, one blue and one black, that didn’t match anything.

  Joey Rothman leaned against the wall, still watching me and making me painfully aware of the slight but uncontrollable trembling in my hands. The detox nurse had told me the shakes might last for several more days. I held onto the edge of the drawer, hoping the involuntary quiver wasn’t too noticeable.

  “What are you in for, booze or drugs?” he asked.

  “Booze,” I answered carefully. “What about you?”

  Joey Rothman gave me an insolent, half-assed grin—a braggart’s grin. “Me,” he said. “Man, I do it all.”

  Right that minute, I could cheerfully have murdered Ralph Ames for convincing me to check into Ironwood Ranch in the first place. He was the one who had forced me to take my doctor’s diagnosis of liver damage seriously.

  But at that precise moment, with Joey Rothman sitting there on the edge of his bed smirking at me, for two lousy cents I would have shit-canned the whole idea, signed myself right back out, gotten into that little rented Grand AM down in the parking lot, and driven off into the sunset. Unfortunately, I’m a stubborn man. I pride myself in never starting something unless I plan to finish it. No matter what. Including having to put up with nosy punk kids.

  Slowly I closed both the drawer and the empty suitcase. With the case in hand, I turned away from the dresser expecting to meet Joey Rothman’s gaze. To my relief I found that he had dismissed me and was totally absorbed in examining the flat plane of his belly, a portion of his anatomy which he regarded with obvious relish.

  “Did you know they’ve got a weight room and hot tub out by the tennis courts?” he asked.

  “So I’ve heard,” I replied without enthusiasm. Exercise of any kind isn’t a great turn-on for me, and as far as hot tubs go, I prefer the privacy of the upholstered two-seater in the bathroom of my penthouse condominium at Belltown Terrace in Seattle.

  I went to the room’s single closet and boosted my empty suitcase up onto the unoccupied
half of the top shelf. Shoving my quivering hands deep in my pockets, I returned to my own single-level bunk bed and perched on the edge of the thin mattress with its squeaky layer of springs.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “As little as possible, and that’s the truth.” He gave a short laugh. “It’s not bad,” he added.

  “What’s not bad?”

  “This place. Food’s pretty good, considering, and the trim you can get around here is awesome.”

  “Trim?” I asked stupidly, thinking he must be talking about either weight lifting or haircuts.

  “You know, dude, women. I mean, there’s so much free stuff floating around here loose that they ought to rename the place Mustang Ranch II. You do know about Mustang Ranch, don’t you?”

  Of course I knew about Mustang Ranch. Who the hell didn’t? No heterosexual male over the age of puberty hasn’t heard about Nevada’s most infamous brothel, but I resented Rothman’s youthful condescension and I bridled at the thought of being demoted back into the ranks of high school locker room sexploit bullshit. We weren’t dealing with a generation gap here. This was a genuine, full-blown generation void.

  “I understand they charge,” I responded dryly, but my sarcasm flew right over Joey Rothman’s head.

  “Like I said,” he continued, “it’s awesome. All you have to do is be up for it, if you know what I mean.”

  He grinned again, and gave me a sly man-to-man wink. And that was the second time that afternoon that I wanted to murder Ralph Ames.

  That opening conversation had taken place three and a half weeks earlier. I had spent one frustrating session with Louise Crenshaw, Ironwood Ranch’s no-nonsense Director of Client Affairs, pleading with her to let me move to another cabin and/or trade roommates with somebody else, but she had been adamant.

  “Absolutely not. Learning to get along with all kinds of people without chemical assistance is a very important part of your recovery,” she had told me icily, and that was that. No plea bargains accepted, at least not for me.

  Since then, I had gotten along with Joey Rothman mostly by avoiding him, except when absolutely necessary at mealtimes or during the required group grope sessions. I heard some rumors to the effect that he had been dealing drugs both before and during his enforced stay at Ironwood Ranch, but I didn’t pay that much attention one way or the other. It was, after all, none of my business.

  Joey obligingly spent very little time in our cabin. When he did happen to be there, usually before meals, he spent his time absorbed in writing in a cloth-covered notebook. I assumed he was keeping a journal, one I figured reeked with post-pubescent sexual conquests. I much preferred him confining those overblown locker room exploits to the privacy of his diary rather than discussing them with me. In the evenings he was almost always out, tiptoeing into our cabin long after lights-out each night like some randy caterwauling tomcat.

  A fifteen-year-old girl named Michelle had come into treatment at about the same time I did, on the same day in fact. I had thought for a while that Joey was actually sweet on her, if someone as screwed up as he was ever got sweet on anybody, but tonight I had been forced to revise that assessment.

  And that revision was precisely why I was waiting up for him. It was the middle of my fourth week of treatment, Family Week, as they call it at Ironwood Ranch. It’s the one week out of six when a client’s family members are invited to come stay for five days to tell what they know about the client’s past behavior and to make a stab at beginning their own recovery.

  My own family, such as it is—two nearly grown children and my ex-wife Karen—were all three in attendance. As a consequence, you could say that my stress levels were up. Off the charts is more like it. In the ten years since our divorce, it was the first time I had seen Karen face-to-face.

  The counselors at Ironwood Ranch must be some kind of salesmen. They had somehow managed to convince her that it was not only her duty but also in her own best interests to leave her new husband at home in Cucamonga, California, attending to the accounting needs of a chicken-ranching conglomerate, and come to Arizona along with Kelly and Scott to help confront me with all my sins remembered.

  Earlier that afternoon, during a stormy group session, Karen had detailed to my chemically dependent peers and their visiting family members all the relevant gory details (at least the details she felt were relevant) about how too much work and too much MacNaughton’s on my part had caused her to fall in love with another man and to have to get a divorce.

  I had spent a miserable two hours in what we clients—there are no patients at Ironwood Ranch, only clients—refer to as the hot-seat. I had to sit there silently, with no opportunity for reply or rebuttal, and endure an emotional bloodletting, listening to a familiar litany of holiday meals missed or ruined, of things left undone that should have been done, of people I loved who had felt neglected and cheated because I had been too busy doing and being what I thought I was supposed to do and be.

  After dinner I was still licking my emotional wounds. Karen and I were sitting on a couch in front of the roaring fire in the main hall, talking quietly, and doing a relatively rational postmortem on our marriage. Our son Scott, a serious-minded sophomore at Stanford, had gone back to the motel to study, and daughter Kelly had left the dinner table saying she was going off to the rec center with some of the younger people to play a game of Ping-Pong.

  Things were going fairly well until I caught a glimpse of Joey Rothman standing on the patio outside the window. He had paused there while he planted a lingering kiss on the face of whoever happened to be with him. Only when he hurried away and left her standing alone did I realize that the kissee was none other than my own daughter Kelly—my seventeen-year-old daughter Kelly.

  Trim indeed!

  I went outside looking for him right then, ready to tear him limb from limb in typically fatherly fashion. Naturally Joey Rothman was nowhere to be found, and naturally Kelly and I got in a big beef about the incident that escalated into Karen and me being drawn into a verbal shouting match as well. Louise Crenshaw had wandered past the melee and had given me a look of unqualified disapproval. Karen and Kelly left in a huff a few minutes later, and I went back to the cabin to smolder and wait.

  Eleven o’clock came and went but still no Joey Rothman. That was all right. I was prepared to wait however long it took. Half an hour later, the rain died down. In the sudden quiet I heard approaching footsteps. They seemed to be coming down the path from the main hall. Joey’s and my cabin was the last one at the very end of the path. As the footsteps came past the final pair of neighboring cabins, I was sure my time had come.

  Joey’s usual pattern was to sneak into the cabin barefoot, carrying his shoes like some errant husband, and to get into bed without turning on the light. Tonight I planned a slight variation on that theme. I was just sitting up and groping for the switch on the bedside lamp when the cabin door crashed open, sending the doorknob banging into the wall behind it. Before I could find the lamp’s switch, the overhead chandelier with its eight-bulbed wagon wheel flashed on in my face.

  “You son of a bitch,” I began as I scrambled to put both feet on the floor. Halfway out of bed I stopped, looked again, and froze where I was.

  The panting man standing in the open doorway with his eyes bulging and his face a mask of undiluted fury wasn’t Joey Rothman at all.

  CHAPTER

  2

  “Where the hell is he?” the man demanded savagely.

  “Where is who?”

  “Don’t play games. Rothman, that’s who!”

  I recognized the man instantly as the father of Michelle, the mousey fifteen-year-old druggie. Because we had been admitted at approximately the same time, it was Michelle’s family week as well as mine. I remembered the man from the family group sessions, an integral part of treatment, which are counselor-moderated discussions involving both clients and family members. I recalled that Guy Owens worked as some kind of honcho, a high-ranking off
icer, at one of the military installations in Arizona. His name surfaced, but the rest of the family details escaped me. During Group that week I had been far too engrossed in my own family’s difficulties to pay much attention to anybody else’s.

  “Tell me where he is,” Owens growled.

  He must have figured I was personally concealing Joey Rothman from him. He took another menacing step into the room. Half sitting half lying on the bed, I was in no position to defend myself against attack if he chose to come after me with physical force.

  “He’s out,” I said curtly, “and if you’re coming in, do you mind shutting the door behind you? It’s cold as blue blazes.”

  The timely invocation of good manners has stopped more than one unwelcome intruder in his tracks. Guy Owens was no exception. He paused uncertainly, glancing from me back over his shoulder toward the open door.

  “What’s the matter?” I continued, pressing the slight advantage. “Were you born in a barn?”

  Without a word Guy Owens returned to the door and slammed it shut. The action gave me just enough time to get both feet firmly on the floor before he swung back around and hurried over to the open bathroom door. He went so far as to walk inside and pull back the shower curtain.

  “He’s not in there, either,” I said. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “I want Rothman,” he snapped. “And when I find him, I’m going to tear his balls off and stuff them down his throat.”

  Too bad I hadn’t thought of that myself. “Sounds like a great idea,” I said cheerfully, “but you’ll have to take a number and get in line. Mind switching off the light? It’s after eleven. If the night nurse sees it, she’ll come riding down here on her broom and kick ass.”