Credible Threat Read online

  “No,” David had replied. “I don’t.”

  He packed up his things that very night and moved out of the house. As far as Rachel knew, he’d never again stepped inside a classroom. He’d held a series of menial jobs, but mostly he’d hung out and done drugs, drifting deeper and deeper into that world until there was no coming back. A heartbroken Rachel had tried reaching out to him from time to time, insisting that they help with rehab. Rich had stayed clear. Once David was dead, Rachel had the advantage of having already processed some of her grief. Rich, on the other hand, had been utterly broken. Paralyzed with guilt and unable to cope at work or at home, he’d fallen into an endless downward spiral and had been stuck there ever since.

  Rachel unfolded the jacket and held it up to her face, hoping that some trace of David’s scent might linger in the fabric. It did not. All she smelled was dust with just a hint of motor oil in the background. Laying the jacket aside, she returned to the box. Next up were a few shirts, two worn pairs of Levi’s, and a broken-down pair of Nikes. At the bottom of the box, she found the odds and ends Tonya had mentioned.

  The first of those was the photo from Disneyland. Rachel picked it up and studied it for a long while. David had been seven at the time—the perfect age to go to Disneyland—and the trip really had been one of their best ever. The photo featured David and Rachel standing together, posed in front of the iconic entrance to the Magic Kingdom. All these years later, Rachel was struck by the fact that his happy grin was marred by his missing front teeth.

  Her eyes filling with tears, Rachel returned to the box. All that remained were the class ring and a copy of the 2001 St. Francis High School yearbook, The Clarion.

  Two thousand one had been David’s senior year, and the swim team had been the center of his existence. Since St. Francis had won the state swimming competition title that year, it was hardly surprising that when Rachel held the book in her hand, it opened almost of its own accord to a page featuring the swim team in the sports section near the back of the book. The shock of what she saw there took Rachel’s breath away. There was a full-page photo of the ten members of the team along with their coach, Father Paul Needham. The boys, grinning for the camera, all wore their swim trunks. As for the priest? He was fully dressed, but above his white dog collar every feature of his face had been blacked out with a Sharpie.

  In that instant and despite all the vodka Rachel had consumed, she found herself stone-cold sober, because for the first time in so many years she finally had some inkling of the reality of what had happened to her beloved son. And that’s when the tears came.

  She and Rich had always wanted only the best for their David. That was why he had attended parochial schools. That’s why they had coughed up the tuition to let him attend St. Francis High, and yet all their good intentions had backfired on them. In wanting to give David everything, they’d given him worse than nothing. Rich and Rachel had failed their son, and the Catholic Church had failed the whole family. In 2010, nine years after graduating from high school, a drug-addicted David Higgins was declared dead at age twenty-six. Ever since, Rachel had agonized over wondering why.

  Years after David’s death, there’d been a huge scandal when Needham was arrested as a pedophile. She had recognized Father Needham’s name, of course, and remembered that he’d been David’s swim-team coach, but not once had it ever occurred to her that David might have been one of Needham’s victims. If he had been, wouldn’t he have mentioned it to his own mother?

  She’d been mystified when, during his last two years in high school, her once happy-go-lucky son had pulled away from her and turned into a difficult, brooding teenager who hid out in his room in much the same way his father currently hung out in his garage. David had shut her out, and now she knew why.

  The storm of fury that followed rocked Rachel to her core. At last, spent with weeping, she dried her tears, repacked the banker’s box with David’s things, and then steeled herself for the grim task ahead. One way or another, she would have her revenge. Someone needed to be held responsible for David’s death, and if God wouldn’t smite them, she would.

  |CHAPTER 1|

  On a bright Monday morning in late June, Ali Reynolds and her husband, B. Simpson, sat drinking coffee on the patio outside the master bedroom of their Sedona home.

  “Okay,” he said. “The party’s over, so time’s up. Are you coming to London with me or not?”

  The party in question had been a garden-party homecoming event for current and past recipients of Amelia Dougherty Askins scholarships, aimed specifically at students attending Verde Valley schools. When Ali had been a senior at Cottonwood High, she was among the first students to be awarded one of those, thus enabling her to attend college, something that would otherwise have been beyond her reach. She’d gotten a degree in journalism that had allowed her to pursue an award-winning career as a television newscaster. When that had fallen apart, she returned home to Sedona, Arizona, to regroup. Sometime later she found herself in charge of the scholarship program from which she herself had once benefited.

  Yesterday’s afternoon tea had been in the works long before Alexandra Munsey, one of Ali’s good friends from her L.A. news-anchor days, had been brutally murdered in her home outside San Bernardino. In the aftermath of Alex’s death, Ali, along with several members of B.’s cybersecurity firm, High Noon Enterprises, had been sucked into the vortex of a homicide investigation.

  Alex and Ali had both led complicated past lives. Maybe that’s part of what had created such a strong bond between them. Their lives had crashed and burned at about the same time, and they’d both reinvented themselves afterward. At the time of her death, Alex had been on the cusp of a blossoming literary career. The novel that had been published within days of her death was a huge success and had made the New York Times list several weeks in a row. Maybe that was one of the reasons Alex’s homicide had hit Ali so hard. Death had forever denied Alex the critical and literary accolades she so richly deserved.

  As for Alex’s killers? Hannah Gilchrist, one of the people responsible, was dead of natural causes. The other conspirators were either already incarcerated on other charges or in jail awaiting trial, but Ali knew that it would take years of court proceedings before justice was finally served—if ever. Even so, there would be no eye for an eye here. No matter what the final outcome was in some California courtroom, nothing would ever bring Alex Munsey back. She would never live to see her precious grandson grow up, graduate from high school, go off to college, marry, or have a child of his own. She would never have the opportunity to write and publish another book. No, her untimely death had destroyed all those potential outcomes, and the unbearable finality of that was wearing Ali down.

  Weeks earlier she had risen to the challenge, traveled to L.A., and stood up to speak at Alex’s funeral, but back home it had been all she could do to go through with the party. The food had been catered by one of the scholarship fund’s food-science graduates, and B. and Ali’s new majordomo, Alonzo Rivera, had sorted out most of the physical details. Still, it had taken real effort on Ali’s part to simply dress up, put on a happy face, and go forth to welcome her guests. Once the party had ended, late in the afternoon, she’d been on the verge of collapse.

  B. was due to attend an international cybersecurity conference in London at the end of the week. Days earlier he’d invited Ali to come along, with the added incentive that they’d be able to see a play or two in the West End and maybe spend a couple of days hiking in the Cotswolds once the conference ended.

  “Come on,” he’d said. “It’ll be good for what ails you. We’ve got a full team on board to look after things in your absence.”

  If B. had expected an enthusiastic affirmative, it wasn’t forthcoming. “Maybe,” she’d told him back then. “Let me get through the garden party first.”

  “I just checked with BA,” he added. “There are still a couple of first-class seats on my flight. Shall I book one for you?”

  Ali had stalled him on the subject earlier, but now, with the party in the rearview mirror, it was time for her to give him a final answer.

  “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “I’ll come along, but I’m not sure I’ll be very good company. When do we leave?”

  “Wednesday,” he replied. “Wednesday afternoon.”

  “Sorry,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “I guess I’m acting like an ungrateful, spoiled brat.”

  “You are,” B. agreed with a smile while reaching across the table to take her hand. “But at least you’re my spoiled brat, and you’ve been through one hell of an ordeal.”

  “Thank you,” Ali replied. “Maybe a change of scenery is just what the doctor ordered.”

  |CHAPTER 2|

  On a Monday morning in late June, Francis Gillespie, archbishop of the Phoenix Archdiocese, fled the air-conditioned chill of his study for the welcome warmth of his shaded outdoor patio. An eight-foot-tall stuccoed wall surrounded the residence itself, while a chain-link fence augmented by an impenetrable hedge of twenty-foot-tall oleanders lined the perimeter of the entire property. Looking over the back hedge, the archbishop could see the craggy red expanse of Camelback Mountain looming large against a hazy blue sky. To the front, the wall and hedges combined to shield the property from the rush of city traffic speeding past on East Lincoln Drive. Inside that green barrier, however, the manicured grounds of the archbishop’s residence constituted a whole other world.

  The archbishop loved sitting here on his quiet patio, surveying his lush domain. Because the residence had its own private well, water was not an issue. There was grass, plenty of hardy, thick-bladed St. Augustine. There were raised beds scattered here and there, all of them alive with riots of vivid color from blooming petunias and
snapdragons. Most of the palm trees on neighboring properties had been stripped bare of their skirts, but that wasn’t the case here. Every year the gardener came to the archbishop begging to be allowed to whack off the palm trees’ masses of hanging dead limbs, and each year he was overruled. Those dead palm fronds provided habitats for any number of flying creatures—a flicker or two, a woodpecker, and whole squadrons of bats. Several rock doves resided there, along with a pair of house finches who migrated back and forth between the trees and the bubbling fountain at the foot of the patio.

  The archbishop had moved his old bones out of the air-conditioned residence to warm them in the welcome heat of the outdoors, but he’d brought his work with him. His Holiness at the Vatican might have taken exceedingly strong positions on things like climate change and reducing carbon footprints, but Archbishop Gillespie had seen no reduction in the amount of tree-based paperwork that flowed like a gigantic river in and out of the Holy See. After being sidelined by ill health for the better part of two months, the archbishop regarded the incoming missives as more of a flood than a river.

  In late March something the archbishop had tried to pass off as a minor cold had soon morphed into a full-blown case of bronchial pneumonia. He had spent close to three weeks in the ICU at the Mayo Clinic Hospital south of the 101 Loop and another four weeks confined to their rehab facility. The exceedingly young doctors had warned him that at his age—eighty-six, going on eighty-seven—he was lucky to still be “on the right side of the grass” and that his recovery would be a “long, slow process.”

  That was certainly proving to be true. To his dismay, Francis still had to rely on a walker to get around, and the previous night, while trying to push his way through another stack of paperwork, he’d fallen asleep at his desk and had awakened a full three hours later. He was making better progress in the paperwork department now, but with a noontime appointment looming he wasn’t going to come close to reaching the bottom of the pile.

  At that moment the patio slider opened and Father Daniel McCray, Archbishop Gillespie’s private secretary, stepped outside.

  “Excuse me, Your Grace, but one of your luncheon guests has arrived early and would like a word.”

  Father Daniel and Archbishop Gillespie had worked together on a daily basis for a decade and a half. Although the archbishop might have welcomed a bit of informality between them on occasion, Father Daniel always maintained the proper amount of distance and decorum.

  Archbishop Gillespie removed his reading glasses and set his paperwork aside. Back when he’d been a parish priest, his flock had been his parishioners. Once he was appointed archbishop of the Phoenix Archdiocese, his flock had become the priests and nuns who do the hands-on work of spreading the Gospel. Some archbishops tended to isolate themselves and stay far above the fray. That was not Archbishop Gillespie’s modus operandi.

  He understood the essential loneliness of living the godly life. A shepherd is there to guide and protect his sheep, not to befriend them. As a result priests were always set apart from their parishioners. While serving as both bishop and archbishop, Francis Gillespie had loved the camaraderie of meeting with others of his own ilk—men who knew the joys and burdens of doing God’s holy work. While still a young priest, he had formed long-lasting friendships with several of the men he’d met at those early church gatherings, one of whom was now a cardinal.

  Francis wasn’t a political animal. At the time of his appointment, there’d been two warring factions inside the Phoenix Archdiocese. Considered to be a natural outsider, he had been promoted from within for that exact reason—because he wasn’t a member of either clique. He had risen through the priesthood by dint of being both smart and direct. If he saw a problem, he didn’t care to sit around endlessly jawing about it; he wanted to fix it. As a consequence, early in his tenure as archbishop, he’d made himself available to his flock by hosting monthly luncheons for the priests in his charge. The gatherings, held in his residence, were certainly not mandatory, but they were always widely attended, as much for the delicious food provided by Father Andrew, the archbishop’s cook, as for the fellowship engendered by simply being together.

  The archbishop’s luncheons were customarily held on the last Monday of the month—Mondays being the one day of the week when priests might reasonably take a day off. The luncheons allowed his far-flung clerics to socialize and come to know one another. For Francis Gillespie the gatherings allowed him to keep his finger on the pulse of his flock. Since the previous two luncheons had been scrapped due to his illness, the expectation was that this one would be especially well attended, and Father Andrew had been cooking up a storm for days.

  “Which priest?” Archbishop Gillespie asked.

  “Father Winston from Prescott,” Father Daniel replied.

  Father Jonathan Winston was one of the newer priests in Archbishop Gillespie’s fold. He was a Gulf War veteran who had gone to seminary and joined the priesthood after three separate deployments to the Middle East. In addition to serving as the priest at St. Mary’s in Prescott, Father Winston did a good deal of chaplaincy work at his local VA hospital. He and the archbishop had carried on many long conversations about how best to serve veterans dealing with cases of PTSD.

  “Have Father Winston come out here, then,” Francis told Father Daniel. “Once I’ve had a chance to hear what’s on his mind, the two of us will go in to the luncheon together.”

  “Very well,” Father Daniel replied, nodding his assent. He disappeared through the slider and returned a few moments later with Father Winston in tow. Once he had delivered the guest into Archbishop Gillespie’s presence, Father Daniel disappeared inside.

  With the exception of his white collar, Father Winston was dressed all in black, and it occurred to the archbishop that perhaps the younger man wouldn’t find the outside heat nearly as comfortable as Francis did.

  “Your Grace,” Father Winston said, holding out his hand. “It’s good to see that you’re on the mend.”

  “Mending, but not altogether one hundred percent,” the archbishop replied, waving in the general direction of his much-despised walker. “I’m still having to use that confounded thing.”

  “We’ve missed you,” Father Winston said.

  “Thank you,” the archbishop said. “I’ve missed you, too. Have a seat,” he added, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Seating himself at the round patio table, Father Winston withdrew something from his pocket and handed it over. Looking down, Father Gillespie saw a standard offertory envelope. There were designated spaces where parishioners could write in their name, address, and phone number along with the amount of their offering. All those lines had been left blank.

  “What’s this?” Archbishop Gillespie asked.

  “It showed up in the collection plate yesterday when the deacon in charge was sorting the banking deposit. Take a look inside.”

  Archbishop Gillespie opened the envelope and pulled out a folded three-by-five card. On it, handwritten in ink, was the following message:

  HEY, HEY, HO, HO.

  ARCHBISHOP GILLESPIE HAS TO GO!

  Looking up from the message, the archbishop smiled. “I’m sure this reflects the feelings of any number of folks around here who are of the opinion that I’m well past my pull-by date.”

  Father Winston didn’t smile in return. “It sounds like a threat to me,” he said. “And the fact that it was anonymous…”

  “I doubt it’s as serious as all that,” Archbishop Gillespie advised. “What is it they call people like that—the ones who post all kinds of awful things on the Internet under the mask of anonymity?”

  “You mean trolls?” Father Winston asked.

  “That’s it exactly—trolls. Trolls used to hide out under bridges and cause trouble for passersby. Now they hide out behind computer screens or—as in this case—inside an unlabeled offertory envelope, where they can be totally anonymous and feel perfectly free to say any number of appalling things. Hidden behind a curtain like that, they can spit out all kinds of nonsense that they’d never have gumption enough to say directly to someone’s face. If I were you, Father Winston, I wouldn’t give this message another moment’s thought.”