That was when she began working on this most recent exit strategy. As she had fought her way up from the bottom of the heap, she had been careful not to burn any bridges. She didn’t send out Christmas cards to folks from her old life, but she still knew where useful people were and how to get in touch with them. She remained friends with the people she had enlisted to help dispose of the treasure trove she had lifted from Amos Warren’s storage locker. Even then, she had been smart enough to realize that she was dealing with top-drawer goods. With access to Amos Warren’s little black book, she’d been able to make sure she sold to only the best possible folks.
Ava had started out in the drug trade, back when trafficking had been a wildly profitable freelance operation—back before the cartels got involved and smuggling became a far more dangerous and murderous occupation. She and a girlfriend, or a boyfriend as the case may be, would drive down to Nogales or Naco or Agua Prieta, smile and wave at the customs guy, and be back home with the goods, free and clear, in a jiffy. And she’d always been smart enough at it that she’d never been caught.
Big Bad John Lassiter had been dazzled by her looks. Amos Warren hadn’t. Worried that he might turn her in, she’d taken him off the board. The poor sap had probably thought she was bluffing when he saw the gun pointed at him. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.
The fact that Ava been able to make off with a fortune in artifacts after Amos’s death was nothing more than a happy coincidence, one that she had used to good advantage. The resulting money had made possible a complete makeover, one that had given Ava entrée into one of the top-tier escort services in town. From there it had been only a small step to her first upwardly mobile set of marriage vows.
Over the years, however, she hadn’t crossed any of the useful people from the bad old days off her list. Guys she knew from her earlier drug-dealing exploits—the ones who were still alive, anyway—were easy to find because many of them were still in prison and could lead her to a whole new generation of useful contacts. Someone she had met in her escort-service days had turned into a very capable forger who could, with a few strokes of a pen, turn a blood diamond into a conflict-free one that was good to go for two to three times what she paid for it initially. And that was Ava’s focus these days—smuggling diamonds. Blood diamonds could be bought on the cheap. Certified diamonds went for a bundle, and that was the whole idea—buy cheap and sell high.
Why diamonds? She’d been in the illicit Indian artifact business for a while, but pots were usually too hard to find. Diamonds were easier to come by, and they weighed a lot less. At the moment, nobody, including the cartels, Border Patrol, and the occasional robber, seemed to be looking for diamonds, at least not so far.
A year or so earlier Ava and Harold had been returning to the United States from their condo in San Carlos with a jar full of peanut butter, which Ava had salted with diamonds. South of Nogales, they’d been pulled over by a bunch of gun-toting banditos posing as Federales. The crooks had happily relieved Harold of his wallet and Ava of her purse, making off with close to a thousand bucks in cash, but they had completely missed the diamond-stuffed peanut butter jar sitting in plain sight in the picnic cooler. The crooks hadn’t been any the wiser, and for that matter, neither had Harold.
Ava no longer brought the goods across the border herself; that was far too dangerous these days. Now she had a small crew of worker bees to do that part of the job. She figured it would only take a couple more shipments to have enough to make a break for it as soon as Harold corked off, which might well be sooner than later.
The problem was, she had recently learned that a ghost from her past was about to surface. What she didn’t need right now was anything at all that would call attention to her earlier life. Unfortunately, according to the newspaper that morning, Big Bad John Lassiter’s name was once more in the news. If he ended up back in court, someone might well dig deep enough into the past to learn that a girl named Ava Martin, now Mrs. Harold Richland, had been a prosecution witness in both of John’s previous murder trials. That might be enough to bring her entire enterprise crashing down around her ears. There was no way in hell she was going to let that happen.
Ava’s drink was gone. She was ready for another. Before she got up to pour it, she kicked off her high heels. Most women her age had given up wearing heels by now, but not Ava. Whenever Harold was up and about, she was careful to dress the part. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, he had always raved about Nancy Reagan. In Ava’s continuing effort to give Harold no cause for complaint, she emulated Nancy in every way—right down to the pearls, the chic size four tailored suits, and the high heels. That evening, though, since Harold had already checked out and gone night-night, she let her stockinged feet revel in the lush living room carpeting.
At the bar, Ava refilled her glass—no ice—and stood staring back and forth between the two trophies she had held back when she had sold off Amos Warren’s goods. One was a tiny pot, a miniature olla, that she had kept and treasured from the moment she pulled the cloth-wrapped piece out of Amos Warren’s stolen backpack. The other was a serving-tray-sized flat hunk of limestone with the skeleton of what looked like a crocodile fossilized inside it. That hadn’t come from the backpack. Ava had stolen it from Amos’s house when she’d cleaned that out, too. She wouldn’t have had any idea what it was had Amos not gone to the trouble of sticking a helpful label on the back. Printed in fading but still readable ink on a piece of masking tape were the words Phytosaur, Willcox Playa, 1967, followed by the initials AW.
For some reason, those two pieces had captured Ava’s imagination—the tiny pot and the Gila-monster-sized fossil. After Amos’s death, she had revisited the area around the crime scene numerous times. Johnny had taught her enough about searching for artifacts that she had known to go looking farther upstream, and she had lucked out, finding a whole other treasure trove of unbroken pots. Each of those she’d sold to the highest bidder without a second thought.
But Fito, as she called her fossilized treasure, and the tiny pot were hers to keep, and she had never considered selling either one. Instead, she had displayed them together, in one home after another, as she gradually moved up in the world to ever more upscale digs.
In this house, for instance, high in the Catalinas, Ava kept the olla on a clear glass shelf high above the bar, the humble piece of reddish clay keeping company with Harold’s first wife’s collection of elegant Rosenthal crystal stemware. The rock platter, along with its nightmarish, toothy captive, stood on the counter, propped against the bar’s mirror, where it served as a somewhat fierce background to Harold’s collection of expensive booze.
Taking the pot down from its place on the shelf, Ava stood there for a time, absently tracing the tips of her fingers over the faint image that remained stubbornly etched there—a tortoise and an owl. She often wondered about them—about why those two images had been placed there together. They seemed so different, and yet here they were in some kind of mysterious juxtaposition.
It was as her fingers slid thoughtfully across those mysterious figures that she reached a final conclusion about what she should do—a decision she’d been wrestling with all day long, since the moment she had seen the article in the newspaper.
After all these years, there was a good chance that Big Bad John Lassiter was about to have yet a third trial for a murder Ava herself had committed. She had dodged that bullet the first two times, but what if new information had come to light, especially something that might implicate her?