Free Hand of Evil by J. A. Jance

children are returned to homes like that, it’s often only a matter of time before they bolt once more.
We’re also all too familiar with other endings to this story—horrific instances where missing children disappear and never return home. They simply melt into the ether. Days or weeks or months later their remains are found and identified—close to home or far away. At that point what was once a missing persons case is suddenly transformed into a homicide.
Today a friend’s thirteen-year-old child has gone missing. She never made it to school this morning even though she was dropped off right outside the campus. She wasn’t reported missing until late this evening, a good twelve hours after she was seen walking in the direction of her first morning class. An Amber Alert has been issued, but her father fears too much time may have passed before that happened.
Yes, the clichés are all there. The girl is from a broken family—a divorced family—with the distraught father living in one state and with the mother, children, and new stepfather living in another. Some people are probably thinking this is nothing more than a custody dispute gone bad. But it isn’t that, not at all.
It’s bad enough for families to have to face this kind of crisis when a marriage is solid and intact. It’s even tougher to contemplate doing so when the marriage bond has been severed and the crisis must be faced alone.
And that’s where my friend is tonight—facing the loss of his daughter on his own. His former wife has a new husband, and the two of them are together in this difficult time. My friend is alone—alone and angry; alone and grieving. He came to talk to me earlier this evening. I did what I could to bolster him, but there’s only so much anyone else can do.
I have no idea how these events will sort themselves out in the course of the next few days. If it is a family dispute of some kind and if his daughter has simply run away, she may turn back up on her own when she gets cold enough or hungry enough or even tired enough. But it may turn out that something else is going on here—something more ominous than that. If foul play is involved, it’s likely the story will go public. For right now, and out of deference to my friend’s privacy and that of the other family members, I’m not identifying any of the players. There may come a time when that will change, when posting the missing girl’s information on this Web site may be used as a possible means for bringing her home.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to hope and pray that doesn’t happen.
     
    While the post took its sweet time about uploading, Ali turned to her new mail list. There, along with a mountain of spam, was an e-mail from one of her regulars, Velma Trimble in Laguna Beach, California. Under the name of “Velma T in Laguna” she usually sent correspondence to the comment section of cutlooseblog.com. It was odd for her to write to Ali directly.
     
    Dear Babe,
You’re the only person I can think of to write to tonight. You see, today I went to the doctor to get the results back from the biopsy for the lump on my left breast. It took almost two weeks to get the results back. I don’t know why it takes so long, but today was the day.
I had pretty well prepared myself for the fact that it was going to be bad news, and it was. Since I have a computer, I had gone to the various Web sites and looked up what I could expect in terms of treatment options—surgery, radiation, chemo. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be told not to bother.
“At your age,” this little whippersnapper doctor told me, “there’s really not much point.” He’s probably all of forty-five and he should count himself lucky I didn’t whack him over his head with my walker. The problem is, I can’t get in to see an oncologist without a referral from my primary physician. And if he does give me a referral, what’s he going to say? “Here’s Velma, but don’t bother doing