Free Cruel Intent by J. A. Jance

one. According to my mother, everyone in town has already decided he’s the guilty party.”
    Leland shook his head. “I’d hate to think he would be capable of that kind of thing. Then again, I know for a fact that you can’t always tell what someone is capable of, even if you think you know them.”
    Ali knew he was thinking about Arabella Ashcroft. Her seemingly normal appearance had belied the fact that she was a remorseless serial killer.
    Before Ali could reply, tires sounded on the driveway. She looked up to see Bryan Forester’s pickup truck come to a stop near the garage. As Bryan strode toward her, Ali hurried to meet him. Not surprisingly, the look on the man’s face was grim.
    “That’s Dave Holman’s car, isn’t it?” he asked. “What’s he doing here?”
    “Asking questions about whether or not you were here yesterday, which you were,” Ali said.
    “Great,” Bryan said. “Just what I needed, having him going around to all my jobs asking questions.”
    “But what are you doing here?” Ali asked. “Your guys are doing a great job on their own. After what happened yesterday, I would have thought—”
    “We need to talk,” Bryan interrupted. “In private.”

CHAPTER 4

    W ith a discreet but understanding nod in their direction, Leland disappeared into his fifth wheel. Ali led Bryan over to the canopy-covered table. “What about?” she asked.
    Bryan sighed and ran one hand over his eyes as though he couldn’t imagine where to begin. “It’s about your cabinets,” he said.
    “The kitchen cabinets?” Ali asked. “What about them?”
    “Since it seems likely that I’m going to have to be off track for a while, I was trying to line up materials so the guys could keep on working and we can finish up the jobs that are already in process,” Bryan said. “I’m self-employed. If the jobs don’t get finished, I don’t get paid, which means I’ll probably end up firing my crews and declaring bankruptcy. With the drywall going up, I knew it was only a matter of days before we’d be ready to install your cabinets. I noticed yesterday that they hadn’t been delivered yet, so I called to check. The person I talked to said she’d look into it. Today she called me back to say that they were never ordered.”
    “Not ordered?” Ali asked. “How can that be? I distinctly remember giving you a check. You said I needed to pay half at the time we ordered and the remainder when they were delivered and installed.”
    “That’s right,” Bryan said. “I remember that, too. You did give me a check. So did the people on the other two jobs. All three checks were deposited in the company account, but as far as I can tell, Morgan never faxed the order to the cabinet company. They have no record of it. The good news is that I have a copy of the three files on the laptop in my truck, so at least we don’t have to start over from scratch. I’ve already e-mailed the specs for each of the three jobs to High Design Cabinets. The problem is, they don’t have any record of the payments, even though the money for those three deposits is no longer in my business account.”
    “It’s not there?” Ali asked.
    Bryan shook his head morosely. “None of it.”
    “But that was a lot of money,” Ali objected. “I seem to remember the check I wrote for the cabinet deposit was well over thirty thousand dollars.”
    “Thirty-three nine, to be exact,” Bryan answered. “And the other two orders came to nearly the same amount. One was a little more and the other a little less. Altogether, it comes to right around a hundred thousand.”
    “So where did the money go?” Ali asked. “Maybe your wife simply made a mistake.”
    “I believe I’ve found the money, and it’s no mistake,” Bryan said grimly. “A couple of years ago, when Morgan’s grandmother passed away, she left her daughter a tidy little sum of money. Morgan had always been self-conscious about her figure. We agreed that she’d set that