Healing Sands by Stephen Arterburn, Nancy Rue

don’t know exactly what happened,” I said, “but that Jake is innocent until—” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t even let myself think anything that involved the word guilty . “Just tell them we’re working on finding out the truth.”
    â€œAnd that Alex needs their support.”
    Our heads swiveled to Victoria. Her face was still so unfocused I wasn’t sure she’d actually said it, until Poco breathed, “Right.”
    What had just happened? Whatever it was, I was confused. I chalked it up to the fact that I had no experience with groups of women. I’d always avoided them the same way I eschewed sales and fad diets and department store makeup counters.
    And intended to continue doing so.
    The temperature had dropped to the low sixties by the time Sully stretched out on his back deck on a chaise lounge that left his feet hanging over the end. God had just treated him to a psychedelic sunset, and the sun was now sizzling on the top of the thick adobe wall that surrounded his backyard, preparing to reduce the two gnarled Mexican elder trees to mere silhouettes.
    Sully liked the wild tangle that overtook not only the backyard but the front of his rented house as well. It gave the place a funky look that matched the chipped tile on the porch overhang and the patinaed pink stucco. Every faded blue window frame and gap between the floorboards reminded him of himself at this point. Put together in the past in pieces and trying to come together as a comfortable whole in the present.
    Sully propped his laptop on his knees and turned it on. While it loaded, he sipped at a Frappuccino and studied the long bunch of brick-red chiles hanging from an open beam over the nearby table piled with his files. What was it about them that he got such a kick out of? Maybe because they were so deceptively cheerful looking, and then you bit into one and got the spicy surprise of your life.
    The computer announced that it was ready, but now that he stared at it, he had no idea what to Google. Zahira’s Devil Renouncement / New Mexico? Some kind of Internet 411 for Zahira Cox? What did that mean, anyway . . . Zahira?
    For lack of a better direction, Sully Googled the word. He skipped Zahira’s School of Belly Dance and the Zahira Primary School in Hambantota and went to a list of baby name meanings. He snorted out loud. Zahira was Arabic for “brilliant and shining.”
    He went back to Zahira’s School of Belly Dance and searched the faces for anyone even remotely resembling Belinda Cox, but the photographs were such poor quality, everyone in them looked as if they’d been blurred for a reality cop show. Sully clicked the site off and dug in the pile for a folder. He opened it and pulled out a photograph whose subject was all too clear, even from fourteen years ago.
    She had too-blonde hair, bleached of any natural color and shine, and it lay in thin, flat layers around a face flecked with freckles. There was nothing ingenuous about Belinda Cox. Her eyebrows were too tweezed, her lips too glossy. She wore a practiced expression, as if she’d worked in front of a mirror to align her features to say, “I’m only trying to help you.”
    Help? She hadn’t helped Lynn do anything but lose her beautiful mind. And she was going down for that if he had to tear Las Cruces apart . . .
    Sully stared at his fist, now crumpling the picture into a ball. He let it bounce to the table where it rolled against the laptop and waited.
    Sully closed his eyes. God, don’t let me do this. Don’t let me turn this into revenge.
    He’d had himself convinced this was about ethics, about protecting other innocent people. But there was no denying now that it was intensely personal. Porphyria was right. He had to get this done so he could put it to bed and get on with his life. If he didn’t, it was going to take over.
    He looked at the crushed ball on the table. If