Fatal Error ar-6

by J. A. Jance

  The idea that Janet Silvie was coming to Grass Valley complicated Gil’s life, but it would make it far easier to interview her.

  “Good,” he said. “Will you want to be picked up at the airport?”

  “No. I’ll rent a car. If no one else is going to lift a hand looking for Richard, I need to have my own wheels so I can do it myself. My guess is that once you find that crazy woman, that Brenda, the one who was always making up terrible stories about Richard and threatening him, you’ll find Richard too. They were engaged once. When Richard broke it off, she went crazy.”

  Gil didn’t let on that Brenda Riley was among the missing, and he wasn’t at all sure who was crazy and who wasn’t, but he didn’t argue the point. “Let me give you my phone numbers,” he said. “That way you can get in touch as soon as you get to town.”

  After putting down the phone, he sat and stared at it for a while. He’d never had a next-of-kin notification go quite so haywire. He personally was convinced that, scar or no scar, Richard Lowensdale and Richard Lydecker were one and the same. Gil was convinced; Janet Silvie wasn’t.

  Shaking his head, he picked up the receiver and dialed the number for Dawn Carras in Eugene, Oregon. Once again he gave a recitation of who he was and what had happened-that the body of a murder victim, presumably Richard Lowensdale, had been found and that his investigation into the matter indicated that Lowensdale was in fact Richard Loomis, the man Dawn had reported missing earlier in the day.

  Dawn heard him out in such aching silence that for a while Gil wondered if the connection had been broken.

  “Did you say Lowensdale?” Dawn asked finally.

  “Yes. Richard Lowensdale.”

  “That sounds like it could be the name she told me,” Dawn said, her voice suddenly hollow and devoid of any inflection. “But if Richard had to go by another name, he probably had a very good reason.”

  Yes, Gil thought, because he’s a lying creep.

  “She who?” Gil asked. “Who was it who gave you that other name?”

  “Brenda. Richard’s ex-fiancee. Somehow she gained access to his computer, and she started calling all of Richard’s friends and trying to tell us what a terrible person he was. That his name wasn’t really Richard Loomis, that it was Richard Lowensdale, that he was a liar and a cheat.”

  Which seems to be absolutely true, Gil thought.

  “How did she get inside his computer?” he asked.

  “I have no idea, but I’m sure Brenda is behind whatever has happened.”

  Gil thought it interesting that both Janet and Dawn seemed to know about the alleged stalker, Brenda, who probably really was a stalker. It seemed unlikely, however, that Janet knew about Dawn and vice versa.

  “Do you have a photo of Mr. Loomis?”

  “No,” she said. “Richard doesn’t allow any photographs of himself.”

  Right, Gil thought. The car wreck.

  “He was terribly disfigured by a campfire accident when he was younger,” Dawn said. “You can imagine how painful it must be to live with that kind of disfigurement.” She paused and then added, “Do you think there’s a chance my Richard is still alive?”

  Richard, Richard, Richard, Gil thought. You lying turd!

  “No,” Gil said. “I don’t think so.” It was a brutally honest answer.

  “What should I do now?” Dawn said. “If I come down there, do you think I could help find him?”

  With Janet Silvie already planning on flying in from Buffalo, the last thing Gil needed was for Dawn to show up as well. His investigation was already complicated enough without having two feuding fiancees land in the middle of it. He remembered what Rachel had said about selling tickets to the catfight.

  “It might be best if you didn’t do anything right now,” he said. “If I find anything out, I’ll be sure to be in touch with you.”

  “All right,” she said quietly. Dawn sounded strangely subdued. “Thank you for calling me. I appreciate it.”

  Gil gave her his cell phone number in case something came up, not that he thought anything would. He was dead tired. He was sitting there wondering if he should give up for the night and go home when Janet Silvie called back.

  “Getting from here to Sacramento is going to take all day,” she said. “Even if I leave here at seven-oh-five a.m., I won’t be there until after six tomorrow night. That’s the best I can do.”

  Gil was relieved to hear it. He wasn’t thrilled that Janet was coming, but he hoped he had managed to deflect Dawn Carras. He stayed at the office for a while longer but not much. He was verging on putting in another twelve-hour overtime day. When Chief Jackman found out about that, he would not be thrilled.

  Gil went back to his house. Opening the door, he stopped in the doorway and surveyed his desolate surroundings. There were only three pieces of furniture in the living room and that was it. Linda had left him the low-profile Ekornes recliner that she had always hated because it was so hard to get in and out of it. Truth be known, Gil loved it, but every time he settled into it and tried to relax, the phone rang. Still it was better than having no chair at all. Linda had also left Gil a single television set, his son’s cast-off nineteen-inch. It was old-fashioned, definitely not high-def. It was also dying. On the right-hand side of the screen was a black border almost two inches wide. The television sat on top of the chipped brass and glass coffee table that had been deemed unworthy of moving.

  That was the living room. In the kitchen he had no table, just a single stool parked by the kitchen counter. His cooking equipment included a coffeepot and his place-setting-for-one set of dishes. The only reason he still had a microwave was that it was a built-in. He had no pots and pans. No extra glasses. For bedroom furniture, he had the AeroBed that he and Linda had once used for out-of-town guests. Oh, and a pair of suitcases. When Linda removed the dresser and the chest of drawers in the bedroom, she had dumped Gil’s clothes out of his drawers and into a pair of open suitcases on the bedroom floor. She had taken the washer and dryer too.

  That was it. Linda had been gone for two months now. She had told him it was all about the job, but when he had driven up to Mt. Shasta to see the kids, they had told him about the new man in her life-someone she had hooked up with at last year’s all-class reunion, one she had attended solo because, surprise, surprise, Gil had been working.

  So here he was, living in an almost empty house on Rattlesnake Road. When he and Linda bought the house, they had gotten a great deal on it because the couple who lived there before were going through a nasty divorce. Gil probably should have thought about that and realized that a street address with the word rattlesnake in it was most likely a bad omen-that things probably wouldn’t turn out well if they tried living there. And they hadn’t.

  Difficult as it was to fathom, he had fewer possessions now than he’d had in college. He had spent those two months going to work, doing his job, and feeling like a human train wreck. But today he had seen a real human train wreck, the bodily remains of Richard Lowensdale.

  After spending so much time at the crime scene, Gil was appalled to see the resemblance between his place and Lowensdale’s house on Jan Road. His house didn’t stink like that-he still took the garbage out to the street every week-and it wasn’t overheated. All the same, it looked forlorn and empty and uncared for, and there were several discarded newspapers on the floor next to his chair.

  Someday soon he was going to have to do something about that. But right now he needed sleep, and having an AeroBed in the bedroom beat the hell out of sleeping on the floor.

  34

  San Diego, California

  When Brenda awakened once more, enough time had passed that her clothing was no longer damp. She had no idea what time it was or if it was day or night. She wondered if she was still wearing her watch, but with her arms fastened behind her, there was no way to tell if it was on her wrist or if it had been taken from her somewhere along the way. And even if she had been able to hold it up to her face, she wou
ldn’t have been able to see it. There was no light. Only the occasional rumble of an airplane passing overhead told her she wasn’t marooned in outer space.

  She tried not to think about how thirsty she was, but her mind tricked her into remembering all the words to an old country/western song that her father used to sing:

  All day I’ve faced the barren waste

  Without a taste of water-cool, clear water.

  Even when she concentrated on something else, the unwelcome words continued to echo inside her head.

  Keep a’movin’, Dan.

  Don’t cha listen to him, Dan.

  He’s a devil not a man

  And he spreads the burning sand with water.

  How long will I last without food or water? Brenda wondered. Six or seven days? Longer? And how long have I been here already?

  Then, just when she was ready to give up, when she was ready to pray to God and ask that in his mercy he take her, Brenda heard Uncle Joe’s voice, speaking to her from across the years, his voice low and filled with quiet dignity. “All I had to do each day was choose to live.”

  Yes, Brenda thought as she drifted back into a feverish sleep. That’s what I choose too.

  35

  Scotts Flat Reservoir, California

  Grass Valley High School was generally thought to be divided into three separate but relatively equal groups-the jocks, the nerds, and the druggies. The jocks were somewhat smart and drank beer; the brainy nerds were incredibly smart. They were also geeky and drank whatever; the druggies were habitual underachievers who spent lots of time smoking grass, some of which they managed to grow themselves in out-of-the-way places.

  John Connor, whose parents were big Terminator fans, didn’t quite fit in any of the molds. He was a genuine jock-varsity football, basketball, and track. That should have put him firmly in the beer-drinking camp except for the fact that he was a born-again Christian who didn’t drink anything, including coffee or tea or even soda. And although he was smart and could have been a nerd, the coffee, tea, and soda prohibitions counted against him.

  John may have been “born again,” but he wasn’t a fanatic about it and didn’t much believe in turning the other cheek, which meant that he had knocked the crap out of several guys on the JV football team before they gave up and decided they could just as well be friends. Now, as seniors with their final football season behind them and with basketball season in full swing, John and his best pals, Pete Bishop, Tony Alvarez, and Jack Whitney, were spending Sunday of their long MLK weekend celebrating Saturday night’s basketball win and enjoying the fact that there was no school on Monday.

  Tony’s cousin worked in a liquor store. As usual, Tony had provided the single case of beer and, as usual, John was the designated driver. Pete’s dad worked for Nevada County Irrigation, and Pete had grown up trailing his dad around the Scotts Flat Reservoir. On Sunday the boys followed Scotts Flat Dam Road across the dam and off into the woods to a secluded clearing where local teenagers did their illegal drinking.

  Now, at eleven o’clock at night and with all the beer gone, they were heading back to town. Just east of the earthen dam, the drinkers started whining about needing a pee stop. John pulled off into a tiny parking area near the dam. While his friends went off into the woods to relieve themselves, John sauntered over to the edge of the lake. He and his father came here fishing sometimes in the summer, but now with a fringe of ice still clinging to the edge of the shoreline, fishing season seemed a long way off.

  He stood there on the edge of the lake, watching a sliver of moon make a slender golden splash in the choppy water, and wondered what would happen to him; what did the future hold? John was still hoping for an appointment to West Point, but that was probably a pipe dream. Yes, John was smart and his GPA was outstanding, but his parents weren’t well connected, and there were always political ramifications to consider.

  So he looked at the cold water and wondered what would happen if he didn’t get the appointment. Would he go on to college? He’d had a couple of scholarship offers but not enough to cover the full freight, and his folks couldn’t really afford to pay his way. He could maybe try going the ROTC route or perhaps he would end up doing what his father had done and volunteer.

  The water wasn’t giving him much of an answer. The chill wind sliced through his letterman’s jacket and made him shiver.

  “Hey, John,” Jack yelled at him. “We’re done here. Are you coming or are you going to stand around gawking all night?”

  Turning away from the water, John tripped over something soft. His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that when he righted himself he could see the object that had tripped him was made out of leather and was most likely a purse. He looked around. There was no one in sight, no one to connect to this lost property, but then he caught a glimpse of something else-a pair of white tennis shoes, gleaming in the pale moonlight, parked at the edge of the frigid water.

  For a moment John stood staring at the empty shoes. There was no other sign of life in this desolate place and no sign of a struggle either. John knew at once that if someone had gone into the water there, they had done so under their own power. They had gone in, and they hadn’t come back out.

  Of the four buddies in the car, John was the only one who understood the implications of suicide, from the inside out. His grandfather, his mother’s father, had taken that road when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Gramps had left a note saying he wouldn’t put his family through the pain of watching him die, so he had handled it himself. With pills. And the pain of all that-of Gramps’s suicide and what had come after it-was one of the reasons the Connor tribe, previously a devout Catholic family, had abandoned Holy Mother Church and become devout Protestants.

  Standing there in the moon-softened darkness, John saw the purse and the shoes and made several calculations. If someone had committed suicide here, he should probably call the cops. With three not exactly sober eighteen-year-olds in his car-his car-John couldn’t bring himself to do that. There would be questions: What were you doing out there in the woods in the middle of a cold January night? Who was with you? Why were you there? What did you see? All of which meant that if John did the right thing, it would be the wrong thing. He would be in trouble even though he hadn’t been drinking and his friends would be in even more trouble because they had been.

  But he couldn’t just walk away either. That wasn’t an option. Gramps had done the same thing this person had done: he had gone off into the forest by himself and taken his pills, washed down with plenty of Irish whiskey. It had taken a week to find the body-a week in the heat of summer.

  John remembered vividly the terrible sense of unknowing that his whole family had lived through back then, between the time Gramps went missing and the time someone finally found him. And he remembered his grandmother sitting there in her living room, rocking back and forth and saying that she would never forgive him for going off and leaving her alone like that without even letting her say goodbye. And he remembered his mother’s grief when the priest told them that since Gramps had taken his own life, there would be no mass.

  John had been twelve at the time. He had been struck by the fact that the people who should have been there to help his grieving family-the cops and the priest-had made things that much worse.

  John knew that somewhere nearby was a worried family waiting for answers. He also understood how much having those answers would hurt, but he knew from his own experience that knowing hurt less than not knowing. And so, without really thinking it through and without saying anything to the friends who were still waiting in the car, John reached down and grabbed up the purse and the shoes. On his way back to the driver’s seat, he popped open the trunk and dropped the three items inside.

  “What was that?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing,” John answered. “Just some trash someone left on the beach.”

  “That’s John for you,” Pete said. “Eagle Scout all the way.”

  Ba
ck in Grass Valley, John drove them to Pete’s house, where they all went inside, watched some DVDs and hung out. The other guys finally crashed, but John didn’t even try to sleep. A little past midnight he let himself out of the house. Instead of going home, he drove to the local Safeway. There, parked under one of the halogen lights at the far end of the lot, he got out the purse and brought it to the hood of his car.

  It was large and made of some kind of soft leather. Intending to dump the contents out onto the hood, John was about to unzip the purse when a cell phone rang inside it. The noise startled him enough that he almost dropped the purse. Once he unzipped it, though, a foul odor spilled out of it, filling the air around him with an awful stench that was all too familiar. John had no choice but to step away from the vehicle. For the next few minutes he stood doubled over in the corner of the lot, retching onto the pavement.

  He recognized the odor-the odor of death-because it was the same one that had lingered in his grandfather’s old Suburban no matter what remedies his father used to get rid of it. Ultimately they’d had to total the SUV even though it ran perfectly and didn’t have a scratch on it.

  Finally the spasm of nausea ended. The odor was still there, slightly dissipated in the cold wind blowing down from the mountains. If there was something dead inside the purse, then maybe John was wrong about what had happened at the reservoir. Maybe the shoes by the lake didn’t mean that someone had committed suicide. Yes, that was the point when John Connor definitely should have called the cops and reported what he had found, but he didn’t do that. He couldn’t.

  There would be too many questions, ones that couldn’t be answered without jeopardizing his future and his friends’ futures too. But he couldn’t just leave it alone either. Someone had been calling on the telephone inside the purse, looking for whoever owned the purse, and John Connor-this John Connor, not the teenager from the movies or the old TV series-was the only one who could answer that call.