Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  Unlike Brenda, Ali had a pretty definite idea of what to think. In her current guise, Brenda Riley was clearly a very troubled person. Under those circumstances it made perfect sense that most right-thinking men would have done the same thing Richard Lattimer had done—run like hell in the opposite direction.

  Their food came, along with another cup of coffee for Ali. She was starved and lit into her burger. Brenda picked at her fries and ordered another shot of tequila. Keeping count, Ali was astonished at her capacity.

  “So anyway,” Brenda continued. “Like I said, he’d been acting all weird for weeks—sort of distant, like something was bothering him. That’s why I went down to see him—to surprise him. When I got back from San Diego, I called Richard and told him I knew he had left San Diego and that I knew he had lied to me.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He hung up on me. I tried sending him text messages and e-mails, but he blocked them. I haven’t heard from him since. That’s why I’m here. I need you to help me find him,” Brenda said miserably. “Even if he doesn’t love me anymore, even if he lied to me, I still love him. I need to be sure he’s okay. Finding him should be easy, right? I mean, especially now that you’re a cop.”

  That was when Ali finally understood what Brenda wanted and why she was here. Ali also knew the ramifications. Using law enforcement tools and sources to track down personal information on someone who was not a suspect in a specific crime is illegal. Yes, cops did that kind of thing occasionally, but it was also grounds for instant dismissal if the snooping was discovered.

  “Tell me about him,” Ali said.

  The floodgates opened. “Like I said, his name is Richard,” Brenda said. “Richard Lattimer. He grew up in Grass Valley, California. We met in an Internet chat room, a support group for abandoned spouses. My husband had left me and his wife had left him. Once we met, we just clicked. I know it sounds trite, but it seemed like we had always been meant to be together. For one thing, we had so much in common. We both had cheating spouses in our backgrounds. Our fathers died at an early age when we were both in high school. His father committed suicide. Mine had a heart attack and died.

  “Richard and I talked about everything, and he was always there for me. When the station fired me, he was the only one who stood by me. We spent hours on the phone, talking, texting, e-mailing. Whenever I felt like I was falling apart, he was there to bolster me up and help me get a grip. At least he was for a while. Once I wasn’t working any longer, there was no reason I couldn’t drive down to see him on occasion, but every time I made plans to go, something seemed to come up at the last minute. Once his daughter, Suzanne, was sick; once he got called out of town on a job-related problem; once he got called in to work on some kind of emergency and was there for five solid days, fixing some problem or another.”

  “What does he do?” Ali asked.

  “He’s an electronics engineer,” Brenda said. “He said he did highly classified work for a small defense contractor down in Southern California. He told me they really counted on him. He was always on call, even on the weekends. He had to have a suitcase packed and ready to go in case he had to take off at a moment’s notice.”

  “So he was part of an AOG team?” Ali asked.

  Brenda gave her a mystified look. “A what?”

  “The way my ex explained it to me, it’s a term used by airplane companies, and it means ‘aircraft on the ground.’ Team members have to be ready to go wherever that broken plane is, repair the problem, and get it back in the air. Paul Grayson always had his own AOG bag packed. It took me a long time to realize that when he took off at a moment’s notice, it turned out he wasn’t fixing problems; he was making them.”

  Brenda nodded, but she was so caught up in her tale of woe, Ali doubted if what she said had penetrated.

  “I didn’t mind him being on call like that,” she said. “I know what it’s like to have a demanding job. I didn’t worry about it. I was patient. I didn’t want to rush him. We were supposed to get engaged on my birthday in May. He sent me links to a couple of jewelry websites. He showed me three different rings and asked me to choose which one I wanted. I did, and I didn’t even choose the most expensive one, but when he went to order it, that one was already sold out. We talked about what kind of wedding we’d have, where we’d go on our honeymoon, the kind of apartment we’d have . . .”

  Brenda’s voice drifted away into silence.

  “But you didn’t get a ring,” Ali supplied.

  “No, I didn’t,” Brenda said sadly. “I had made the mistake of telling my mother and my sister that I thought a ring was coming. They haven’t given me a moment’s peace about it since, especially my sister. She said I had to be out of my mind to get engaged to someone I had never met. That’s why I finally decided I had to go see him no matter what. I drove to San Diego without letting him know I was coming, and that’s when I found out he was gone.

  “You have to believe me, Ali, this is all so out of character,” Brenda continued, barely pausing for breath. “Richard would never do something like this—especially like cutting me off without any reason. Something must be terribly wrong. I’m sure of it. What if he has cancer or something? What if he’s dying? What if he has only a few months to live and doesn’t want to drag me through it with him?”

  “Wait a minute,” Ali said in dismay as something Brenda had said earlier finally penetrated. “You’re saying you were practically engaged to a man you’d actually never met?”

  “You don’t have to be standing next to somebody to know him,” Brenda said. “We talked on the phone for hours almost every day. Now that I can’t talk to him anymore, I miss him so much. I just need to know he’s all right—that he’s not sick or dying.”

  For a time Ali was stunned into silence. Brenda was a well-educated professional woman. How was it possible that she could fall in love and be virtually engaged to someone she had never met? Clearly virtually was the operant word. The man Brenda Riley supposedly loved wasn’t a person at all. What she knew about Richard Lattimer was what he had told her in a stream of words typed on a computer screen, endearments uttered over a cell phone. The whole idea was beyond bizarre. It made no sense.

  Ali found herself in full agreement with Brenda’s mother and sister. Richard whoever-he-might-be was a lying son of a bitch, and he most definitely had been stringing Brenda along.

  “Have you ever thought about running a background check on him?” Ali asked.

  Brenda frowned. “You mean the kind of thing employers do when they’re getting ready to hire someone?”

  Ali nodded.

  “It sounds expensive,” Brenda said. “I probably couldn’t afford . . .”

  “The people who handle my computer security issues do background checks all the time,” Ali said. “I’m sure they’d be happy to look into it for you.”

  “Really?” Brenda grasped at this slender thread of hope with heartbreaking eagerness.

  “Really.”

  “All I want is to know that Richard is okay. If he doesn’t want me in his life, that’s fine, but I need to know for sure that he’s not sick or dying.”

  “I understand.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Just his e-mail address.” Ali knew that once the people at B. Simpson’s High Noon Enterprises had Richard Lattimer’s IP address, they could go from there and find all kinds of things Richard might prefer to leave unfound.

  Brenda’s sad face was suddenly radiant with hope. She reached into her purse and dug around for a piece of paper and a pen. While doing so, she placed her car keys on the table. Ali quietly slipped them into her pocket, although what she was going to do from there was anyone’s guess.

  Brenda was still scribbling down Richard’s e-mail address when a broad shadow loomed over their table. Ali looked up and was astonished to see Jose Reyes standing there. In one hand he held a cup of coffee. In the other another shot. “This is for you,” he said, setting the co
ffee cup in front of Ali. “And this is for your friend.” He handed the shot glass to Brenda.

  “Peace offering,” he said to Ali. “Thanks for not raising hell about today,” he said. “You could have. I was out of line.”

  Brenda downed the drink and then gave Jose a bleary-eyed smile.

  “I’m willing to let bygones be bygones,” Ali said, “on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” Jose said.

  “I need some help. My friend here is drunk out of her gourd and is in no condition to drive. There’s a motel next door. Would you please help me get her there?”

  “How much has she had?” Jose asked.

  “Too much,” Ali said.

  Jose nodded. “Sure,” he said, then he held out his hand to Brenda.

  “What’s going on?” Brenda asked.

  “We’re moving the party,” he said.

  “Really? What fun.”

  Jose guided Brenda across the two adjoining parking lots while Ali hurried on ahead. Fortunately the VACANCY sign was still lit. Inside the office, Ali rented a room and told the clerk, “My friend’s had a little too much to drink. I’m keeping her car keys. Tell her to call me in the morning.”

  When she went back outside, Ali discovered that Brenda was violently sick. If Jose hadn’t been holding her up, she might have fallen in her own mess. Ali opened the door to the room. After the spasm passed, Jose picked Brenda up and carried her into the room.

  “On the bed?” Ali asked.

  Jose shook his head. “She’ll be better off on the floor in the bathroom.”

  He propped Brenda against the wall beside the toilet. Ali threw a couple of bath towels in her direction. On the way out she turned the wall AC unit on high.

  Jose was waiting for her out in the parking lot. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate the help.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They shook hands. As they did so, it occurred to Ali that she might pull off a hip toss right now. Jose wasn’t expecting it, but he also didn’t deserve it. She had needed his help with Brenda. She couldn’t have gotten the almost comatose woman out of the bar, across the parking lot, and into the room by herself.

  “See you tomorrow,” she told him and walked away.

  Ali took herself back to her dorm room at the academy and climbed into bed. The fall she had taken had hurt more than her ego and her eye. Her whole body ached, and the several cups of coffee she had drunk in the bar earlier in the evening kept her from going to sleep at a reasonable hour that night. Instead, she lay awake and thought about Brenda Riley, about what she had been once, and what she was now.

  The difference between the two was nothing short of astonishing.

  3

  Grass Valley, California August

  By 4:30 a.m. Richard Lowensdale was up, had made his first pot of coffee, and was at his computer. It was ironic that he worked harder now than when he had been working and that he put in far longer hours. Thank God he had cut back to just two fiancées at the moment. Trying to juggle three of them had been a killer. If it hadn’t been for his storyboard file, he never would have managed.

  There had been a time in Richard’s life when he had thought about being a writer. He had even gone so far as to take a correspondence course taught by Gavin Marcus Hornsby, a once-published but relatively obscure novelist who, in his old age, supported himself by teaching his “craft” to flocks of deluded wannabe authors. Richard figured it must have been as easy as taking candy from a baby. No doubt Hornsby had kept his “students” on the string for years, assuring them that they were each writing and rewriting the great American novel.

  That’s what the writing instructor had told Richard about his first paltry attempt, that it had the potential of being “great literature.” Since Richard was an expert at dishing out BS, he recognized that comment for what it was. He deleted his novel file and never sent another rewrite, but what he had learned in that creative writing class hadn’t been a total loss. Richard had hung around long enough to learn about storyboards. Gavin Marcus Hornsby was a big believer in storyboards. After that Richard had never again tried his hand at fiction, other than what he did each time he re-created his own next persona, but the storyboard suggestion had appealed to him. Over time he had made good use of it.

  He located Lynn Martinson’s storyboard. Forty-one years old. PhD in secondary education. Divorced for three years. Superintendent of schools in Iowa City, Iowa. Richard liked targeting high-profile women. They often didn’t want to spill their guts or their troubles too close to home. When they needed to vent, they needed to do so with someone far away, someone who didn’t know where all their personal bodies were buried. After his troublesome breakup with Brenda, being from out of state was first and foremost on Richard’s list of requirements. The women in his life all had to be from out of state.

  When Richard was working in San Diego and had been involved with someone else, having Brenda Riley as a side dish safely stowed in Sacramento had been ideal. For a long time the distance thing had worked in his favor, right up until Brenda lost her own job. After that, she had started harping about coming down to visit and spending some time together. Richard knew that wouldn’t do. He had spun some wild stories about who he was and what he did, and he didn’t need Brenda Riley showing up at his office and blowing the whistle on him.

  With that in mind, Richard kept stalling with one excuse after another. It worked for a while, but then Richard’s own carefully constructed real world imploded. Mark and Mina Blaylock gave him his walking papers. They said it was all about losing the defense department contract and the economy and all that other crap, but Richard didn’t believe that was all there was to it. He suspected that Mark Blaylock had finally wised up to the fact that maybe his sweet little wife liked some of their employees—and Richard in particular—just a little more than she should have.

  But the point was, Richard was out of a job. He needed a place to stay—a cheap place to stay. He had always despised Grass Valley and had sworn he would never go back there. When his mother and stepfather died and he had inherited their house, he had rented it out, furnished. Now though, even though Grass Valley was alarmingly close to Brenda’s Sacramento home, Richard wasn’t stupid enough to walk away from a free house. The renters weren’t happy about leaving, and the eviction process had taken time. But while Richard was getting rid of the renters, he was also getting rid of Brenda.

  At that point he was still under the impression that breaking up was hard to do. Now that he’d had some practice, he realized it wasn’t difficult at all and that he could have dumped Brenda much faster. That’s what he did these days, but back then, during his first time out, he had enjoyed playing her and watching her squirm. Faced with losing him, she had exhibited the whole entertaining gamut of reactions from anger to despair, from raging to resigned, from hopeful to devastated. She had begged him not to leave her and pleaded with him to take her back. The more she groveled, the more he liked it.

  Brenda Riley had willingly given him a kind of control over her life that he had never experienced before. She had been putty in Richard’s hands, and he had loved every minute of it. Wielding that power had hit his system like some incredibly addictive drug. Once he started on that path, he couldn’t let go. He had strung Brenda along for months, making promises he never intended to keep because it was fun to put her through her emotional paces.

  Richard Lowensdale was almost fifty years old. He was out of a job, living off the insurance settlement that had come to him after the drunk-driving incident that had claimed the lives of his mother and stepfather. He understood that much of the rest of the world might look at him and see a loser, but not Brenda Riley and not the women who had followed her either. To them, Richard was the ultimate prize—the most wonderful man in the world.

  In a strange way, he owed much of his newfound happiness to two very different women—Mina Blaylock, who appeared to know more about sex and how to use it than anyone Ric
hard had ever met, and Brenda Riley, who taught him exactly how stupid women could be, stupid and pitiful.

  So back to Lynn Martinson. Her sixteen-year-old son, Lucas, had just gotten sent to juvie for drug dealing. How embarrassing it must be for her to be the top educator in her small town while at the same time having a kid who was totally out of control. No doubt every parent who had a child in that district was looking to Lynn to lead by example when it came to parenting skills, yet here was her son, totally off the charts and into drugs in a big way. That was where Richard had met Lynn in the first place, in a chat room for parents dealing with out-of-control kids and trying to survive the hell of tough love.

  Richard—Richard Lewis in this case—understood every nuance of how that kind of family disaster felt. He had told Lynn how his own life had devolved, with an ex who married a drug dealer after their divorce and who took his kids along for the ride. For a moment, Richard had to go back to his storyboard file to verify the exes’ names and details. Lynn’s former husband’s name was John. Rather than working as an electronics engineer as he had in San Diego, the newly minted Richard Lewis was a well-respected executive with a Silicon Valley software company. His former wife’s name was Andrea and the teenaged daughter who had just gotten out of rehab was Nicole. Happily for Richard Lewis’s fictional existence, seventeen-year-old Nicole had managed to make a seamless transition from being a druggie to being clean and sober, thank you very much.

  Over time Richard had learned that it was easy to keep his own background story hazy and out of focus. After all, these desperately needy women weren’t really interested in him. They were totally self-absorbed. What they really wanted was someone to listen to them while they bared their souls.

  Richard was always glad to oblige in that regard, but only up to the point when he was ready to stop being glad to do it. Once that happened, he sent his poor ladyloves packing. He thought of it as a kind of “catch and release.” Or else maybe “shock and awe,” depending on his mood at the time. First he went to the trouble of reeling them in, then he let them go. Not kindly. Not gently. No, he took pains to tell the losers they were losers and that they needed to do the world and him a favor and get lost.