Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  He was getting close to doing that with Lynn. She was starting to bore him. She was so focused on that damn prick of a kid of hers that she just wasn’t fun anymore. Phone sex didn’t count for much when one of the partners was totally preoccupied.

  Richard had asked Lynn his customary trick question by sending her to the links with diamond engagement rings. He told her he had a ring in mind for her, but he didn’t tell her which one he preferred. If she lucked out and picked that one—the one he regarded as the right one—then he’d let her hang around for a while longer. If she picked the other one, the wrong one? Too bad. It was time for a quick dose of “So long, babe. Have a nice life.”

  So far, with the notable exception of Brenda Riley, there hadn’t been any blowback from any of his breakups. Why would there be? What could the women do about it? They couldn’t very well go around crying on the shoulders of their friends and relations because they had been dumped by a fiancé they had never met. Telling that story was bound to be a winner. People would laugh their heads off.

  And what other recourse did Richard’s lovelorn victims have? They couldn’t go to the cops either, because Richard Lowensdale had committed no crime. Unlike breaking into somebody’s house and stealing someone’s stuff, breaking somebody’s heart wasn’t against the law. As far as Richard was concerned, this whole thing was like playing a very complicated video game, only better because he got to do it with real people.

  “Morning, sweetie,” he said cheerfully to Lynn Martinson over his VoIP connection when she picked up the bedside telephone receiver at her home in Iowa City. Richard sometimes teased her about still clinging to her guns and religion as well as to her landline. He was firmly entrenched in the camp of Voice over Internet Protocol users. For someone with his particular brand of hobby, not having to pay long distance charges was a major money-saving consideration.

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked. “How are things? I wanted to hear the sound of your voice and wish you good morning before you have to go off to work.”

  4

  Peoria, Arizona

  When Ali’s phone rang at six the next morning, she assumed it was B. calling her. He was spending a lot of time doing consulting work in Japan these days. The sixteen-hour time difference meant that early mornings for Ali and just before B. went to sleep were the best times for them to talk on the phone. At other times they made do with text messages and e-mail. The phone was still ringing by the time Ali realized that he was probably on a plane somewhere over the Pacific. When Ali finally answered, Brenda Riley was on the phone and she was outraged.

  “What the hell do you mean stowing me in this fleabag hotel and taking my car keys?” she demanded.

  No good deed goes unpunished, Ali thought.

  “You were drunk,” she said calmly. “You were in no condition to drive. Would you like me to bring your keys?”

  “You’re damned right I want you to bring me my keys.”

  “I have to be in class by eight, but between now and then, I’ll treat you to breakfast. There’s a Denny’s just up the street.”

  Brenda started to say something else and then stifled. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “I’ll meet you there.”

  By the time Ali got out of the shower, she saw the text message from B. that she had missed earlier when the phone rang.

  Bordng now. CU at home. Dinner? LV. B.

  By the time Ali reached the restaurant, Brenda, dressed in an oversized man’s shirt and a pair of ragged jeans, was already seated in a booth, drinking coffee and sulking. She had evidently showered in the motel room. Her hair was still damp and smelled of shampoo, but a cloud that reeked of tequila still lingered around her.

  Ali remembered a friend of hers who had gone into AA after he got tired of what he called “drinking and stinking.” Ali wondered if Brenda was there yet. If she wasn’t, she ought to be.

  Ali put the car keys down on the table and then slid them across to Brenda. “I couldn’t let you drive,” Ali explained. “You were an accident waiting to happen, a danger to yourself and others. What if you’d had a wreck? What if you had ended up in a hospital or if you had killed someone else?”

  Brenda closed her fist around the key fob. “Thank you, I guess,” she muttered, but she sounded mutinous rather than grateful.

  Ali slid into the booth and picked up her menu. The waitress was there with a coffeepot before Ali found the breakfast pages.

  “Coffee?”

  Ali nodded. The waitress slapped a mug on the table, filled the mug with coffee, and then took off. Efficient? Yes. Personable? No. The service made Ali long for the down-home comfort of her parents’ Sugarloaf Café.

  “So,” she said, for openers and hoping to break the ice. “Last night you told me about your boyfriend, Richard Lattimer, and your difficulties with him. Do you still want me to have someone run a background check on him for you?”

  Brenda looked surprised. “You’d still do that? Even after . . . well . . . you know.”

  “You mean after you made a complete fool of yourself?”

  Brenda made a face and nodded. “Yes,” she said meekly. “I guess I just got carried away.”

  To Ali’s relief it sounded as though Brenda was genuinely sorry.

  “So yes, I’ll still do it because I told you I would,” Ali said. “I’ll need an address so I can send you the report.”

  “But . . .” Brenda began, then she stopped. “I don’t have an address right now,” she admitted. “I don’t have a computer either. I guess you can send it to my mom’s house.”

  Ali located the piece of paper Brenda had used the night before to jot down her missing fiancé’s e-mail address. “Use this,” Ali said. “That way I’ll have all the information in one place.”

  Brenda scribbled an address on the paper. The waitress came, took their order, and disappeared again.

  “I don’t have much money,” Brenda said, as she handed the paper back to Ali. “How can I possibly pay for a background check?”

  As a customer of High Noon Enterprises, Ali knew she could ask for a routine background check with no charge, but Brenda didn’t need to know that.

  “I’ll tell you how you can pay for it,” Ali said.

  On the way to the restaurant, Ali had decided that she wasn’t going to pull any punches. “You’re a mess right now, Brenda—a wholesale mess. Yes, your fiancé dumped you, but considering the way you look and act right now, I’m not surprised. If you don’t believe me, you might take a gander at yourself in a mirror.”

  Two bright angry splotches appeared on the surface of Brenda’s once-narrow cheekbones. “How can you talk to me like that?” Brenda demanded, as tears of self-pity welled in her eyes. “I thought you were my friend!”

  Ali didn’t relent. “I am your friend,” she declared. “And that’s the very reason I’m telling you this. Your broken-down wreck of a BMW is parked outside. It looks like you’re living in it.”

  At least Brenda had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I lost my apartment,” she said. “Living in my car beats living on the street. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to pull yourself together,” Ali told her. “Find a job, any kind of job. You say you don’t have money, but you had enough money to buy tequila last night.”

  “My mother gives me an allowance,” Brenda said.

  “That allowance isn’t helping you, Brenda. It’s enabling you,” Ali said. “Stop using your mother and stop using whatever else you’re on. I don’t know if it’s just booze or if it’s something more than that. You told me Richard dropped you. I don’t blame him. He probably didn’t want to be involved with an addict. He’s not the one who’s sick or dying. You are. The amount of tequila you put away just last night should have been enough to kill you.”

  Brenda stared into her coffee cup and said nothing.

  “If booze is all you’re on, go to AA,” Ali continued. “If you’re on drugs, go to Narcotics Anonymous. Put
yourself in a treatment center if you have to. Get your life back on track. Once you’re clean and sober, if Richard Lattimer is the kind of empathetic guy you seem to think he is, maybe he’ll take you back.”

  Their order came. Instead of touching it, Brenda shoved the plate across the table. Then she stood up and stormed out of the restaurant without touching a bite.

  The waitress came back over. “Something the matter with the food?” she asked, picking up Brenda’s abandoned plate.

  “No,” Ali said. “Something’s the matter with her.”

  The waitress shook her head. “Some people don’t have a lick of sense.”

  A few minutes later, when the waitress brought Ali the bill, the charge for Brenda’s food had been removed. Ali left enough cash on the counter to cover Brenda’s breakfast along with a generous tip. Outside in the parking lot, Brenda’s BMW was long gone.

  At least I tried, Ali told herself. It was the best I could do.

  5

  Peoria, Arizona

  Ali headed back to the academy. She was there in plenty of time to get into her uniform for the early morning session. Some of the swelling had gone down, but the bruise on her cheek was still purple. Ali thought about trying to cover it with makeup but decided against it. She had earned it the hard way; she might as well show it off.

  Cell phones were forbidden during class. The last thing before she went out the door, she turned on her cell phone and called B.’s number. “You’re still in the air,” she said. “I won’t have access to my phone again until after four. You had said something about going out for dinner. I’m ready to stay home. I’m going to call Leland and ask him to pull together a light dinner for tonight. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Then she called Leland and asked him to do just that. “Very good, madam,” he said. “I think a nice chilled fusilli pesto salad would fill the bill. Sam will be glad to have you home. I think she much prefers your company to mine.”

  Sam was Ali’s aging cat, a one-eyed, one-eared, sixteen-pound tabby who had come to Ali on a supposedly temporary basis, which was now comfortably permanent for all concerned.

  “I miss her too,” Ali said with a laugh.

  Off the phone, Ali hurried to the parade ground, where she was dismayed to find Jose Reyes waiting for her.

  “Morning, Oma,” he said with a cheerful grin. “How’s it going today?”

  Jose’s friendly overture, made in public, sent a clear message to those around them that whatever problem he’d had with Ali before was over—at least on his part. She understood that he was enough of a ringleader that if he buried the hatchet, the others would follow suit.

  But that didn’t mean it was completely over. That day, when they went to the shooting range, Ali made sure she had the slot next to Jose’s. When target practice was over, she had beaten him six ways to Sunday. She knew it. He knew it. Neither said a word. They signed off on their respective targets and handed them over to the range instructor.

  On her way to the next class, Ali wondered if the antagonism between them had really been put to rest.

  All things considered, Ali thought, it doesn’t seem likely.

  Barstow, California

  In an unreasoning rage, Brenda Riley slammed out of the Denny’s parking lot with her tires squealing. Her speeding BMW left behind a rooster tail of gravel as she roared into traffic. She missed the entrance to the 101 and decided to stick it out on surface roads rather than taking a freeway. Somewhere along Grand Avenue she finally caught sight of a drive-in liquor store. She stopped at the drive-up window and filled her purse with a collection of three-ounce bottles of tequila—a little hair of the dog.

  Ali Reynolds wanted Brenda to stop drinking? Big deal. Who had appointed Ali Reynolds as the ruler of the universe? What business was it of hers? What right did she have to go around pointing fingers? Brenda Riley would stop drinking when she got around to it—and only when she was good and ready.

  Then since her mother’s credit card was still working, Brenda decided to take the scenic road back home. She stopped for lunch in Wickenburg and ended up having to spend the night when an alert bartender in the Hassayampa River Inn took away her car keys. For Brenda, having her car keys confiscated twice in as many days was something of a record.

  On Saturday morning, Brenda was up bright and early—well, ten o’clock, which was bright and early for her. She ate half a bagel and some cream cheese from the breakfast buffet at the hotel and was on the road as soon as she got her car keys back. She was doing just fine until she made pit stops in Kingman and again in Needles. By the time she was outside Barstow, she was feeling no pain. That was when she drifted off the highway. Without even noticing the rumble strips, she slammed into a bridge abutment and rolled over several times into a dry riverbed.

  Brenda was knocked unconscious. Her seat belt kept her from being ejected from the vehicle, but the sudden force exerted by the belt broke her collarbone in two places. By the time rescuers reached her, she had regained consciousness and was screaming at the top of her lungs. Her nose was broken, as was a bone in her right wrist. There were several cuts on her body as well, some from flying debris from the windshield but others from glass from numerous broken booze bottles, most of them empty, that had gone flying around the passenger compartment of the battered BMW as it finally rolled to a stop.

  One of the early first responders was a San Bernardino deputy sheriff who noticed the all-pervading odor of tequila and took charge. He summoned an ambulance. Once Brenda was loaded into it, he followed the ambulance to Barstow Community Hospital, where he saw to it that the doctors caring for the patient also administered a blood alcohol test, which came back at more than three times the legal limit. That was enough to maintain the deputy’s interest and make his paperwork easier. It was also enough for the alert ER doc to admit her to the hospital for treatment of her injuries as well as medically supervised detox.

  Afterward, Brenda Riley would recall little about her three-day bout with DTs. The acronym DT stands for “delirium tremens,” and Brenda was delirious most of the time. Even with IV drips of medication and fluids, the nightmares were horrendous. When the lights in the room were on, they hurt her eyes, but when she turned them off, invisible bugs scrambled all over her body. And she shook constantly. She trembled, as though in the grip of a terrible chill.

  During her stay at Barstow Community Hospital, Brenda Riley wasn’t under arrest; she was under sedation. She wasn’t held incommunicado, but there was no phone in her room. Besides, when she finally started coming back to her senses, she had no idea who she should call. She sure as hell wasn’t going to call her mother or Ali Reynolds.

  Finally, on day four, the doctor came around and pronounced her fit enough to sign release forms. Once he did so, however, there was a deputy waiting outside her room with an arrest warrant in hand along with a pair of handcuffs. Brenda left the hospital in the back of a squad car, once again dressed in what was left of the still-bloodied clothing she’d been wearing when she was taken from her wrecked BMW—her totaled BMW, her former BMW.

  It didn’t matter how the press found out about any of it, but they did. There were reporters stationed outside the sally port to the jail, snapping photos of her as the patrol car with her inside it drove into the jail complex.

  Sometime during that hot, uncomfortable ride from the hospital to the county jail with her hands cuffed firmly behind her back Brenda Riley finally figured out that maybe Ali Reynolds was right after all. Maybe she really did need to do something about her drinking.

  First the cops booked her. They took her mug shot. They took her fingerprints. They dressed her in orange jail coveralls and hauled her before a judge, where her bail was set at five thousand dollars. That was when they took her into a room and told her she could make one phone call. It was the worst phone call of Brenda’s life. She had to call her mother, collect, and ask to be bailed out of jail.

  Yes, it was high time she, Brenda Riley, did some
thing about her drinking.

  Peoria, Arizona

  Back in Peoria that Friday, Ali Reynolds knew nothing of Brenda’s misadventures in going home. At noon Ali went back to her dorm room to check her cell for messages. Ali understood that the major purpose of academy training was to give recruits the tools they would need to use once they were sworn officers operating out on the street. Weapons training and physical training were necessary, life-and-death components of that process. The rules of evidence and suspect handling procedures would mean the difference between a conviction or a miscarriage of justice.

  Drills on the parade ground were designed to instill discipline and a sense of professional pride. That sense of professionalism was, in a very real sense, the foundation of the thin blue line. Still, some of the rules rankled. There was a blanket prohibition against carrying cell phones during academy classes, to say nothing of using them. In the first three weeks, instructors had confiscated two telephones and kept them for several days as punishment and also as an object lesson for other members of the class.

  Ali had definitely gotten the message. She had taken to returning to her room for a few minutes at lunchtime to make and take calls. That Friday, there was only one text message awaiting her. B. said that he had landed in Phoenix, picked up his vehicle, was on his way to Sedona, and would see her at dinner. That was all Ali really wanted to know.

  On her way back to class, Ali encountered one of her fellow recruits, Donnatelle Craig, out in the hallway. Donnatelle was an African-American woman, a single mother, who hailed from Yuma. She was standing in front of the door to her room, weeping, and struggling through her tears to insert her room key into the lock.