Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “Don’t even start,” Valerie said. “Give me a break.”

  After that they pretty much stopped talking. By the time Valerie stopped in front of their mother’s faux Victorian house on P Street in Sacramento, it was well after dark. A single lamp was lit in the living room, and Brenda caught sight of her mother sitting in the halo of light. She was just sitting there, waiting. There was no television set glowing in the background. There was no book on her lap. She was simply waiting.

  Brenda looked at her sister. “Are you coming in?”

  “I guess,” Valerie said. “But only for a minute. If I stay any longer than that, I might say something I’d regret.”

  “Thank you for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome,” Valerie replied. She didn’t say the rest of it, but she was sure Brenda got the message—just don’t let it happen again.

  Palm Springs, California

  One week later, again on a Friday afternoon, Mina made another trip to the casino, where she found Enrique Gallegos waiting for her in the bar. He sat in a corner booth with an athletic bag on the banquette between them. After a brief chat, Gallegos walked away, leaving the bag behind.

  As Mina drove out of the parking lot, she called Mark. “Did they spring with the cash?” he asked.

  “Some,” she said. “Not as much as I wanted but enough to bring Richard Lowensdale on board.” The truth was they had given her exactly what she’d asked for in terms of the cash advance, but she wasn’t going to tell Mark the whole truth about that. He’d find a way to fritter away the money on things he felt were essential—like bringing their mortgage payments up to date.

  Mark sighed with relief. “So you’re off to see Richard?” It had taken some talking, but she had finally convinced Mark that Richard was their only hope of resolving their technical problems without bringing in a lot more people.

  Mina glanced at her watch. “Yes,” she said. “I’m on my way to the airport. If I can get a flight to Sacramento tonight, I’ll go see Richard in the morning. The sooner we get him started working on this, the sooner we get the rest of our money.”

  She couldn’t help feeling just a little sorry for Mark. The man was incredibly transparent. He was afraid of losing what they had, and by most standards, they had a lot. Generally speaking, having was better than not having, but Mina wasn’t nearly as hung up on that prospect as Mark was.

  Losing possessions held no particular terror for Ermina Vlasic Blaylock. She’d already been through that once. She’d lost everything and everyone she’d held dear as a thirteen-year-old child during the Bosnian war. A Croat by birth, she had hidden in a barn while her entire family was slaughtered—her parents, her grandparents, her brothers and sisters. Of all those people, she was the only one to survive. More than survive, she had thrived. She had been adopted by an older couple from America, Sam and Lola Cunningham. Lola had wanted a daughter. Sam had wanted something else, but that had been her ticket to the American dream, one she had made her own.

  She had been working as a minimum wage server for a caterer at what turned out to be the memorial reception for Mark Blaylock’s first wife, Christine. Mina had seen Mark looking broken-hearted and handsome and needy—to say nothing of rich—and had sought him out like a heat-seeking missile. She had managed to put herself in his way, and he had taken the bait. They had been married now for seven years.

  Somewhere along the line Mark had been given what was supposedly an inside track on getting a military contract for guidance systems on a particular class of UAVs. It had the potential of turning into a financial gold mine. Mark had mortgaged everything they owned to buy Rutherford International. They had put Mina at the helm of the new entity so it would qualify as a woman-owned company in terms of government contracts. Had they managed to get the drone contract, they would have been millionaires several times over, but the drone contract had gone away completely, and now they were broke.

  One thing was certain, however. Ermina Vlasic Cunningham Blaylock was nothing if not resourceful. She was pretty sure she’d be able to bring Richard Lowensdale to heel just as she had Mark Blaylock and Enrique Gallegos. Instead of heading directly to the airport, she drove east past the Palm Springs exits, toward Indio. With the bag of money safely in her trunk, she turned south on California 86.

  She had changed clothes at the office, slipping out of her work clothes and into a golf shirt, jeans, and sandals. Dressed like any other weekender, she drove to Mark’s cabin. She was glad to be coming from the north. That meant she could turn off toward the cabin miles before the Border Patrol checkpoint. The cash was most likely in unmarked hundred-dollar bills. She knew, however, that far too many of those bills might have come into contact with the drug trade in one guise or another. She didn’t need a drug-sniffing dog to point out the cash.

  The property on the outskirts of Salton City had been in Mark’s family for generations. The cabin was a stout clapboard affair that decades after being built still somehow managed to hold together and remain upright in the face of howling desert winds and scorching dust. Nothing if not austere, it included a single multipurpose room that was kitchen, dining room, and living room combined, a tiny bedroom with a minuscule closet, and a bathroom that was functional but definitely not deluxe. When the AC was on, the place was comfortable enough. There was running water, but the brownish stuff that came out of the taps tasted and smelled like dirt—salty dirt. There was no real furniture, only a collection of odd mismatched outdoor chairs and lounges that were stored inside and then dragged outside and to the sandy beach as needed.

  Mina knew how much Mark had appreciated the fact that she understood his need to hang on to the derelict old wreck. It had escaped being mortgaged along with everything else, because the lending officer from the bank had claimed it was essentially worthless.

  Sometime earlier—during that terrible year the fish in the Salton Sea all died for no apparent reason—there had been a period of months when almost no one had been able to use their cabins owing to the fierce odor of dead fish. While the owners were mostly absent, someone had broken into Mark’s cabin and most of the others and vandalized them all. As a consequence and at great expense, Mark had insisted on installing a system of roll-down metal shutters that covered the cabin’s windows and doors.

  It had been an expensive process, not unlike putting lipstick on a pig, but the shutters made the cabin, humble as it was, impervious to intrusion. Once the shutters were in place, Mina had made her own contribution. She had hired a workman to install a fireproof safe concealed behind what appeared to be an electrical box in the cabin’s only closet. The safe made a perfect hidey-hole for Mina’s private hoard of cash, not just Gallegos’s cash but other monies she had accumulated over the years by skimming funds off the top and hiding them without Mark’s ever being the wiser.

  Mark Blaylock was under the impression they were going broke. Mina knew that wasn’t entirely true. Mark would be broke; Mina would be fine. She would see to it.

  Driving to the Salton City cabin early that evening, Mina threaded her way through various campsites with their outdoor bonfires and their amazing collections of ATV rolling stock parked outside massive motor homes and fifth-wheel campers. Using her remote control, Mina opened only the shutter that covered the front door, then she let herself inside with a key. Without the AC on, the place was like an oven. She held back only as much cash as she thought Richard might demand. She stuffed that into her Gucci bag and then put the remainder in the safe.

  She was in the cabin for only a matter of minutes, but by the time she left, she was dripping with sweat. She paused outside long enough to relock the front door and close the shutter. With the now-empty athletic bag safely stowed in the trunk of her car, she headed for the airport.

  Mina knew that she was cutting it close, but she didn’t need to check any luggage. Besides, with this new influx of cash, she was once again flying first-class. That meant security wouldn’t be a problem. She’d be there in
plenty of time to board her plane.

  9

  Grass Valley, California September

  Richard Lowensdale was busy chatting with Lynn Martinson that Saturday morning, trying to prop her up in the face of that day’s so-called family meeting, which was part of her son Lucas’s incarceration process. Lynn, her ex-husband, the ex’s new wife, the druggie sixteen-year-old, Lucas’s court-appointed attorney, and his counselor would all be in attendance. Lynn was expecting the session to be one of blame-game finger-pointing, and Lynn’s devoted listener, Richard Lewis, allowed as how that would probably be true.

  He read Lynn’s messages and sent back what he hoped sounded like sympathetic one-word comments—encouraging words, as it were. The truth is, committee meetings of any kind bored the hell out of him, so listening to Lynn going on and on about a meeting that was going to take place half a continent away was not high on Richard’s agenda. The more she blathered on about her problems, the more he knew it was time to take her off his list. She just wasn’t fun anymore, and any woman who wasn’t fun wasn’t worth having around.

  So when there was an early-morning doorbell ring at his front door—a totally unexpected doorbell ring—Richard was grateful for the interruption and was glad to tell Lynn someone was there, that he had to go to the door.

  Richard was smart enough about home security to have a CCTV camera on his front porch, one with a video feed that went directly into his computer. Before leaving his desk, he switched over to that screen and was pleased to see Mina Blaylock—the beautiful Mina—waiting there for him to open the door. He wasn’t surprised to see her. He knew exactly why she had come and what she would need. The only thing that did surprise him was how long it had taken for her to show up on his doorstep.

  As he started toward the door, however, he looked around the room and had a glimpse of how bad it was. The house was a mess. When his mother and Ron had lived here, you could have eaten off the floor. Now you couldn’t eat off the dining room table. For one thing, Richard had turned that into his primary assembly station for model airplanes. His own collection, layered with dust, covered the bookshelves where his mother had once kept her collection of murder mysteries. Those had been banished to the trash heap at the bottom of the basement stairs.

  There were plenty of people who wanted to fly model airplanes but didn’t have brains enough to put them together properly. In addition to building his own planes, he made several hundred bucks a month on the side by doing the assembly work for those dunderheads. They sent him their kits and their money; he sent them their planes.

  Doing that, however, meant he needed packing material. That was also in the dining room. The packing station was his mother’s old buffet, where instead of good china, packing boxes and tape and shipping labels held sway. To the side of the buffet, on the floor, a huge plastic bag spilled a scatter of foam peanuts in every direction.

  Richard spent most of his waking hours either working at the dining room table or at his computer at the far end of the small living room. Over time, there had come to be trails from the computer station and the dining room table that led through the debris field to other rooms in the house—the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. Most of the time he didn’t worry about any of this.

  The string of women he romanced over his VoIP connection had no idea how dirty his house was or how long it had been since he’d had a haircut—or a shower. The delivery guys who handed him packages or dropped them on the front porch or picked up the outgoing ones didn’t mind how Richard or his house looked. It wasn’t their business, and it wasn’t their problem.

  Now, though, with Mina standing out on the front porch, Richard realized how the house would look through her eyes—how he would look—and he was embarrassed. He spent a few minutes clearing a spot on the couch so she’d have a place to sit down. Finally, when she rang the doorbell again, Richard made his way to the door.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Hello, Richard,” Mina said. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What brings you to these parts?”

  He pushed open the screen door. Mina looked great, but then she always looked great. He often wondered why she put up with Mark. He seemed so . . . well . . . ordinary. Boring and old. Mark had to be pushing sixty, probably twice Mina’s age.

  Richard led her through the entry and into the living room. He gestured her to a place on the couch while he resumed his place on the chair in front of the computer. On the screen, Lynn Martinson was leaving him a long text message. More whining, no doubt.

  “I need some help,” Mina said, then she corrected that statement. “We need some help.”

  Clearing a path through the mess on the floor, Richard rolled his desk chair closer to the couch. “With what?” he asked.

  That was disingenuous. Richard knew exactly what Mina needed help with—a problem with the drone guidance system. The reason Richard knew all about that problem and how to fix it was that the problem was his own creation. One of his last acts when leaving Rutherford International was a bit of “gotcha” sabotage. He had inserted the problem, a single set of rogue commands, buried deep in the thousands of commands it took to run the supposedly scrapped drone and make it work on GPS coordinates.

  Richard knew that a sharp programmer might be able to locate and fix the problem, but a search like that would take time and money—lots of money. He also understood why it had taken so long for the problem to come to light. That had to do with the fact that no one had bothered to do a drone test flight for well over a year. No test flights meant that RI had no customers.

  If Mark and Mina knew about the problem now, that meant they had needed and tested a working model—for someone. A customer of some kind must have come out of the woodwork. Richard knew it sure as hell wasn’t the military, because as far as they knew the drones were history. Besides, if it had been someone on the up-and-up, Mina wouldn’t have come skulking up here unannounced to ask Richard for help.

  As far as Richard was concerned, a customer who was interested in staying under the radar was very good news. It meant money was in play—lots of money, for the Blaylocks and, if Richard played his cards right, for him as well.

  “What do you think is the problem?” he asked.

  Mina shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “Neither does Mark. We need someone who can troubleshoot for us. We’re not in any condition to start bringing people back on a permanent basis,” she added, “but since you’re so familiar with the project, we were hoping you’d agree to come on board on a consulting basis.”

  “What happened?” Richard asked.

  “We put a drone up in the air, or rather, Mark put it up in the air. He’s flown them before with no trouble, but this time it crashed and burned.”

  Which, Richard thought, is exactly what I programmed it to do: take off, fly flawlessly for a while, and then drop out of the sky for no apparent reason.

  Richard let the silence between them stretch for some time before he shook his head. “I just don’t see how I can do it, Mina,” he said reluctantly. “Not after what I hoped would happen between us. There’s too much history. Just seeing you again is enough to break my heart.”

  Lying to someone’s face was a lot more difficult than telling lies over the phone, but between the last time Richard had seen Mina and now, he’d had a whole lot more practice in the art of prevarication. And he had to admit that she was a pretty capable liar herself. Ignoring the mess around her, she watched him with a kind of almost breathless, bright-eyed attention. That was how she made men sit up and take notice.

  “I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said. “Please understand. I had to let you go along with everyone else. Otherwise Mark would have figured it out.”

  For months after Richard went to work at Rutherford, Mina had flirted with him shamelessly and hinted that she was interested in having a little fling with him. That was all that happened in the end—flirting. In actual fact, he’d hardly ev
er gotten to first base with any real women. They scared the hell out of him. Richard talked a good game, but when it was time to deliver the goods, he always came up short.

  He had hoped things would be different with Mina, but the flirting had come to naught. Later, when he’d been given his pink slip, rather than facing up to his own shortcomings, Richard had convinced himself that was why he’d been let go—because Mark had somehow caught on to what Mina was thinking. That was the real reason Richard had dropped that little programming bomb into the Rutherford works. It was the best way for him to even the score. And now, months later, when they finally knew they had a problem, not only did they not know he was responsible for their difficulty, they had come to him to fix it. How wonderful was that?

  Richard wanted to leap off the couch and dance a little jig. Instead, he sighed and shook his head as though he were allowing himself to be persuaded entirely against his will.

  “All right,” he said resignedly. “What do you need and when?”

  “I need to fly a ten-kilo payload, one hundred or so miles, to predetermined coordinates.”

  Richard had been wondering about the end user. Mina’s statement provided the answer. After all, this was California. Other businesses might be struggling to survive, but the illegal drug industry was still booming. Richard wanted Mina to verify it, though. He wanted her to understand he wasn’t as dumb as she thought he was.

  “I suppose that means we’re dealing with one of the drug cartels,” Richard said.

  Mina looked him square in the eye and didn’t deny it, and she didn’t object to his use of the word we either. In fact, she used the same word herself.

  “We’ll make a lot of money,” she said.

  “Who’s we?”

  “All of us—you, me, Mark. How long do you think it’ll take to troubleshoot the problem?”