Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  The real answer was about two minutes, but he didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t pay for two minutes.

  “I don’t know how you expect me to do that,” he said. “I don’t have any of the code, and even if I did, finding something like this won’t be easy.”

  Mina reached into her purse and pulled out a thumb drive, which she handed over to him. “I brought the latest version of the programming with me. Here it is,” she said. “Everything you need should be on that.”

  The fact that Mark and Mina still had drones and were getting ready to sell working models meant that the Blaylocks had gone over to the dark side. From Richard’s point of view there was a definite upside to working the dark side—lots of money.

  “It’ll take me at least six months, but that’s not a guarantee,” he said. “Fifty thou total. All communications are to be done this way, in person and eyeball to eyeball. No e-mails back and forth; no telephone communications; all payments to be made in cash. Half down; half on delivery.”

  “Five months, not six,” Mina countered. “I need to be able to do the test flight before the end of January. I’m offering twenty thousand down, and ten a month until the job is completed. Plus, I’ll give you a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus in January after a successful test flight.”

  Once again Mina reached into her oversized purse. This time she plucked out a packet of cash and handed that to him as well. “Count it if you want.”

  Richard didn’t have to count it. He knew it was all there. He couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. He’d had no idea that she knew him so well. The fact that she was offering more than he’d asked was surprising.

  “Oh,” Mina added. “There is one more thing. We’ll need the ability to remotely detonate this thing.”

  “As in blow it up?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Blow it to pieces.”

  “That’s a little more complicated,” Richard said with a laugh. “But I get it,” he added. “It’s like the beginning of one of those old Mission: Impossible stories on TV where they say, ‘This tape will self-destruct in thirty seconds.’”

  Mina frowned. “I don’t think I ever saw that movie.”

  “It wasn’t a movie,” Richard said. “It was an old TV series. From the sixties.”

  “I never saw that either,” Mina said.

  But Richard had seen those shows, countless times. Ron Mills, Richard’s stepfather, had loved Mission: Impossible, especially Cinnamon. He had owned DVD versions of all three seasons. Richard had found those DVDs in the same box in the basement where he had found his mother’s prized boxed sets of Murder, She Wrote VCR tapes.

  “Too bad,” he said. “You’re missing out on an essential piece of Americana.”

  Mina stood up and gathered her purse. Richard didn’t bother getting up to show her out. He looked at the money—money he had never expected to see. Without having to pay taxes and at his current rate of expenditure, that much money and the rest Mina had promised him would last for a very long time.

  Richard felt an immense sense of satisfaction. He had Mina Blaylock just where he wanted her. Richard knew that if there was that much money lying around just for the asking, then there was obviously far more where that came from.

  Sacramento, California

  Brenda’s enforced jail-based sobriety didn’t exactly take. It lasted long enough for Valerie to drive her home to Sacramento from Barstow. It lasted long enough for Brenda to be far too sober during the name-calling blowup between her sister and her mother, Camilla, when Valerie dropped Brenda off at their mother’s P Street home.

  “Here’s your jailbird,” Valerie had said, opening the door so Brenda could make her way inside. “I brought her home to roost.”

  Camilla heaved herself up out of the chair and hurried to meet them. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said, hugging Brenda close. “When I didn’t hear from you, I was worried sick.”

  “She’s a drunk, Mom,” Valerie said. “She wrecked her car and she damned near killed herself. She probably would have done us all a favor if she had.”

  “Valerie,” Camilla said, “you mustn’t talk like that.”

  “Why not? You don’t think she’s learned her lesson, do you? Just wait. She’ll be drinking again the minute your back is turned.”

  “Valerie . . .”

  “Save your breath, Mom. I don’t want to hear it, and the next time she gets in hot water, don’t bother calling me. I did this once. I won’t do it again.”

  Valerie had slammed out the door on that note and hadn’t been heard from again. She hadn’t phoned. Camilla called and left messages. Valerie didn’t call back.

  As for Brenda? Unfortunately, Valerie’s assessment proved to be correct. Brenda was all right for a couple of days, but then she got around to opening the mail, including the background check on Richard—Lowensdale, it turned out, not Lattimer. Reading through the material and uncovering the fabric of lies behind everything he had told Brenda was enough to push her off the deep end once more.

  That night, after her mother was asleep, she let herself out of the house, walked six blocks to the nearest liquor store, and bought a supply of booze that she smuggled back into the house and upstairs to her room. One of the pieces of furniture in the room was her mother’s old hope chest. From Brenda’s point of view, the best thing about it was the fact that it came with a lock and key. Brenda deposited her booze purchases in among mother’s extra sheets and pillowcases, then she turned the old-fashioned key in the lock and hid the key in her purse, concealed in her hard plastic tampon holder.

  She drank the rest of the night, reading and rereading the background check and fanning her anger to a fever pitch. She was furious to think that while she had been sick with worry about Richard’s health, he had been fit as a fiddle and only an hour or so away. She thought about calling him, but then she realized that wouldn’t work. He had stopped taking her calls, and once he recognized her new cell phone number, he wouldn’t take calls from that device either. No, what was called for was a visit—a personal visit, one where Brenda would have the opportunity to let Richard have it. She wanted to talk to him face-to-face and tell him how contemptible he was.

  She fell asleep around four a.m. and woke up at eleven. She had breakfast in the kitchen while her mother was having lunch. Camilla greeted her daughter with a smile. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said. “You’re keeping the same kind of hours you did in junior high.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Brenda said.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Camilla asked.

  Yes, Brenda thought. Leave me alone. “Can I borrow your car for a while this afternoon?”

  “Well, of course,” Camilla said. “When do you expect to get your own car back?”

  The answer to that was never. Valerie would have spilled the truth about that in a minute. Fortunately for Brenda, Valerie hadn’t hung around long enough to do a huge amount of damage.

  “They’re getting the parts in,” Brenda lied. “It’s going to be a while.”

  On that sunny afternoon in early October, Brenda stocked her purse with enough booze to tide her over, then she borrowed her mother’s car keys and took off for Grass Valley in Camilla’s twenty-year-old Taurus. All the way there, Brenda rehearsed exactly what she would say to Richard Lattimer Lowensdale. By the time she reached the house on Jan Road, she was only partially drunk, but she had worked herself into a seething rage.

  Ready for war, she marched up to his door, stomped across the front porch, and gave the doorbell button a furious punch. But nothing happened. Richard didn’t come to the door. The house was totally silent. Convinced he had recognized her and was simply hiding from her, she wandered around to the side of the house, where she found a second door. This one didn’t have a doorbell, but it did have a series of glass panes.

  Without giving any thought to the consequences, Brenda picked up a rock and smashed one of the lower panes. Then she unlocked the door a
nd let herself inside. Entering through a utility room, she found herself choking on the terrible odor. It made her throat hurt and her eyes itch. The kitchen was fine, but the mess in the remainder of the house was appalling.

  Richard had passed himself off as an urbane, witty, neat guy, yet here he lived in a squalid hovel. Brenda wandered through the filthy house, letting the scales fall from her eyes. Richard had lied about far more than his name and his place of employment. Everything about him was false.

  With Richard not there, Brenda was ready to vandalize the place. Standing in the living room, surveying the mess, she caught sight of the most logical target. Richard’s command central, his computer desk, stood at the far end of the room.

  Brenda remembered Richard’s telling her that he never turned off his computer. Maybe I’ll turn it off for him, she thought. Permanently.

  She looked around for a suitable weapon and settled on a sooty fireplace poker. She carried it over there and was ready to smash the CRT when she saw there was an open file showing on the screen. The file name was Martinson in a folder called Storyboards.

  Scanning through the open file, Brenda learned far more than she wanted to about Lynn Martinson’s sad life—her drug-addicted son, her difficult ex-husband, her complicated job, and her loving relationship with someone named Richard Lewis who had a troublesome ex-wife named Andrea and a teenaged daughter, Nicole, who was also involved with drugs. Lynn’s social security number was there. Her preferred nicknames and suitable terms of endearment were duly noted. There was also a log of calls and e-mail conversations that included transcripts of what Richard had said to her and what Lynn had answered in return. Glancing at the contents of the storyboard was like eavesdropping on a two-way conversation.

  Suddenly a light went on in Brenda’s head. Making a mental note of Lynn Martinson’s name, Brenda hit the open file command. When a list of fifty-seven items appeared, Brenda scrolled through it. She found her own name, Brenda Riley, three-quarters of the way down the list.

  She could have opened her file just then, but she didn’t dare take the time. She wanted the contents of this folder—all the contents. Fortunately Brenda was conversant with the Mac operating system. She went back to the Storyboards folder and hit command P to activate the printer. As pages spun out of the printer, one after another, Brenda scanned one or two, realizing as she did so that she was far from alone in being victimized by Richard Lowensdale and his various aliases.

  It took precious minutes and more than a hundred pages to print the storyboard folder. At one point, the printer ran out of paper and Brenda had to look around to find paper to load into it. As soon as the printing job was finished, Brenda reopened the Lynn Martinson file, leaving the computer much as it had been when she found it.

  Then she picked up the printed material and fled. Back at her mother’s home on P Street in Sacramento, Brenda locked herself in her room and read through what she had printed, studying every single page and drinking as she read.

  By the time she finished reading and passed out again—at five o’clock the next morning—Brenda Riley had given herself a new purpose in life: one way or another she would find a way to take Richard Lowensdale down if it was the last thing she ever did.

  10

  Sedona, Arizona January

  Four months after graduating from the Arizona Police Academy, Ali Reynolds was doing something she had never expected to do again—manning her mother’s lunch counter in the Sugarloaf Café.

  “Order.”

  Summoned to the serving window by the café’s substitute short-order cook, Ali Reynolds picked up two platters of ham and eggs and delivered them to the two customers seated at her station.

  This Friday morning in January the restaurant had been slammed from the moment Ali opened the doors at six a.m. until only a few minutes ago. Once the pace slowed slightly, Ali leaned her hip against the counter and gave herself permission to sip a cup of coffee.

  Six days down, one to go, Ali told herself.

  Ali’s parents, Bob and Edie Larson, were on the next-to-last day of their seven-day Caribbean cruise. Ali was on the next-to-last day of filling in for them.

  After nearly a week of working her mother’s early morning shift, Ali had a renewed respect for the jobs her parents had done in running their Sedona area diner for all those years. She also had a renewed respect for her mother’s killer schedule. Edie Larson came in to the restaurant at four a.m. every day to bake the restaurant’s signature sweet rolls as well as that day’s supply of biscuits.

  Ali’s one attempt at duplicating her mother’s sweet roll recipe had been nothing short of disastrous. Fortunately, Leland Brooks had come to her rescue. For the remainder of the week Edie and Bob Larson were gone, Leland had agreed to come in each day to handle the baking. Leland went back home each morning about the time Ali and the substitute short-order cook turned up to take over.

  When Ali had first broached the topic of a Caribbean cruise as that year’s Christmas present to her parents, they had turned the idea down cold. Both of them had insisted that they couldn’t possibly be away from the restaurant for that long. Ali, however, had refused to take no for an answer. She had found a substitute cook and had sorted out a passport renewal for her mother and a new passport for her father. But it was only when she agreed to come in to the restaurant herself every day to keep an eye on things that Bob and Edie finally acquiesced.

  To Ali’s knowledge, this was the first long vacation her parents had ever taken together. From the tenor of the short e-mail updates Edie sent home on a daily basis, it seemed they were having the time of their lives. Ali was not having the time of her life. She was tired. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. She put on her smile every morning when she put on her uniform—a freshly laundered Sugarloaf Café sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. She did her best to be cheerful and pleasant as she served coffee and wiped up spills, but the truth was Ali Reynolds was still annoyed. She was also bored.

  This wasn’t the way her life was supposed to be right now. She loved her parents and was glad to help with giving them a break, but the truth was she shouldn’t have been available to work for a week as a substitute server in the Sugarloaf Café. The way she had seen her future, she should have been working as the media relations officer for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. The problem was, she wasn’t.

  The previous September, Ali Reynolds had graduated third in her class at the Arizona Police Academy in Peoria. For someone who was the oldest member of her class and a female besides, that had been a big accomplishment. She had been tossed into a class filled with much younger recruits, and she had made the grade.

  Her parents, her son and daughter-in-law, and B. Simpson, her significant other, all of them beaming with pride, had shown up for her graduation. They had congratulated her and told her what a great job she had done. And she had shaken hands with all her fellow graduates, who, like her, were going back to towns all over the state of Arizona to begin their law enforcement duties. The whole experience had been an incredible high.

  As a result, nothing could have prepared her for what happened to her the following Monday morning. Dressed in a perfectly creased uniform, she drove to Prescott fully expecting to resume her media relations duties. Before the scheduled preshift roll call meeting at nine, however, Sheriff Gordon Maxwell called her into his office, sat her down opposite his desk, and gave her the bad news.

  “I’m sorry to do this, Ali, but I’m going to have to furlough you.”

  At first Ali didn’t think she’d heard him right. “Furlough?” she repeated. “As in let me go?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you kidding? I just busted my butt for six weeks getting through the academy.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And no, I’m not kidding. Believe me, I’m very, very sorry. The county budget-cutting axe fell on every aspect of county government about three weeks ago. I knew then this was going to happen. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want
you to drop out without finishing the course. And you did great, by the way.”

  “Right,” Ali replied sarcastically. “I did so well that now I’m being fired.”

  “Furloughed, not fired,” Maxwell insisted. “Once the fiscal situation straightens out, I fully expect to bring you back as a sworn officer, but right this minute my hands are tied. Last in, first out, and all that jazz. Hell, Ali, it was either you or Jimmy. He’s got a couple of kids and really needs this job.”

  Deputy Jimmy Potter happened to be a recent hire as well. He and Ali shared office space in the Village of Oak Creek Substation. He was a nice guy with a wife and a pair of preschool-aged children. Ali could see that Sheriff Maxwell had a point. Ali had no dependents. Her financial situation made work an option for her rather than a necessity, but she really wanted this job. She loved it. She was good at it.

  “So that makes me expendable?” Ali asked.

  “Not expendable, not at all.”

  Despite what he said, it turned out Ali Reynolds was indeed expendable. Without ever attending that morning’s roll call, she turned in her laptop, her cell phone, her weapons, and her badge and went home. She wasn’t in disgrace, but it certainly felt like it.

  In a way, losing the media relations job was somehow worse than losing her newscasting job in California years earlier. Her response to that had been to pack up and go home to Sedona. This time she was already in Sedona. That left her nowhere else to run. L.A. was big enough to allow for a certain amount of anonymity. Sedona was another proposition entirely. Everyone seemed to know she’d been laid off. Even though most of the comments came in the inoffensive guise of harmless well-wishing, the lack of privacy in both her love life and job situation bothered her.

  She had been forced to sit on the sidelines licking her wounds and watching while the media storm over the “sweat lodge wars” once again catapulted the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department to national prominence. And who was doing the media relations work for the department in the midst of that maelstrom? The guy with his face on TV and voice on the radio was Mike Sawyer, a twenty-two-year-old college kid Ali had brought on board as an unpaid summer intern while she was down in Phoenix at the academy. Instead of returning to school to work on his master’s degree in the fall, he had stayed on.