Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  Phyllis then glanced at the clock on the wall across the room. It was almost time for her coffee break. Wanda Harkness, the operator at the next desk, had just come back from her break, and she was now involved in taking a call that sounded no more critical than the one Phyllis had just handled.

  For the remainder of that Sunday morning, Phyllis and Wanda handled calls most of which shouldn’t have been 911 calls in the first place. One woman was frantic because her declawed house cat had escaped through an open door and taken off for parts unknown. What if a coyote caught it and ate it? Couldn’t they please do something to help? Someone else had crashed into an empty plastic garbage can hard enough to split it wide open. The car was most likely damaged, but apparently no people were. And one woman, an almost weekly caller, begged them to do something about the noise of those church bells: did they have to ring that loud every single Sunday morning?

  Time dragged. Between calls, Phyllis sipped her coffee, worked the New York Times Sunday crossword, and kept an eye on the clock.

  At eleven thirty-eight, Phyllis’s phone lit up. “Nine-one-one,” she said. “What are you reporting?”

  “I want to report a missing person,” a woman said, sounding reasonably controlled. This one wasn’t panicky. She wasn’t yelling.

  Caller ID said that the call had originated in area code 541. Phyllis recognized that as being somewhere in Oregon. Phyllis’s sister and brother-in-law lived in Roseburg.

  “Is the missing person a child or an adult?” Phyllis asked.

  “An adult. He’s fifty-three.”

  “He’s a relative of yours?”

  “Well, sort of. We’re engaged. At least we’re going to be. We had this little disagreement on Thursday. He sent me a link to an engagement ring he was thinking about getting me for Valentine’s Day. The problem is, I didn’t like the one he picked out, and I told him so, but I can’t imagine he’s still mad about that. We talked briefly on Friday morning. He was still upset, but he thought we’d be alright.”

  “All right, then,” Phyllis said. “Let me get some information. What’s your name?”

  “Dawn,” the woman said. “Dawn Carras from Eugene, Oregon.”

  “And your missing fiancé’s name?”

  “Richard,” Dawn said. “Richard Loomis.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Yes. It’s nine sixteen Jan Road.”

  Whoa! Phyllis thought. Another man named Richard AWOL from the same address? How interesting.

  Phyllis managed to keep her voice even and businesslike as she checked Grass Valley records for any listing for Richard Loomis. She found nothing, just as earlier she had found no listing for Janet Silvie’s Richard Lydecker.

  This seemed like more than a mere coincidence. Two women had called from opposite ends of the country on the same morning to report two missing fiancés both of whom were named Richard and who evidently shared a residence with yet a third person, also named Richard. Once you added a psychotic ex-girlfriend into the mix, Phyllis’s Sunday morning shift at the com center was suddenly a whole lot more interesting than it had been earlier.

  Dutifully she took down all of Dawn Carras’s information, but the moment Phyllis was off the phone, she called Grass Valley PD and spoke to Sandy in Dispatch.

  “About that welfare check I called in earlier—”

  “I forgot to get back to you,” Sandy said. “It’s turned out to be a whole lot more serious than a welfare check. Responding officers found a body. If this is Mr. Lydecker, the guy’s dead and has been for some time—a couple of days at least. The ME is on his way there right now. The cops on the scene said someone trussed him up with packing tape, put a plastic bag over his head, and taped that shut as well. Can you give me any additional details?”

  “No,” Phyllis said. “I already gave you everything I had on that one, but it turns out I do have one more piece of the puzzle. I just had some other woman, one from Oregon this time, who called in a missing person report on her fiancé. This guy is named Richard Loomis. He happens to live at the same address on Jan Road that Janet Silvie gave me for Richard Lydecker.

  “The second caller is a woman named Dawn Carras who lives in Eugene, Oregon. According to her, she and Richard Loomis had a lover’s spat the other night because she wasn’t wild about the engagement ring he had chosen for her. They had words over it on Thursday evening. He was still upset when she spoke to him on Friday morning, but she expected that all would have blown over in time for their regular Saturday date-night phone call, but he never called.”

  “So we’ve got three guys named Richard, one dead guy, and two missing fiancés,” Sandy said. “What does it sound like to you?”

  “Sounds like our little Richard was playing with fire and got burned. He must be one good-looking dude. Or else he’s loaded. Think about how ugly Aristotle Onassis was.”

  “Who?” Sandy asked.

  Phyllis Williams, Phyllis James back then, had been a freshman in high school on that day in November when President Kennedy was gunned down by Lee Harvey Oswald. Years later, she had been appalled when his widow and Phyllis’s own personal idol, Jackie Kennedy, had taken up with billionaire Aristotle Onassis. It seemed impossible to Phyllis that Sandy had no idea who Aristotle Onassis was, but then again, Sandy might be so young that she didn’t know who Jackie Kennedy was either.

  This wasn’t the first time in Phyllis’s many years at the Nevada County Com Center that she had run headlong into a generation gap with her younger counterparts, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But if Richard Lowensdale, Richard Lydecker, and Richard Loomis were all one and the same, Phyllis wondered what exactly the guy had going for him. Whatever it was, it had obviously been good enough to attract women like flies to honey.

  Too bad it wasn’t enough to save his life.

  22

  Los Angeles, California

  Ali Reynolds didn’t awaken in her Los Angeles hotel room until after ten the next morning. As soon as she heard the rumble of planes overhead, she was surprised that she had been able to sleep through the racket. She ordered coffee and breakfast from room service. Knowing she needed to check on Velma before showing up at her home, Ali dialed Velma’s phone number in Laguna Beach and then waited for someone—a hospice worker, most likely—to answer.

  What if I waited too long? Ali wondered.

  “Velma Trimble’s residence.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was brisk and businesslike.

  “My name is Ali Reynolds,” she began. “I was told Velma wanted to see me—”

  “Ali? It’s Maddy—Velma’s friend, Maddy Watkins. I’m so glad you called.”

  When Velma had defied her cancer diagnosis by signing up for that round-the-world private jet cruise, she had been assigned a stranger, Maddy Watkins, as roommate by the travel agency. By the end of the trip, Maddy and Velma had become fast friends. Maddy, a wealthy widow from Washington State, was an aging dynamo who traveled everywhere by car in the company of her two golden retrievers, Aggie and Daphne. When she and Velma had been invited to attend Chris and Athena’s wedding, the two dogs had come along to Sedona.

  “How are your kids?” Maddy asked. “Aren’t those twins due most any day now?”

  “Soon,” Ali said. “But how’s Velma?”

  “The dogs and I drove down and have been here for the past three days. Aggie and Daphne weren’t trained to be service dogs, but try to tell them that. Aggie has barely left Velma’s bedside. By rights her son should be the one who’s here supervising the hospice workers, but he’s not. If you don’t mind my saying so, Carson is a real piece of work. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he and my own son were twins. Anyway, I believe Carson is a little afraid of me, and rightly so. He was ready to pull the plug on his mother four years ago when she first got her cancer diagnosis. And I don’t blame her at all for wanting people with her right now who
don’t have a big vested interest in what’s going on.”

  “What is going on?” Ali asked.

  “She’s dying, of course,” Maddy said brusquely. “But she’s interested in tying up a few loose ends before that happens, you being a case in point.”

  “I flew into L.A. last night,” Ali said. “If it’s convenient, I could come by later this morning. It’ll take an hour or so for me to drive there, depending on traffic.”

  “Midafternoon is a good time,” Maddy said. “She takes a nap after lunch. If you could be here about three, it would be great.”

  “Three it is,” Ali said. There was a knock on the door.

  “Room service.”

  “My breakfast is here, Maddy. See you in a few hours.”

  Ali let the server into the room. Over coffee, orange juice, and a basket of breakfast breads, Ali opened the High Noon envelope, pulled out a wad of papers, and began to read.

  23

  Grass Valley, California

  Detective Gilbert Morris of the Grass Valley Police Department wasn’t having an especially good weekend. Once upon a time, when Gil first hired on with the department, being promoted to the Investigations Unit was more of an honor than anything else. Sure you had a few car thefts and break-ins to investigate from time to time, but not many murders. Maybe one every two to three years. At that point, the Investigations Unit would get called out to do their homicide investigation dance. That, of course, was back before the meth industry came to town and set up shop.

  People had started killing one another with wild abandon about the time Gil got promoted to the I.U., and there didn’t seem to be any sign of the homicide count letting up. That didn’t mean, however, that the city fathers had seen fit to adjust the budget enough to allow for any more than four detectives. In the short term that had been good for Gil’s overtime pay, but long-term it had been bad for his marriage. This week had been especially tough. Dan Cassidy, the lieutenant in charge, was out for knee surgery, Joe Moreno was off on his honeymoon, and Kenny Mosier’s father was taking his own sweet time dying in a hospital somewhere in Ohio. That meant Gil was the only Investigations guy in town, and this was fast turning into a very crowded week.

  Friday was a good case in point. That night, two brothers, some of Grass Valley’s less exemplary citizens, had gone to war with each other and had both ended up dead. George and Bobby Herrera were a pair of homegrown thugs who had graduated from small-town thievery to running a meth lab out of their rundown apartment on the outskirts of town. Both had been pumped up on a combination of booze and meth. What started out as a verbal confrontation had escalated to physical violence when they took their furious sibling rivalry into the unpaved parking lot outside their apartment.

  When weapons appeared, fellow residents ducked for cover and called the cops. By the time officers arrived on the scene, both brothers were on the ground. Bobby had died instantly. George died while en route to the hospital. Gil arrived at the crime scene to find both brothers were deceased, leaving in their wake a mountain of evidence and a daunting amount of paperwork.

  Gil had spent all day Saturday working the crime scene. It wasn’t a matter of solving the crime, because the double homicide pretty well solved itself. Several witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen everything that had happened in the weed-strewn parking lot. A hazmat team came by to dismantle the meth lab George and Bobby had been running in their cockroach-infested one-bedroom apartment.

  “It’s a good thing they’re both dead,” the hazmat guy told Gil. “If they had started a fire in their meth lab kitchen, the place would have gone up like so much dried tinder and the other people who lived here might not have been able to get out.”

  Gil took one statement after another. The witnesses’ stories were all slightly different, but the general outlines were all the same. When the brothers were sober, they were fine. When they were drunk or high, look out. Bobby and George had been pleasant enough earlier that Friday morning, but by the middle of the afternoon they were screaming at one another and, as one young mother of a three-year-old reported, using some very inappropriate language.

  Bobby, the younger of the two, had come running out of their downstairs apartment carrying a rifle of some kind and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Gil Morris had to admit, going barefoot in Grass Valley in January was something of a feat. Friday had been clear but very cold. Obviously Bobby was feeling no pain.

  Bobby stood there holding the gun pointed at the door and yelling at his brother to man up and come outside. Otherwise he was a lily-livered something or other—several expletives deleted. At that point several of the neighbors, crouched behind furniture, saw the weapon, picked up their phones, and dialed 911. Unfortunately, before officers could get there, George emerged from the apartment. He was fully dressed and carrying a firearm of his own.

  According to witnesses, both men stopped screaming for a moment. They seemed to be listening to the sound of approaching sirens before Bobby resumed his rant.

  “You stupid son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You had to go call the cops, didn’t you.”

  Just like that, as though they were on the same wavelength, they both pulled their respective triggers. George was evidently the better shot of the two. His bullet removed most of his brother’s head. Bobby was dead the instant he was hit. Bobby’s shot went low and tore through George’s femoral artery. By the time the EMTs were able to get to him, he had lost too much blood and couldn’t be stabilized.

  As a police officer, Gil found himself being grateful that those two dodos had killed each other without damaging someone else. Then, late Saturday evening as he was about to call it a day, he found himself face-to-face with Sylvia Herrera, Bobby and George’s grieving but furious mother.

  “Why?” she wailed at him. “Why are my boys dead, my poor innocent babies?”

  Bobby and George had been twenty-six and twenty-nine respectively. As far as Gil was concerned, they were a long way from babies. And they were a long way from innocent too. They were a pair of drug-stupefied losers, but Gil couldn’t say that to their mother, and Sylvia Herrera was inconsolable.

  Finally, when she quieted enough for him to get a word in edgewise, Gil said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Herrera. It’s the drugs, you know.”

  “Drugs?” she screeched back at him. “You say it’s the drugs?”

  He nodded. She reached out a hand and waggled a finger at him, thumping him on the chest as she spoke, like a mother remonstrating with a difficult child.

  “Don’t you know drugs are illegal?” she demanded. “You’re the police. You should stop them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “We certainly should.”

  On Saturday night it wasn’t necessary for him to call Linda in advance and tell her he was going to be late. Months earlier his wife of twenty some years had given up on being married to a policeman. She had taken the kids and the dog and the cat and had gone home to live with her folks in Mt. Shasta City. It was too bad, “a crying shame,” as some of the guys at work had put it. The truth is Gil had done his share of crying about it, although he’d never tell his buddies at the department a word about that. Instead, he kept a stiff upper lip and motored along from case to case.

  He was sorry about losing his family, but there didn’t seem to be a damned thing he could do to fix it any more than he could stop the overwhelming flood of drugs that had taken the lives of Sylvia Herrera’s sons.

  So Detective Morris dragged his weary body home to his empty house that was furnished with whatever leavings Linda’s father hadn’t been able to cram in the U-Haul. Linda had left him one plate, one bowl, one glass, one coffee cup, and one set of silverware. That simplified Gil’s meal planning, and it simplified clean up too. He washed every dish he owned after every meal. He thought about microwaving one of those Healthy Choice dinners, but he didn’t bother. They tasted like crap, and anyway he was too tired to eat. Or even drink. He stripped off his cloth
es, fell crosswise on the bed, and fell asleep.

  The next morning Gil was still in his shorts, eating the crummy dregs from the bottom of a nearly empty box of Honey Nut Cheerios, drinking instant coffee, and wishing he had a toaster so he could have an English muffin, when the phone rang.

  “Uniformed officers are reporting what appears to be a homicide at the top of Jan Road,” the dispatch officer for Grass Valley PD told him. And so, at eleven forty-five on a chill Sunday morning in January, Gil Morris found himself summoned to his third homicide case in as many days.

  Yes, it’s a good thing Linda is gone, Gil told himself as he hurried into the bedroom to get dressed. Otherwise she’d be pitching a royal fit.

  24

  Grass Valley, California

  Gil got dressed and drove straight to 916 Jan Road. The front yard was unkempt and weedy. There were dilapidated remnants of what might have been flower beds long ago, but no one had planted anything in them for a very long time. The front gate on the ornamental iron fence hung ajar on a single bent hinge. Two uniformed officers, Dodd and Masters, waited for Gil on the front porch.

  “What have we got?” Gil asked.

  “It’s pretty ugly in there,” Dodd said. “One victim, but he’s been dead for a while and the thermostat is set somewhere in the upper eighties.”

  With no explanation needed, Dodd handed Gil an open jar of Vicks VapoRub. Nodding his thanks, he slathered some of the reeking salve just under his nostrils. It stank to high heaven, but it would help beat back the pungent odors that were no doubt waiting for him inside the house.