Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “Cigar?” Dale Masters asked, offering one of those as well.

  Linda had put a permanent embargo on Gil’s having the occasional cigar. With her gone, it was time that prohibition was lifted.

  “Thanks,” Gil said. He took the proffered smoke and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “If you don’t mind, I’ll save it for later.”

  “Be my guest,” Masters told him. “You’re going to need it.”

  “What happened here, forced entry?”

  “Not that we can see,” Masters replied. “There’s a deadbolt on the front door, but it wasn’t engaged.”

  That means the victim probably knew his killer, Gil thought. At least he let the bad guy into the house.

  “But we might get lucky,” Officer Dodd said.

  “How so?” Gil asked.

  Dodd gestured to the upper corner of the front porch to where a CCTV security camera had been mounted on the wooden siding.

  “The only way that’ll help us is if it’s turned on,” Gil said. “Now what about the coroner?”

  “Fred’s on his way,” Dodd said. “He should be here any minute.”

  Without waiting for the arrival of the coroner, Fred Millhouse, Gil slipped on a pair of crime scene booties and a pair of latex gloves. “Do we have a name?”

  “Several actually,” Officer Dodd said. “We were originally sent here to do a welfare check on a guy named Richard Lydecker whose fiancée called nine-one-one to report him missing. Later another woman called looking for her missing fiancé. She gave the nine-one-one operator the same address, only she says her guy’s name is Richard Loomis.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Gil said.

  Dodd nodded. “County tax records say the residence is owned by someone else named Richard, only his last name is Lowensdale. So I’m guessing the dead guy is one of those three or maybe he’s all of them. According to them, Lowensdale is age fifty-three. Looks like he lives alone.”

  My age, Gil thought.

  “Were the lights on or off when you got here?” he asked.

  “The overhead fixture in the living room was off. The desk lamp is on in the corner, but the blinds were closed in both the living room and dining room. The only way to see inside was through the window in the front door. That allows a view of the entryway only, not the actual crime scene, which is in the living room.”

  “So no one could see what was happening from the outside.”

  “I don’t think so. I suspect this all went down sometime in the course of the afternoon on Friday or maybe even Thursday. The porch light was off, and we found a UPS package here by the front door, so it was probably delivered on Friday afternoon at the latest. UPS doesn’t deliver on weekends.”

  Gil paused long enough to look down at the label. Zappos. From information on the label and from the shape of the box, Gil figured the package probably contained a pair of shoes. The victim may have needed new shoes and he may have ordered new shoes, but he was never going to wear them.

  “So the UPS guy may have some information for us,” Gil said. “Any idea who he is?”

  “The local driver is named Ted Frost,” Dodd said. “I went to high school with him. He’s a good guy.”

  Gil nodded. “See if you can get him on the horn.”

  While Officer Dodd set off to do Gil’s bidding, the detective geared himself up for the task at hand. As he stepped on the grimy hardwood-floored entryway, Gil Morris encountered the appalling stench that immediately overpowered the puny efforts of his Vick’s Vaporub.

  That one sickening whiff was enough to tell him that he was also stepping into a nightmare.

  For a moment, after he crossed the threshold, Gil stood still, trying to get the lay of the land and assimilate what he was seeing and feeling. As expected, the house was unbearably hot. If he had been able to see a thermostat, he would have turned it down. The overheated air reeked with an ugly combination of odors. Fighting his own gag reflex, Gil catalogued the unwelcome but familiar smells—both the putrid odor of decaying flesh and the lingering coppery scent of dried and rotting blood. Beyond those two, however, was something else besides, something obnoxious that Gil couldn’t quite place.

  As he stepped into the room, a small coat closet was to his immediate left. The door had been left ajar and the coats, jackets, and sweaters on the pole inside had all been pushed to one side in order to leave enough room for an old-fashioned Kirby vacuum cleaner that had been stowed in one corner of the closet.

  For some strange reason that tickled Gil’s funny bone. Where was it written that vacuum cleaners always had to be stored in entryway closets? That was where Linda had kept her Bissell and where his mother had kept her Hoover. At that moment, Gil was without a vacuum cleaner and without much hope of ever having one either.

  But if I get one, he told himself, I’m not keeping it in the entryway closet.

  The overhang of the porch and the closed blinds along the front of the house left the entryway shrouded in shadow. Making a note of how he had found the light switch, Gil used a pencil to turn on the overhead lights. Immediately he saw evidence of tracked blood, coming and going through the entryway, but the patterns were smeared and indistinct. Gil knew what that meant. Whoever had tramped through the blood had been wearing booties.

  Gil turned back to the door. “Hey, Officer Masters,” he called. “Did you or Dodd leave these tracks in here?”

  “No, sir,” Masters returned. “We saw the tracks. We walked around them.”

  Nodding, Gil dropped a numbered marker onto the floor next to each of three prints. Then, using a small digital camera, he took several photographs of the area indicated by the marker. Each time he snapped a photo, he paused long enough to make a corresponding note on three-by-five cards that he carried in a leather-bound wallet. That way, later, he’d be able to use the notes to explain what was in the photos and he’d use the photos to help decipher his sometimes illegible notes.

  Gil knew that the corpse was in the living room. Instead of going directly there, he turned instead toward a room that had originally been intended as a dining room. Shelves that had probably once held knickknacks of some kind had been installed high on the dining room walls, but they were empty. An oak pedestal table stood in the middle of the room. There was only one chair at the table. Two others sat off to the side, just under the window. A buffet that matched the table was the only other piece of furniture. The top of the buffet was covered with packing boxes, tape dispensers, and blank shipping labels, while the top of the table was littered with tubes of epoxy and paint and brushes.

  On the floor, scattered in among a snowdrift of foam packing peanuts, lay the smashed remains of what must have once been on the now-denuded bookshelves—dozens and dozens of model airplanes, all of them wrecked, ground to pieces on the floor. They had been stepped on . . . no, stomped on, in what Gil read as deliberate, thorough, and wanton destruction.

  Okay, Gil told himself. Kirby vacuum or not, if this is where the victim built his models, that means the guy definitely isn’t married. And he isn’t living with his mother either. No woman in her right mind lets a guy build model airplanes in the middle of her dining room table or spill packing peanuts all over the house.

  Gil stayed where he was, in the dining room doorway. If he tried stepping into the dining room, he knew that no matter how carefully he walked, he wouldn’t be able to keep from crunching larger pieces of wings and propellers and fuselages into smaller bits of plastic, balsa wood, and dust.

  At last, turning toward the living room, Gil was appalled by the mess. Except for the wrecked model planes on the floor, the dining room had been relatively neat and orderly. The living room looked like a trash heap, a lived-in trash heap that consisted of discarded magazines, packets of coupons, grocery bags, empty cans of chili, shipping boxes, and dead pizza containers, with little cleared paths like game trails leading through the mess from one place to another. It was possible someone could find out how long the debris had been t
here by shoveling through it like an archeological dig, but that wasn’t Gil’s job.

  The small desk lamp on the far table did little to illuminate the rest of the room. Once again Gil tracked down a wall switch. Turning on the overhead fixture in the living room immediately revealed the same kind of fuzzy footprints he had seen in the entryway. They meandered in and out of the mess, sometimes following the trails sometimes stepping on or over the trash.

  In the lamplight, the victim’s body hadn’t been immediately visible. Now it was. Just beyond the far end of the couch, a single sock-clad foot hung at an ungainly angle in midair. Only when Gil rounded the couch did he see that a large male was strapped to a fallen dining room chair by layers and layers of clear packing tape. His legs were fastened to the front legs of the chair while his arms and wrists, out of sight, were most likely similarly bound behind his back.

  At first glance there was no evidence of any kind of bullet or stab wound that would account for the presence of all the blood that had been trod through the house. Instead, the man’s head was encased in a clear plastic bag, the kind that customers in grocery stores peel off conveniently located rolls to carry home their freshly chosen vegetables—heads of broccoli, lettuce, or cauliflower—but the plastic was heavy, not likely to be easily chewed through. Underneath the bag, Gil caught sight of another piece of packing tape that had been plastered to the man’s mouth to function as a gag. More tape had been used to fasten the open end of the bag tightly around the victim’s bulging neck.

  Asphyxiation then, Gil thought. So why do I see so much blood?

  Stepping to the far side of the corpse, Gil found the answer to that question. The tips of several of the dead man’s fingers—four in all—had been hacked off by poultry scissors that still lay where it had been dropped. Beside the shears were the blackened hunks of fingertips, although Gil counted only three, not four. It was likely the missing one had been covered by the man’s falling body when the chair had tipped onto its side. And the amount of blood on the floor told Gil what he didn’t want to know—that the victim had been alive when the fingers were hacked off one by one.

  The gruesome savagery of that was enough to make even an experienced homicide cop want to toss his morning’s batch of Honey Nut Cheerios. The other thing contributing to his gag reflex had to do with teeming hordes of insect vermin that were visible both inside and on the body. Since the house itself was a gigantic trash heap, that came as no surprise. The good news about that was that flesh-eating maggots would provide a foolproof way for the coroner to establish the victim’s time of death with a good deal of accuracy.

  Needing to step away for a moment, Gil turned toward the wooden desk. It was stacked high with a complicated collection of electronics—several printers as well as a single computer. A single glance was enough to tell Gil that this was high-end, top-of-the-line Mac equipment, and that struck him as odd. In the course of a normal home invasion, the electronics wouldn’t have been there. They’d have been among the first items stolen or else they would have been smashed to pieces like the model airplanes in the other room.

  Gil made his way around the living room, laying down more evidence markers and taking photos as he went. Finally, returning to the corpse, Gil stepped closer to the body and squatted down next to it. Only then did Gil catch sight of a tiny set of white wires. They came from what Gil assumed to be an iPod in the pocket of the dead man’s sweatshirt. They threaded their way under the tape that was attached to his throat. With the victim lying on his side, Gil could only see the left side of the man’s head, but he could also see that one of the earbuds was still stuck in the dead man’s ear.

  “So what went on here, big fella?” Gilbert asked aloud.

  He often addressed questions to the corpses at crime scenes during those intimate moments when he was alone with murder victims. They never answered, but Gil’s one-sided conversations usually helped him make sense of what he was seeing.

  “You were listening to your tunes, and then something happened. What was it?”

  It was as Gil rose from his crouch and readied his camera once more that he noticed the presence of an extra dining room chair. He had seen it before, but this was the first time it actually registered. Before that Gil had been too focused on the body itself to realize that a second chair had been brought into the living room and positioned in a spot that was close to the dead man’s head.

  It took a moment for Gil to grasp what he was seeing. Two dining room chairs had been brought into the living room, one to confine the victim and one to be used as an observation post. Murder was murder, and the bloody mutilations were nothing short of appalling, but the idea of sitting and watching while your victim struggled to take his last breaths moved what had happened in this room to a whole new level.

  25

  Grass Valley, California

  Gil was still struggling with that reality when the Nevada County coroner, Fred Millhouse, arrived on the scene.

  “Hey, Detective Morris,” Fred said. “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this. Three in one week is more than I bargained for. Is it all right if I move this chair out of the way?”

  “Just a moment,” Gil said, laying down another marker. “Let me get a photo first.”

  While Fred went to work doing what he needed to do, Gil walked through the house. He was looking for evidence, yes, but he was also trying to get the feel of what he was seeing.

  A good deal of the mess in the room was trash that had been there for a long time, but the wanton destruction of the model planes was recent. It had taken time to smash them one by one. If the plane smasher and the killer were one and the same, that meant that the culprit had been in the victim’s house for an extended period of time. This wasn’t a quick in and out. The killer had come here looking for something. The question was, had he found it and taken it?

  Gil glanced again at the collection of electronics on the desk in the corner. Gil Morris was no geek, but he knew enough about computers to realize that the computer was a potential source of all kinds of useful information, including the names and e-mail addresses of the people the victim had corresponded with in the last days of his life. It would also tell investigators what, if anything, Richard Lowensdale had been working on at the time of his death. Gil looked around for a cell phone or a landline. At first glance, neither was visible. And if there were some way to view any of the footage from the security camera over the front door, that wasn’t readily apparent either.

  Not wanting to observe Millhouse at his grim work and not wanting to be in the way, Gil let himself out of the overheated, dimly lit house into bright sunlight and a welcome January chill. He paused on the front porch long enough to search for evidence that the bloodied footsteps had exited this way. There was nothing visible to the naked eye, but luminol might reveal the microscopic presence of blood evidence. A more likely scenario told him that the perpetrator had walked around in the house long enough for the blood on the bottom of his feet to dry.

  Gil stood on the porch’s top step and breathed in a lungful of fresh air. Even with the Vicks right there beneath his nostrils, some of the terrible odors of death still lingered. Gil walked down the cracked sidewalk and let himself out through the crooked gate. A patrol car was parked on the far side of the street. Officer Masters was inside and appeared to be talking on the radio.

  Gil pulled the cigar out of his shirt pocket and mimed his need of a light to Masters.

  When Dale Masters joined him at the rear of the black-and-white, he brought a second cigar for himself and a lighter, as well as a small metal container which, with the lid removed, served admirably as a makeshift ashtray. Leaving ashes of any kind near a crime scene was a bad idea. The black-and-white had a perfectly functioning ashtray in the front seat, but smoking in city-owned vehicles was not entirely verboten.

  Once they both lit up, Gil was pleased to discover that the cigars were impressively obnoxious—the kind Linda had always regarded as “pure evil”—
but the smoke helped displace the last of the noxious odors.

  “Thanks,” Gil said, holding up his cigar.

  “You’re welcome,” Dale said. “You lasted a whole lot longer inside there than I did. By the way, I just got off the phone with Irene in Records. She said there was a B and E at this address on the twentieth of September of this past year. According to the report, an ex-girlfriend allegedly broke into the house in broad daylight while Lowensdale was off getting his Cadillac serviced.”

  “New Cadillac?”

  “Old,” Masters said. “The way I understand it, it used to belong to Lowensdale’s mother.”

  Gil pulled out a new three-by-five card. “Name?”

  “Mother’s name?”

  “No. The B and E suspect.”

  “Her name’s Brenda Riley. She used to be Lowensdale’s girlfriend.”

  “They caught her in the act?”

  “Not exactly. Lowensdale came home, saw a broken window, and realized someone had been inside his place. Even though nothing of value had been stolen, he raised enough of a stink that the chief finally agreed to have our guys come by to do a crime scene investigation. Her prints were found everywhere. No effort to cover them up whatsoever.”

  “She’s in the system?” Gil asked.

  Masters nodded. “She’s been booked for a number of moving violations, DUIs as well as driving without a license, and so forth. Once we told him who the perp was, Lowensdale declined to press charges. Said it was the aftermath of a bad breakup and since nothing was taken, he was prepared to let it go.”

  “Brenda Riley?” Gil asked with his pen poised to write.

  “Brenda Arlene Riley,” Masters confirmed. “She lives in Sacramento. Irene in Records can give you the exact address, but you may want to check. I believe there was something in that original nine-one-one call this morning about an ex being involved in all this one way or the other.”