Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  Candy was the first to give up playing. She was small enough that she had to take three steps to each of the big dogs’ one. She came back to Maddy and asked to be picked up and dried off. Ali did that while Maddy spent the next fifteen minutes expertly hurling a Frisbee for Aggie and Daphne to chase and fetch.

  When the dogs finally tired of the game, the group walked sedately back to the condo building. Near the outdoor pool was a shower with a hose attachment. Maddy used that to remove lingering sand from the dogs’ paws, then they made their way into the building through the basement garage.

  By the time they got back to the apartment, the night nurse had helped move Velma from the chair to the hospital bed, but she was awake again. Maddy toweled off Candy’s wet fur once more, then deposited the dog on Velma’s bed.

  “You keep her while I get the dog food dished up,” Maddy said. “Once the dogs are fed, I’ll see about rustling up some food for the humans.”

  Supper—a collection of cheeses, crackers, fresh grapes, and tangerines—was accompanied by glasses of chardonnay and eaten on trays in the living room. Velma barely touched her food or her wine, but at least it was offered. It was there if she wanted it. That was what Maddy offered her—the dignity of making her own choices.

  They were still sitting over glasses of wine when there was a knock on the door and the dogs went into full-throated barking. Maddy gave Ali a wink.

  “That will be Mr. Killjoy come to call. He doesn’t like the dogs, and the feeling is entirely mutual. They don’t like him either.”

  “Just a minute,” she called. Maddy swiftly gathered glasses and trays and carried them into the kitchen. Then, before opening the door, she silenced the dogs and ordered them onto their rugs.

  Ten minutes with Carson Trimble was enough to make Ali incredibly grateful for her son, Chris. Carson was arrogant and opinionated. To her misfortune, his hireling nurse had been outside smoking a cigarette when her boss arrived. He spoke mainly to her, asking the nurse pointed questions about Velma’s condition rather than addressing his queries to the patient herself. He made it plain that he regarded both Maddy and Ali as unwelcome guests who should have had brains enough to go away and let his mother die in peace.

  When Maddy announced that she was going to go clean up the kitchen, Ali followed.

  “What a jerk!” Ali muttered.

  Maddy smiled. “I told you so. He has a whole set of rules about how he expects his mother’s death to play out, and it annoys him that she’s doing things her way instead of his. As I said, you ever met my son, you’d think he and Carson Trimble were twins.”

  The mention of twins, real or not, reminded Ali that she needed to go down to her room and make some phone calls. By the time she returned to the guest suite, it was well after dark. Considering the time difference and her mother’s early bedtime, she decided not to call her parents. Instead she called Chris and Athena.

  “How are things?” Ali asked her son.

  “Athena is already in bed but probably not asleep,” he said. “We went to Grandma and Grandpa’s for dinner. That way I didn’t make a mess in the kitchen. The laundry is done to the best of my ability. Athena’s hospital suitcase is packed and waiting in the entryway closet.”

  Ali could have asked if “the best of my ability” meant that the colored clothing was improperly sorted, but she didn’t. Chris had kept his color blindness a secret from her for a long time, and she decided to let that bit of family fiction go unchallenged.

  “In other words, she’s still a little grumpy.”

  “Do you think?”

  “She’s pregnant,” Ali counseled. “If you were growing twins in your body, you’d probably be grumpy too.”

  “We see Dr. Dixon again on Wednesday,” Chris said. “I’m hoping she’ll say it’s time to induce labor.”

  Ali heard the unreasonable assumption in what Chris said. He was hoping that once the babies were born, he’d be getting his wife back. Ali understood the reality of that particular pipe dream. Chris and Athena wouldn’t be getting their previous lives back for the next eighteen or so years if ever.

  “Get some sleep then,” she told her son. “You’re going to need it.”

  She spent half an hour IMing back and forth to B. He had moved from his conference hotel to a different one in downtown D.C. She brought him up to date on the day’s happenings and about what she had learned from James Laughlin about Ermina Cunningham Blaylock.

  She was in bed and sleeping soundly when her cell phone rang at one o’clock in the morning. Ali had left the cell plugged in and charging on the bathroom counter, so it took a few moments for her to stagger through the unfamiliar apartment to find it. She recognized the number. The call had originated at Camilla Gastellum’s house, but it wasn’t Camilla on the phone.

  “Ali Reynolds?” the caller asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to call in the middle of the night like this, but my mother insisted. I’m Valerie Sandoz, Brenda Riley’s sister.”

  The estranged sister, Ali thought in relief. Camilla must have called her after all.

  “Richard Lowensdale is dead,” Valerie announced without further preamble.

  “He’s dead?” Ali asked. “When?”

  “As far as I can tell, the detective didn’t say when exactly. It must have happened sometime over the weekend.”

  “How did he die?” Ali asked.

  “Somebody, Brenda most likely, put a plastic bag over his head. He suffocated.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Ali heard Camilla’s forceful objection to that conclusion rumble through the phone, but Ali was busy trying to sort out what she had just been told.

  “Say again,” she said.

  Valerie sighed. “Somebody put a plastic bag over his head,” she repeated impatiently. “The cops must think Brenda did it, since a homicide detective came here to the house looking for her. I don’t think it was a social call. Naturally, Mom didn’t get around to calling me until after the detective left. Brenda’s been missing since Friday afternoon, and I didn’t know a thing about it until Mom called me this evening.

  “Then tonight, while Les and I were driving over from the Bay Area, some kid from Grass Valley called Mom too. It seems he spent this afternoon up in the mountains with some friends. According to him, he came across Brenda’s shoes and purse abandoned by some lake or other. The kid found Brenda’s cell phone in the purse and called Mom’s number. She told him he should take it to the cops. I’m guessing Brenda knocked off Richard and then committed suicide.”

  Ali was trying to pay attention, but her ability to listen was hampered by what Valerie had said earlier about Richard Lowensdale’s manner of death. A plastic bag over the head as a murder weapon? To Ali’s way of thinking, it sounded a lot like Ermina Blaylock’s dead father. In fact, it sounded exactly like Ermina’s dead father. And if Ermina had gotten away with murder once, maybe she had decided to do so again.

  Valerie was still talking when Ali started listening again.

  “I tried to tell Mom we shouldn’t bother you in the middle of the night this way, but she insisted. She said you were Brenda’s friend—that you’d want to know.”

  “Your mother is right,” Ali said. “I do want to know. Now about that detective who came to see your mother. Does he have a name?”

  “Just a sec,” Valerie said. She was off the phone for a moment, then she returned. “He left his business card. His name is Gilbert Morris. Detective Gilbert Morris. Do you want his numbers?”

  Ali had gone out to the front room, where she hunted through her purse and found a pen. She jotted the name and phone number onto the back of Mina Blaylock’s background check.

  “All right,” Ali said when she finished. “Please tell your mother thank you for having you call me. And tell her I’m sorry things are looking so bad for her, and for you too,” she added.

  Up to that moment, Valerie Sandoz had been all business—just the facts,
ma’am, and nothing more. But those few words of sympathy from Ali were enough to crack the facade.

  “Thank you,” she muttered over what sounded like a sob. “Thank you very much.”

  Then the line went dead.

  There was no question about what Ali needed to do. Checking the numbers Valerie had given her, she called the office number first and then the cell phone. In both cases she ended up reaching voice mail and left the same message. “My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m a friend of Brenda Riley. Her mother gave me this number. I understand you’re investigating Richard Lowensdale’s death. I may have some pertinent information. Please give me a call. Here’s my number.”

  After leaving the messages, Ali sat on the sofa for a long time, watching a tiny silver of moon appear in the section of midnight sky that was visible beneath the overhang of the balcony above her unit. The slender sickle of light gradually disappeared into an equally blackened sea.

  I shouldn’t have told Morris that I was Brenda’s friend, she thought. He probably won’t even bother to call me back.

  Ali should have gone back to bed, but she didn’t. She sat there for a very long time, thinking, turning over one mystifying question after another, and looking for answers. Her “gut instinct,” as her friend Detective Dave Holman liked to call it, told Ali that Ermina Blaylock, not Brenda, had murdered Richard Lowensdale. But why? Had she too been duped by Richard and taken vengeance on him for playing her for a fool? And what about Brenda? Had she somehow put together the connection between Richard and Ermina? Was that what had prompted the background check request she had e-mailed to Ali shortly before her disappearance?

  And what about Brenda? Ali wondered. Did Ermina murder her too? Then again, is Brenda really dead, or is that what Ermina wants us to think?

  Ali switched on a table lamp and read through the background check one more time. There was nothing there in the written report that was the least bit damning. If it hadn’t been for Stuart Ramey’s going the extra mile, no one would have put two and two together. No one would have connected what happened years earlier in Missouri to what happened to Richard Lowensdale this weekend.

  Which means Ermina probably has no idea anyone is on to her.

  Ali studied the background check some more and found the address on Heron Ridge Drive in Salton City. That way, if and when Detective Morris called her back, she’d be able to tell him what she had learned and give him an exact physical location to search.

  And then Ali remembered something else—a snippet of something Sister Anselm had told her that day when they’d had tea together. Ali couldn’t remember the exact words, but it had something to do with stepping out with faith that you would be in the right place at the right time. Ali had come to California thinking she was being guided to do something for Velma Trimble, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe the real intended purpose was for her to do something about Ermina Blaylock.

  If not me, Ali asked herself, then who?

  By a quarter to five in the morning, she was dressed and ready to head out. It had been a pain in the neck, going through the process of putting her Glock in the lockbox and having a TSA agent supervise her locking it, just so she could bring it along in her checked luggage. And it had been a pain retrieving it from baggage claim at the end of the flight, but as Ali put on her small-of-back holster, she was glad to have it. Not that she intended to get into any kind of armed confrontation with Ermina Blaylock. Going after a suspect without backup was one of the dumbest things any cop could do. Still, she was glad to be prepared, just in case. As for her pal, the Count of Monte Cristo? He remained untouched in the suitcase and was likely to remain so.

  After leaving the apartment, she rode up in the elevator and slid a note under the door of Velma’s unit. In the note, Ali explained that she had been unexpectedly called away and would be returning later in the day. In the lobby she encountered a sleepy doorman who was able to check the schedule of the guest unit. No, it was not booked for tonight, and yes, she could stay in it for the remainder of the week if she wanted. It wasn’t booked again until the following Friday.

  Driving north to the ten, she remembered that she had never returned her mother’s previous phone call. By now, Edie would have taken the first batches of sweet rolls out of the Sugarloaf’s ovens and would be getting ready to open the doors.

  With her Bluetooth in her ear, Ali speed-dialed her mother’s cell phone.

  “Is this about the babies?” Edie asked anxiously. “Is Athena in labor?”

  “It’s not about Athena,” Ali said with a laugh. “I’m just now getting around to returning your call.”

  “Oh,” Edie said. “It’s about time. I thought you had fallen off the edge of the earth.”

  “Close to it,” Ali said. “I’m on my way to Salton City. You’ll never guess what happened. Do you remember Velma Trimble?”

  “One of the two old ladies who came to the wedding? Was she the one with the dogs?”

  “No,” Ali said. “Velma’s the other one. She’s had a recurrence of cancer, and she’s in hospice care at home. Mom, she gave me a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar donation for the Askins Scholarship Fund.”

  “I’m sorry to hear she’s so bad off, but bless her heart,” Edie said. “What a wonderfully generous thing to do. But why are you going to Salton City? I was there once, years ago with your father. Back then it seemed like the end of the earth.”

  I’m pretty sure it still is, Ali thought.

  “Do you remember last summer when my friend Brenda Riley showed up down in Phoenix?” she asked.

  “The one with the boyfriend troubles and the drinking problem?”

  “The very one,” Ali replied. “Now her former boyfriend, Richard Lowensdale, has been murdered. Brenda is high on the list of suspects, but I may have come up with another possible suspect who lives in Salton City. I’m just going over to have a look.”

  “Do you have your Taser along?” Edie asked. “And have you done a spark check recently? You know what they say, ‘No spark, no zap.’”

  “Yes,” Ali said, smiling. “I’ve got plenty of spark.”

  “Oops,” Edie said. “Customers at the door. Gotta go. You take care.”

  38

  Grass Valley, California

  After coming back from the reservoir at five a.m., Gil managed to grab three hours of sleep. Once he was up, he found he was out of cereal and milk, so he made do with a bologna sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  Sitting at the breakfast counter, he listened to a message that had come in to his cell phone overnight. He hadn’t heard it because the phone had been in the other room on the charger. The caller, someone named Ali Reynolds, claimed to be a friend of Brenda Riley’s.

  Just what I need right now, Gil thought. Somebody else telling me that poor, sweet Brenda would never do such a terrible thing.

  Yes, Gil would call Ali Reynolds back—eventually. When he was good and ready. Right now, though, it took all his flagging energy to drag himself to the Nevada County Crime Lab.

  “So what’s the deal with the amputated finger from Scotts Flat Reservoir?” he asked Mona Hendricks, the chief criminalist in charge of the lab.

  “It’s a thumb, not a finger,” Mona corrected, studying Gil over the top of a chipped coffee cup.

  “Well, excuse me all to hell,” Gil said. “It looked like a finger to me.”

  Mona ignored his sarcasm and added some of her own. “Anybody ever mention that you look like crap this morning?”

  Gibes from Mona went with the territory.

  “Thank you so much for the update. Let’s just say I’m overworked, underpaid, and missing a lot of sleep at the moment.”

  Mona grinned back at him. “I don’t think the underpaid part is going to wash. If you’ve got as much overtime in as I think you do, Randy Jackman is going to have a cow.”

  Randolph Jackman was the Grass Valley chief of police and Gilbert Morris’s boss. Jackman was nothing if not a political animal. He had move
d up in the world of law enforcement not on the patrol side as a cop on the streets but on the administrative side. His view of the world was firmly aligned with the bean counters of the world; he was more a city manager type than a Sergeant Joe Friday. Gil already knew that the overtime he had logged that weekend was going to be a headache, but when you stacked the OT up against three solved homicides, he figured he was all to the good.

  “Let me worry about Jackman,” Gil said. “Tell me about the thumb. Does it belong to Richard Lowensdale?”

  “I believe so,” Mona told him. “I had my people dust the wall next to the toilet in Lowensdale’s bathroom. That’s always a good place to pick up usable prints. On the wall we found prints that match the two fingers that were found at the crime scene, and there are prints that match the thumb print too. So, yes, that would mean this thumb also belongs to Lowensdale unless there were two people using the facilities at that address who are both going around getting fingers whacked off.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Gil said sincerely.

  Mona rolled her eyes. “That was a joke, Gilly! Get yourself some coffee and get on the beam. Of course it’s Lowensdale’s thumb. There aren’t any other damned prints in the whole house. Lowensdale was the only person living there, and whoever killed him was wearing gloves.”

  “I’ve got two women who claim their missing fiancées lived at that same address—Richard Lydecker and Richard Loomis.”

  “They’re mistaken,” Mona said decisively. “I’m telling you Richard Lowensdale was the only resident. We didn’t find anyone else’s prints anywhere in that house.”

  It annoyed Gil to think he was so tired that he’d totally misread Mona’s black humor remark.