Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “Step out of the vehicle,” he said. “Place your hands on your head.”

  53

  Clairemont Mesa Business Park, San Diego, California

  After endless hours of utter darkness, when the lights came on overhead, their brilliance exploded in Brenda’s head, temporarily blinding her. She heard rather than saw the key turn in the lock. When she could see again, a woman—the woman Brenda knew as Ermina Blaylock—was approaching the chair where Brenda was imprisoned. Her face was screwed up in a strange grimace, as though the stench of the place was beyond bearing.

  Brenda had moved far beyond that. She had become so accustomed to the foul odors lingering around her that she could no longer smell anything at all. But then Brenda saw the bottle. Ermina was carrying a bottle of water—a large bottle of water.

  “I’ll bet you’re thirsty,” she said, forcing a smile. “I brought you something to drink.”

  Brenda stared at the bottle. She wanted the water inside it more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. But then she remembered Friday. Or, at least, she remembered parts of Friday, how during lunch she had suddenly begun losing track of who she was and what she was doing.

  She wanted the water, yes. But what if Ermina had slipped something into it? In her terribly weakened condition, even a little bit of something extra might be too much. Something that might have induced unconsciousness on Friday might well prove fatal now.

  Ermina twisted the cap off the bottle and held it up to Brenda’s lips. “Here,” she said. “Have a drink.”

  Brenda leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. Once again, through the trailing ethers of memory, she heard Uncle Joe’s voice. “Choose to live.”

  Yes, she would die of thirst, but she would not willingly swallow whatever poison Ermina was offering her. She waited. Only when the open end of the bottle touched her lips did she bring her head forward, swinging it from side to side. Ermina had expected compliance, and she was caught unawares. Brenda smacked the bottle with the side of her cheek and sent it flying out of Ermina’s hand. It rolled across the floor, spilling precious water as it went. Finally it came to rest against the bottom of a chain-link fence.

  “You stupid bitch!” Ermina exclaimed. “Why did you do that?”

  She reached out and slapped Brenda’s face with an open-handed blow that left Brenda seeing stars, but the pain of it was enough to jar Brenda fully out of her stupor. And even as Ermina readied another blow, Brenda realized that Uncle Joe would have been proud of her. For once in her life Brenda Riley had measured up.

  Then suddenly the chair she was imprisoned in was moving. With Brenda still in it, the chair rolled out through the open gate in the chain-link fence, across the tiled floor to yet another door. She sped through the second door and into another interconnected section of the building. There was a car inside. Ermina wheeled Brenda past a tall stack of cardboard boxes and stopped next to the trunk of the car.

  Without a word, Ermina opened the trunk. Then, after donning a pair of latex gloves, she reached inside and pulled out a plastic-wrapped package. Using a box cutter, she tore though the packaging and then shook out the contents. Brenda watched as a narrow bedroll unrolled. For some reason it reminded her of an uncoiling snake.

  Ermina unzipped the bedroll and then she cut through the tape that had bound Brenda’s legs. “Stand up,” she said.

  Brenda looked down at her feet. After being forced to sit for days on end, her limbs were severely swollen, distended. She understood without being told that if she ever got inside that bedroll, there would be no coming out. And she also understood that there was no point in screaming. She had already tried that once, to no avail. Besides, she didn’t have the strength.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can and you will,” Ermina replied.

  She held the opening of the bedroll over Brenda’s head and slipped it down. As the thick material shut out the light—as darkness descended again—Brenda tried to struggle against it, but it was no use. She felt herself propelled up and out of the chair, which skittered away from her and banged up against a wall somewhere behind her. She landed hard inside the trunk as her head came to rest against the upright wall at the far end of the trunk. And then, although she struggled hard against it, she heard the zipper closing inevitably, shutting her in.

  Brenda tried shouting then, one last time, in the vain hope that someone would hear her, but the down filling of the bedroll muffled her cries.

  She heard the car’s motor start. She heard a racket of some kind, like a garage door opening. She felt the car start to move, and then she heard a crash as it stopped moving. Her head smashed hard against something she couldn’t see, and then another kind of blackness descended around her and carried her away.

  54

  Clairemont Mesa Business Park, San Diego, California

  Gil heard the guy talking in the background on Ali’s phone. For a moment he was torn. Did he abandon his post and go give Ali backup, or did he stay where he was in case Ermina heard the racket out front and made a break for it? Then Gil heard another sound in the background—a garage door rolling open. He turned and sprinted back the way he had come, but he was the better part of a block away.

  The grinding sound of a crash—of crunching metal and breaking glass—was immediately followed by a shout of surprise that could have been from someone being hit or hurt.

  A car engine revved. More than revved, it roared. There was another horrendous grinding and scraping of metal on metal. Gil made it around the corner in time to see the back of a Cadillac DTS T-boned into the side of the Marquis. The security guard’s bicycle had been flung across the street. With its front wheel still spinning, it lay at an odd angle next to the gutter. In the middle of the street, next to the Marquis, lay the fallen security guard.

  Gil took it all in as he ran. Then a woman in what looked like a tan tracksuit erupted out of the open garage door. She sped away from Gil with so much distance between them that he knew he’d never catch her. Just then, Ali sprang out of her car. She had to dodge around to keep from stepping on the fallen security guard, but then she caught her balance and ran too. She ran with her head down and her arms pumping; she ran like she meant it.

  Gil paused briefly when he reached the security guard. He seemed to be coming around. Leaving the fallen man where he was, Gil pounded after the two fleeing women, who by then had disappeared around the far end of that same set of buildings.

  As Gil rounded the corner, they were still far ahead of him, but he could see that Ali was closing the distance. She was a runner who worked at it chasing someone who didn’t. Ali didn’t shout out a warning that she was a police officer, because she wasn’t, so Gil did it for her.

  “Stop,” he yelled. “Police.”

  Sirens sounded in the background. Pulsing lights showed that slowing police cars were converging on the area. Gil couldn’t be sure if it was the shout or the sirens or neither one, but Ermina seemed to lose heart. She paused for a moment, and that moment was enough. Ali caught up with her.

  “On the ground!” she shouted. “Now.”

  For a few seconds, the two women stood facing one another panting, out of breath, glaring at one another in animal fury. Then, as Gil watched in amazement, Ali Reynolds grabbed Ermina Blaylock by the arm and executed a flawless hip toss.

  He caught up with them just then, stumbling to a stop in time to see Ermina land hard on the sidewalk. Her face was bloodied. Ali was astraddle her with one knee in the small of her back.

  “I tried to warn you,” Ali gasped breathlessly. “I told you to get on the ground!”

  Moments later the business park was alive with men and women in windbreakers emblazoned with the letters FBI. Two agents stepped forward. One of them took charge of Ermina. The other one reached for Ali. Exhibiting his own badge, Gil waved him off.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s with me, but you’d better go check on your undercover guy. He’s down ba
ck there in the street. When I came by him, he seemed to be coming around. He’s probably wearing a vest, but those are better for stopping bullets than cars, so he might have internal injuries.”

  One agent led Ermina away, while the other jogged off in the direction Gil had indicated. Once they were gone, Gil helped Ali to her feet.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Ali said. “The security guard was standing by the window hassling me when Ermina came screaming out of the garage without even glancing in her rearview mirror. I don’t know how fast she was going when she hit my car, but it was with enough force that it slammed the driver’s side of the Marquis into the guy on the bicycle. I saw him go down and the bicycle go flying, but I didn’t stop to check on him. She was getting away.”

  “I think the guy on the ground is probably okay,” Gil said. “But what about you? Are you all right?”

  “Still out of breath,” she managed. “But okay.”

  “You’re fast,” he said admiringly. “It’s a good thing you were the one chasing her. She would have left me in the dust. Let’s go check on that guard. And I hope you’re right about your insurance, because that Mercury you rented is toast!”

  The fallen FBI agent still lay on the ground with a group of fellow officers clustered around him. Somewhere in the distance came the shrill wail of an arriving ambulance. As Ali walked toward her car, one of the FBI agents broke away from the group around the injured officer.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here besides screwing up a major bust.”

  As Gil reached again for his ID packet, Ali leaned inside the open window on the driver’s side of her wrecked car, looking for the rental agreement and her purse. Ali, Gil, and the agent all heard the noise at the same time—a muffled thump coming from the trunk of the wrecked Cadillac.

  “What the hell is that?” the FBI agent demanded.

  Ali was closest to the conjoined vehicles. She darted around the front of her car and arrived at the smashed rear end of the Cadillac just as another thump sounded from inside the crumpled trunk. The rear bumper had been smashed into the body of the vehicle, leaving the trunk lid jammed in place.

  Wrenching open the driver’s door, Ali reached for the trunk release. She found it at last and pulled it, but nothing happened.

  “Hey,” the agent called out, “somebody bring me a tire iron or a crowbar. We need to open this thing up.”

  Thirty seconds of prying later, the trunk lid gave way and opened. While the agents worked to open the trunk, Gil stayed front and center. Once the trunk lid finally sprang open, Gil peered inside at what appeared to be a squirming mass of bedroll—a smelly squirming mass of bedroll. Gil lifted the slithering mass of bedroll out of the trunk and placed it gently on the weedy grass next to the driveway. One of the agents dropped his crowbar and unzipped the zipper, letting a terrible stench loose into the air.

  “Thank you,” whispered a cracked voice that barely sounded human. “Water, please.”

  Ali was the one who recognized her.

  “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, falling on her knees beside the badly injured woman. “It’s Brenda Riley. I don’t believe it. She’s alive!”

  “Hey,” the agent shouted. “Send those medics over here. Order another ambulance for Sinclair. Looks like this one is hurt a lot worse than he is.”

  55

  Sharp Mary Birch Hospital, San Diego, California

  A squawking ambulance whisked Brenda Riley away from the scene and took her to the Sharp Mary Birch Hospital ER, which was only minutes away. Ali and Gil rode there in a black Suburban with San Diego FBI Agent in Charge Sam Hollingshead at the wheel. They had transferred the luggage to the Suburban—Gil’s single suitcase as well as the three cardboard boxes that still reeked of smoke and leaked trailing bits of sand.

  While ER personnel attended to Brenda, Hollingshead commandeered a conference room and herded Ali and Gil inside.

  “I don’t know if I should thank you or throw the book at you,” he said. “You caught Ermina, and from what she did to that poor woman in there, she surely needed catching, but you may have blown the cover off an operation we’ve been working on for months. The problem is, this is a white-collar crime case with overriding national security issues. Without a proper security clearance, I can’t even discuss it with you.”

  “We know about the UAVs, if that’s what you mean,” Ali said.

  Hollingshead looked at her sharply. “How would you know anything about that?”

  Gil reached into his jeans and pulled out the two thumb drives. “From these,” he said, placing the drives on the table in front of Hollingshead. “My homicide victim in Grass Valley, Richard Lowensdale, had these hidden in his garage. Ali was able to run the files past one of her computer people. They’re the ones who came up with the drone angle.”

  Ali appreciated that creative bit of understatement. There was no mention of High Noon Enterprises in anything that had been said, and she doubted Sam Hollingshead would be terribly interested or motivated to track down the details. He seemed to be preoccupied with his own concerns.

  “All right, then,” Hollingshead said, “so you know about that too. We figured Richard was involved in the Blaylocks’ drone project. We had court-ordered access to his computers, and we used his own CCTV to maintain surveillance on his house.”

  “So you know about the cyberstalking?” Ali asked.

  “Yes,” Hollingshead said, with a dismissive shrug. “As far as I could tell, it was just a harmless hobby. He didn’t appear to be doing anything wrong.”

  Ali did a slow burn at that statement, which said more about SAC Hollingshead than it did about Richard Lowensdale.

  “What he did to those poor women may have been legal, but it was most definitely wrong,” Ali said.

  “Yes,” Hollingshead agreed, “I suppose it was, but that didn’t concern us. It wasn’t part of our investigation. We were convinced that Richard was working for Ermina, but since we haven’t been able to find any record of payments, I surmised that perhaps they had some other involvement that overrode any monetary considerations.”

  “You mean you thought Richard and Mina were involved sexually?” Gil asked.

  Hollingshead didn’t bother denying it. “Look,” he said, “she drove up there last weekend like she usually did every month or so. She went into Lowensdale’s house in Grass Valley. She went inside for a while and then she came back out again. Maybe she stayed inside a little longer than she usually did, but we had no idea that she had killed the guy while she was there.”

  “So you had surveillance in place, but you didn’t actually follow her?”

  “The CCTV at Lowensdale’s house went on the fritz while she was there.”

  “The video feed ended,” Gil offered.

  “Correct.”

  “What about her car? Did you attempt to follow it?” Ali asked.

  “We didn’t need to,” Hollingshead said. “We had a GPS bug on her car. We know where she went and when right up until tonight when she ditched the car and gave us the slip.”

  “So you didn’t know she had picked up Brenda Riley?” Ali asked.

  “From what we can tell, Ermina drove to Brenda’s mother’s place on P Street in Sacramento. We’re assuming that’s when she met up with Brenda, but we don’t know positively.”

  “But you knew she drove to the Scotts Flat Reservoir?” Gil asked.

  “Yes, and we wondered about it after the fact, but she was only there for a few minutes, then she headed home. Since the spot didn’t appear to have any bearing on our case, we just let it go.”

  “What about Ermina’s background?” Ali asked. “Did you have any idea about what she’s suspected of doing to her adoptive father in Missouri?”

  Hollingshead paused for a moment, then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “One of our agents spoke to Detective Laughlin months ago. He sounded like an old guy all hung up on a long closed case. We learned about Lowensd
ale’s death sometime yesterday, but you need to understand, there was nothing we could do about it. Our hands were tied. If we had acted on any of that information prematurely, we might have risked jeopardizing the mission.”

  “Yes,” Ali said, “but if you had, maybe Mark Blaylock wouldn’t be dead right now.”

  “He was part of this too, you know,” Hollingshead said. “Ermina didn’t do all of it on her own.”

  “You think he was part of it,” Ali pointed out. “It’s also possible that he was innocent—innocent and dead, an outcome you might have prevented.”

  “I agree,” Hollingshead said. “It’s an unfortunate outcome.”

  “Especially unfortunate for Mr. Blaylock,” Ali insisted.

  Hollingshead seemed to be running out of patience. “Look, Ms. Reynolds,” he said placatingly, “I understand that you’re angry. You have every right to be. At least two people are dead who probably shouldn’t be, and your friend Brenda has suffered grievous harm, but we need to keep a lid on this. We must keep a lid on it.

  “Our intelligence tells us that the drone shipment is due to be picked up sometime tomorrow. We’re attaching bugs to each of those individual boxes. We’re going to let them be picked up and delivered and delivered without incident. We already know that the middleman is a guy named Enrique Gallegos who has been on the FBI’s watch list and also the DEA’s for a very long time. Our intention is to take down the end users—whoever they are and wherever they might be.

  “So don’t expect to read about this in the paper tomorrow morning, because it turns out nothing at all happened at the business park tonight, understand? Your damaged car has been hauled away, and so has hers. The Rutherford garage bay has been cleaned up and buttoned up. Hertz is in the process of delivering a replacement vehicle to you here, no questions asked.”

  “Wait a minute,” Gil said. “You’re whitewashing this?”