Fatal Error

3

Grass Valley, California August

By 4:30 a.m. Richard Lowensdale was up, had made his first pot of coffee, and was at his computer. It was ironic that he worked harder now than when he had been working and that he put in far longer hours. Thank God he had cut back to just two fiancees at the moment. Trying to juggle three of them had been a killer. If it hadn’t been for his storyboard file, he never would have managed.

There had been a time in Richard’s life when he had thought about being a writer. He had even gone so far as to take a correspondence course taught by Gavin Marcus Hornsby, a once-published but relatively obscure novelist who, in his old age, supported himself by teaching his “craft” to flocks of deluded wannabe authors. Richard figured it must have been as easy as taking candy from a baby. No doubt Hornsby had kept his “students” on the string for years, assuring them that they were each writing and rewriting the great American novel.

That’s what the writing instructor had told Richard about his first paltry attempt, that it had the potential of being “great literature.” Since Richard was an expert at dishing out BS, he recognized that comment for what it was. He deleted his novel file and never sent another rewrite, but what he had learned in that creative writing class hadn’t been a total loss. Richard had hung around long enough to learn about storyboards. Gavin Marcus Hornsby was a big believer in storyboards. After that Richard had never again tried his hand at fiction, other than what he did each time he re-created his own next persona, but the storyboard suggestion had appealed to him. Over time he had made good use of it.

He located Lynn Martinson’s storyboard. Forty-one years old. PhD in secondary education. Divorced for three years. Superintendent of schools in Iowa City, Iowa. Richard liked targeting high-profile women. They often didn’t want to spill their guts or their troubles too close to home. When they needed to vent, they needed to do so with someone far away, someone who didn’t know where all their personal bodies were buried. After his troublesome breakup with Brenda, being from out of state was first and foremost on Richard’s list of requirements. The women in his life all had to be from out of state.

When Richard was working in San Diego and had been involved with someone else, having Brenda Riley as a side dish safely stowed in Sacramento had been ideal. For a long time the distance thing had worked in his favor, right up until Brenda lost her own job. After that, she had started harping about coming down to visit and spending some time together. Richard knew that wouldn’t do. He had spun some wild stories about who he was and what he did, and he didn’t need Brenda Riley showing up at his office and blowing the whistle on him.

With that in mind, Richard kept stalling with one excuse after another. It worked for a while, but then Richard’s own carefully constructed real world imploded. Mark and Mina Blaylock gave him his walking papers. They said it was all about losing the defense department contract and the economy and all that other crap, but Richard didn’t believe that was all there was to it. He suspected that Mark Blaylock had finally wised up to the fact that maybe his sweet little wife liked some of their employees-and Richard in particular-just a little more than she should have.

But the point was, Richard was out of a job. He needed a place to stay-a cheap place to stay. He had always despised Grass Valley and had sworn he would never go back there. When his mother and stepfather died and he had inherited their house, he had rented it out, furnished. Now though, even though Grass Valley was alarmingly close to Brenda’s Sacramento home, Richard wasn’t stupid enough to walk away from a free house. The renters weren’t happy about leaving, and the eviction process had taken time. But while Richard was getting rid of the renters, he was also getting rid of Brenda.

At that point he was still under the impression that breaking up was hard to do. Now that he’d had some practice, he realized it wasn’t difficult at all and that he could have dumped Brenda much faster. That’s what he did these days, but back then, during his first time out, he had enjoyed playing her and watching her squirm. Faced with losing him, she had exhibited the whole entertaining gamut of reactions from anger to despair, from raging to resigned, from hopeful to devastated. She had begged him not to leave her and pleaded with him to take her back. The more she groveled, the more he liked it.

Brenda Riley had willingly given him a kind of control over her life that he had never experienced before. She had been putty in Richard’s hands, and he had loved every minute of it. Wielding that power had hit his system like some incredibly addictive drug. Once he started on that path, he couldn’t let go. He had strung Brenda along for months, making promises he never intended to keep because it was fun to put her through her emotional paces.

Richard Lowensdale was almost fifty years old. He was out of a job, living off the insurance settlement that had come to him after the drunk-driving incident that had claimed the lives of his mother and stepfather. He understood that much of the rest of the world might look at him and see a loser, but not Brenda Riley and not the women who had followed her either. To them, Richard was the ultimate prize-the most wonderful man in the world.

In a strange way, he owed much of his newfound happiness to two very different women-Mina Blaylock, who appeared to know more about sex and how to use it than anyone Richard had ever met, and Brenda Riley, who taught him exactly how stupid women could be, stupid and pitiful.

So back to Lynn Martinson. Her sixteen-year-old son, Lucas, had just gotten sent to juvie for drug dealing. How embarrassing it must be for her to be the top educator in her small town while at the same time having a kid who was totally out of control. No doubt every parent who had a child in that district was looking to Lynn to lead by example when it came to parenting skills, yet here was her son, totally off the charts and into drugs in a big way. That was where Richard had met Lynn in the first place, in a chat room for parents dealing with out-of-control kids and trying to survive the hell of tough love.

Richard-Richard Lewis in this case-understood every nuance of how that kind of family disaster felt. He had told Lynn how his own life had devolved, with an ex who married a drug dealer after their divorce and who took his kids along for the ride. For a moment, Richard had to go back to his storyboard file to verify the exes’ names and details. Lynn’s former husband’s name was John. Rather than working as an electronics engineer as he had in San Diego, the newly minted Richard Lewis was a well-respected executive with a Silicon Valley software company. His former wife’s name was Andrea and the teenaged daughter who had just gotten out of rehab was Nicole. Happily for Richard Lewis’s fictional existence, seventeen-year-old Nicole had managed to make a seamless transition from being a druggie to being clean and sober, thank you very much.

Over time Richard had learned that it was easy to keep his own background story hazy and out of focus. After all, these desperately needy women weren’t really interested in him. They were totally self-absorbed. What they really wanted was someone to listen to them while they bared their souls.

Richard was always glad to oblige in that regard, but only up to the point when he was ready to stop being glad to do it. Once that happened, he sent his poor ladyloves packing. He thought of it as a kind of “catch and release.” Or else maybe “shock and awe,” depending on his mood at the time. First he went to the trouble of reeling them in, then he let them go. Not kindly. Not gently. No, he took pains to tell the losers they were losers and that they needed to do the world and him a favor and get lost.

He was getting close to doing that with Lynn. She was starting to bore him. She was so focused on that damn prick of a kid of hers that she just wasn’t fun anymore. Phone sex didn’t count for much when one of the partners was totally preoccupied.

Richard had asked Lynn his customary trick question by sending her to the links with diamond engagement rings. He told her he had a ring in mind for her, but he didn’t tell her which one he preferred. If she lucked out and picked that one-the one he regarded as the right one-then he’d let her hang around for a while longer. If she picked the other one, the wrong one? Too bad. It was time for a quick dose of “So long, babe. Have a nice life.”

So far, with the notable exception of Brenda Riley, there hadn’t been any blowback from any of his breakups. Why would there be? What could the women do about it? They couldn’t very well go around crying on the shoulders of their friends and relations because they had been dumped by a fiance they had never met. Telling that story was bound to be a winner. People would laugh their heads off.

And what other recourse did Richard’s lovelorn victims have? They couldn’t go to the cops either, because Richard Lowensdale had committed no crime. Unlike breaking into somebody’s house and stealing someone’s stuff, breaking somebody’s heart wasn’t against the law. As far as Richard was concerned, this whole thing was like playing a very complicated video game, only better because he got to do it with real people.

“Morning, sweetie,” he said cheerfully to Lynn Martinson over his VoIP connection when she picked up the bedside telephone receiver at her home in Iowa City. Richard sometimes teased her about still clinging to her guns and religion as well as to her landline. He was firmly entrenched in the camp of Voice over Internet Protocol users. For someone with his particular brand of hobby, not having to pay long distance charges was a major money-saving consideration.

“I didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked. “How are things? I wanted to hear the sound of your voice and wish you good morning before you have to go off to work.”