Fatal Error

30

Grass Valley, California

It was late in the afternoon before Gil Morris finally headed back to the department. Sometime in the course of the evening, he would need to consult with the coroner’s office to figure out who would be doing Richard Lowensdale’s next-of-kin notifications. The problem with that was that Richard’s driver’s license still listed his mother, Doris Mills, as his next of kin, and Gil was pretty sure Doris was deceased.

Now that he had finally left the crime scene behind, Gil’s first consideration was food. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and he was starving, so he picked up a Subway sandwich, and on the way to his cubicle, he stopped off in the break room to grab a cup of coffee.

Rachel Hamilton from Dispatch was there ahead of him. “How’s it going with lover-boy?” she asked.

He gave her a quizzical look. “Who?”

“You mean nobody’s told you yet? I talked to Allen Dodd about it but then he got pulled off your case to answer another call. It turns out that dead guy of yours has two fiancees. Two! One lives somewhere in New York and the other one is from somewhere up in Oregon. What happens if they both turn up at the same time? That could turn into some kind of catfight. If you want somebody to sell tickets, here I am!”

Gil stared at Rachel in amazement. From Richard Lowensdale’s driver’s license photo, he had appeared to be a pretty average-looking guy, but an average-looking guy with at least two different aliases. He also lived like a hermit in a filthy garbage dump masquerading as a house. How was it possible for someone like that to have not just one but two women on the string?

Obviously I’m missing something, Gil told himself. I’ve been out of the dating game way too long.

Since Rachel seemed to have no intention of leaving the break room, Gil didn’t leave either. He poured his coffee. He could tell from the acrid smell that it was old coffee-this morning’s coffee. On Sundays there weren’t nearly enough coffee drinkers around the department to keep the pot fresh, but Gil was desperate.

Taking a seat across from Rachel, Gil unwrapped his sandwich.

“Where’d you hear all that?” he asked. “About Richard having two fiancees?”

“From Phyllis,” Rachel said. “Phyllis Williams at the Nevada County Com Center. She took both missing persons calls. The first one was earlier this morning. That’s when Phyllis asked Sandy to have officers do a welfare check. The second one came in closer to noon. Phyllis says that as far as she knows, two fiancees is some kind of record.”

Rachel was eating a Twinkie. Gil wished they had Twinkies in the vending machine, but they didn’t.

“It’s a record all right,” Gil said. “Is Phyllis still on duty?”

“Nope. Her shift ended at two.”

Gil munched his sandwich and made a mental note to track Phyllis down as soon as he got back to his desk. If a pair of feuding fiancees showed up when he and the coroner had yet to have an official next-of-kin positive ID, Gil’s life would be infinitely more complicated and so would Fred Millhouse’s.

Not only that, the Willie Nelson component in the homicide told Gil that Lowensdale’s murder might well be a love affair gone awry. The fact that the two fiancees claimed they were elsewhere at the time of Richard’s death didn’t count for much. Gil would need to look into both women’s backgrounds to see if one or the other of them had the kind of connections that might make it plausible for a pissed-off fiancee to hire a hit man. As far as he knew, that hadn’t ever happened in Grass Valley, but there was always a first time.

Once his sandwich was gone, Gil dumped out the dregs of his coffee in the kitchen sink and headed for his cubicle, where he turned on his computer. While he waited through the interminable boot-up function, Gil picked up a well-thumbed hard copy of the Nevada County Employee’s directory, where he located Phyllis Williams’s home phone number.

When Gil dialed, a male answered the phone. “Hey, Phyl,” he called. “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?” Her voice came from somewhere in the noisy distance, as if the house was full of noisy kids and probably grandkids.

“Work,” Gil told him. “Tell her I’m calling from work.”

Phyllis came on the line soon after that. She was glad to give Gil the details she could remember from the 911 calls. He’d be listening to the tapes himself in a matter of minutes, but he knew that Phyllis was a longtime emergency operator. He wanted to hear her impressions in case she had picked up vibes from either of the women that someone less experienced might have missed.

“They both sounded like nice women,” Phyllis told him. “Worried. Upset. Concerned. Too bad they were both hooked up with a lying, two-timing bastard.”

Phyllis Williams also had no strong opinions.

While Gil was talking to her, the department’s ponderous computer system finally managed to finish the prolonged boot-up cycle. He typed in the name Richard Stephen Lowensdale and the birth date he had jotted down after looking at the victim’s driver’s license. There were no citations on his record-not even so much as a parking enforcement listing.

Typing in the address on Jan Road came back with the same information he had heard from Dale Masters concerning the B amp; E case from early October. Once the investigation had zeroed in on a named suspect, Richard Lowensdale had declined to press charges against the woman he referred to as his troubled former fiancee. He had been advised to swear out a restraining order, but he had declined to do that.

Looks to me like you should have, Gil thought.

The next name Gil typed into the computer was Brenda Arlene Riley, and he hit a gold mine. In addition to the arrest on suspicion of breaking and entering, there were multiple moving violations, including DUIs and driving on a suspended license. Court documents listed her address as an apartment in one of the scuzzier neighborhoods in Sacramento.

“Bingo. Not two fiancees,” he muttered to himself. “The count just went up to three.”

Gil spent the next hour or so doing a detailed study of Brenda Riley and her arrest record. He spent a long time studying the cavalcade of mug shots. For some reason Gil couldn’t quite fathom, the woman looked familiar, as though she were someone he should know. It was only when he made it back to the very first DUI arrest that he made the connection and put the name and features together. That Brenda Riley! The news babe Brenda Riley. How could someone like her be hooked up with someone like Richard Lowensdale?

Scrolling back through the mug shots in reverse order was like looking at time-lapse photographs of meth users. Each photo showed her a little more bedraggled, a little more ill-used. She had put on weight. When she had been queen of the news desk in Sacramento, Brenda Riley had been known for her perfectly blunt-cut blond hair. Now, though, the chic haircuts were clearly a thing of the past as were the blonde dye job touchups and the careful application of flaw-concealing makeup. The last piece of information Gil gleaned in his cursory overview of Brenda Riley’s unhappy and swift decline was an eviction order from that scuzzy apartment.

As far as Brenda Riley was concerned, this was all very bad news, but from Gil Morris’s point of view, it was terrific. He had a suspect-a real suspect, a suspect with a name. A few hours into his third homicide investigation in three days, Detective Morris felt he was on the way to solving it. All he had to do to clear his case was to track down Brenda Riley and talk to her.

Gil had a feeling that, once the guys in the lab made their way into Richard Lowensdale’s computer, he’d have a way to find her. In the meantime, her old driver’s license information listed her mother’s address on P Street in Sacramento. That was the place to start.

Before leaving, though, he did one more pass through the computer. This time he was looking for information on Richard Lydecker, Janet Silvie’s missing fiance, and the man in Dawn Carras’s life, Richard Loomis. As far as Gil could find, there was no record of either one of them, not in Grass Valley and not anywhere in California either. Both men seemed to be figments of their respective fiancees’ vivid imaginings.

Finally, shutting off his computer, Gil picked up his car keys and hurried out to the parking lot. When the motor of his Crown Vic turned over, Gil checked the gas gauge. It wasn’t quite on empty, but the needle showed there wasn’t enough gas for him to go to Sacramento and back. Rather than leaving right away, he stopped by the motor pool long enough to fill up. He’d be better off doing that than trying to be reimbursed for a credit card charge later on.

In Randy Jackman’s nickel-diming department, credit card charges-even justifiable credit card charges-had a way of being disallowed.

Same way with overtime, Gil thought grimly.

By the time this long weekend was over, he was sure to have a coming-to-God session with Chief Jackman. With any kind of luck, he’d be able to mark Richard Lowensdale’s murder closed before that happened.

San Diego, California

A distant rumble awakened Brenda from a restless, dream-ridden slumber. She had been caught in a nightmare, buried alive in horrible darkness, trapped under the rubble of some catastrophic earthquake. The waking darkness was even more complete than that in her dream. The rumble, she realized, wasn’t the arrival of another aftershock but the distant roar of an airplane.

Once she was fully awake, she realized that she needed to relieve herself. Desperately. Even though she’d had nothing to drink-even though she was thirsty beyond any hope of quenching-her kidneys were still trying to function. But there was no way to stand up. Her feet were still bound together. If she once left the rolling desk chair, she might never get back into it. Sitting in the chair was preferable to lying on the cold, hard floor.

Shameful as it was, she had no choice but to relieve herself. Right there. In the chair. As the pungent odor of urine filled the air, Brenda let out a strangled sob. But she didn’t let herself cry for long. She couldn’t afford to squander the tears.