Fatal Error

32

Sacramento, California

When Gil parked in front of Camilla Gastellum’s house on P Street in the early evening, it looked as though he had made the trip for nothing. The house was dark. There was no flickering glow from a television set. Having come this far, however, he refused to give up without at least ringing the doorbell.

Once on the porch, though, he thought he heard the sound of classical music coming from somewhere inside the house. He found the doorbell and rang it. Moments later he heard a faint shuffle of footsteps approaching the front door. Two lights snapped on-one in the entryway and one on the porch. The door cracked open as far as the end of a brass security chain.

As far as Gil was concerned, those security chains were worse than useless. They gave the homeowner a false sense of security. If a bad guy wanted to get inside, he would.

“Who’s there?” a woman asked.

“My name is Detective Gilbert Morris,” he said, holding his ID wallet up to what he assumed was eye level. “I’m looking for Camilla Gastellum. It’s about her daughter.”

The security chain was disengaged with a snap, the door thrown open. A gray-haired woman, dressed in a robe and nightgown, stood exposed in the doorway. The way Camilla Gastellum squinted as she looked up at him made him think she couldn’t see very well.

“Don’t tell me!” she exclaimed. “Have you found Brenda? Is she all right? Come in. Please.”

She stepped back and motioned Gil into the house. “Are you saying your daughter is missing?”

“Well, of course she’s missing. She left on Friday morning and never came back. I’ve been trying since Friday night to get someone to take a missing persons report. The last person I talked to told me that since Brenda’s an adult, she doesn’t have to tell me where she’s going. I thought that was why you were here-that you had found her. Where did you say you’re from again?”

The fact that Brenda had disappeared the morning of Richard Lowensdale’s murder caused a rush of excitement to course through Gil’s veins, but he didn’t let on.

“Grass Valley,” Gil said noncommittally. “I’m with the Investigations Unit of the Grass Valley Police Department.”

“Oh, no,” Camilla said with a sigh. “Not again.”

Using both hands, she reattached the security chain, then she led the way into the house, turning on lights as she went. In a room that seemed more like a parlor than a real living room, she motioned him onto an old-fashioned and exceedingly uncomfortable horsehair couch while she settled in an wooden-armed easy chair. The source of the music was a CD player, which she muted by clicking a remote.

“When I’m here by myself, I generally sit in the dark and listen to music,” she explained. “I have macular degeneration. Sitting in the dark helps keep me from thinking about how much I can’t see. So tell me,” she added, sounding resigned, “what kind of trouble is Brenda in this time?”

“What can you tell me about Richard Lowensdale, Mrs. Gastellum?” Gil asked.

“Please,” she said, “call me Camilla. Richard and Brenda were supposedly engaged for a time, but he never actually gave her a ring. It turned out that he had other girlfriends-several other girlfriends. She found that out this past October.”

“That would be when she allegedly broke into his house?” Gil asked.

“She didn’t ‘allegedly’ break into his house,” Camilla said. “She really broke into his house. She started working on her book right after that-a book about something called cyberstalking. I don’t know much about it, but she claims that’s what Richard has been doing. And what he did to her personally really hurt her,” Camilla added. “She sort of went off the deep end for a while, but I thought she was finally pulling out of it. You know, that she was starting to recover. At least that’s what I was hoping. But you still haven’t told me what this is all about, Mr. . ”

“Morris,” he supplied. “Detective Gilbert Morris.” He removed a business card from his wallet, placed it in her hand, and closed her fingers around it. “That has all my contact information on it.”

“But why are you here?”

He didn’t want to lower this boom on Camilla Gastellum. She was truly an innocent bystander. Still, he had no choice.

“I need to speak to your daughter,” he said. “I need to speak to Brenda.”

“Why?”

“A man was murdered in Grass Valley sometime over the weekend, possibly on Friday afternoon. When I left to come here, we still hadn’t established a positive ID, but indications are that our victim is Richard Lowensdale. Someone put a plastic bag over his head and taped it shut. He died of asphyxiation.”

“Oh,” she said. And then a moment later she added, “No, that’s not possible. My daughter could never do something like that. Ever.”

“Even so,” Gil began, “you can see why we’re interested in speaking to your daughter. She may know something.”

Camilla Gastellum stood up abruptly. “You aren’t here to talk to Brenda. You’re here to arrest her. You think she did it.”

“Mrs. Gastellum, please-”

“You need to go now,” she insisted. “You’re no longer welcome in this house. And the next time you come back, it had better be with a search warrant.”

Camilla escorted him back to the front door. He heard the security chain lock into place as the door closed behind him. Gil headed back to Grass Valley feeling like he was making real progress. He had a suspect. True, Brenda Riley might be among the missing. He didn’t for even a moment consider that Camilla Gastellum knew her daughter’s whereabouts, but someone did, and Gil was determined to find that person.

In his experience, most people didn’t disappear without a trace. Somewhere in Brenda’s mother’s house on P Street he would find a clue-an e-mail to a friend, a plane or hotel reservation-that would tell him what he needed to know. But in order to find that information and have it admissible in court, he would have to come back with a properly drawn search warrant. To get a warrant, Gil would need to have enough pieces of the puzzle in place to convince a judge that he had probable cause. Probable cause took work, sometimes a whole lot of work.