Fatal Error

6

Sedona, Arizona

One of the people who had helped keep Ali on track was B. Simpson and his considerable charms. Ali and Bartholomew Quentin Simpson had both been born and raised in Sedona, but Ali was enough older than he was that they hadn’t been friends or even acquaintances during grade school and high school. They weren’t formally introduced until years later, when as adults and in the aftermath of failed marriages, they had both returned to their mutual hometown to recover their equilibrium.

Due to unmerciful teasing from his classmates, B. had shed his first name in junior high. The other kids had ragged on him constantly about that “other” Bart Simpson until he had abandoned his given name entirely. B.’s nerdy interest in computer science may have made him the butt of jokes in small-town Arizona, but it had translated into two successful careers-the first one in the computer gaming industry and his current gig as an internationally recognized computer security guru.

After a rancorous divorce, B. had returned to Sedona as a reluctant bachelor with no particular interest in cooking. For months he had survived by eating two meals a day at the Sugarloaf Cafe. Over time he had struck up a friendship with Ali’s father. It was Bob Larson who had suggested to Ali that she might want to turn to B.’s start-up computer security company, High Noon Enterprises, to safeguard her computers.

From shortly after they met, B. had made it clear that he was interested in more than a client-only relationship, and the man should have qualified as a good catch. He was an eligible bachelor with plenty of money and a beautiful custom-built home. He was tall, good-looking, and had a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to send female hearts into spasms. He functioned well under difficult circumstances. He wasn’t needy. He didn’t whine.

But even with all those things going for him, Ali had been immune to his entreaties for several reasons, one of which was their similarly checkered marital pasts. Ali had lost her first husband to cancer. Her second husband, Paul Grayson, who had cheated on her repeatedly, had been a terrible mistake. B.’s wife had divorced him and was already remarried to someone B. had once regarded as a good friend. In other words, they’d both been burned on the happily-ever-after score, and that meant that more than a bit of wariness was well in order.

For Ali, though, the biggest stumbling block had been and continued to be B.’s age. It didn’t help that there was now a specific epithet-“cougar”-for a woman in her situation, an older woman involved with a younger man. It was worrisome to Ali that B. was fifteen years younger than she was. She didn’t like thinking about the fact that B. was closer in age to Chris and Athena and to most of Ali’s police academy classmates than he was to Ali herself.

In a weak moment, she had finally let down her defenses enough to succumb to his charms, and now she was glad she had. She enjoyed spending time with him. They were having fun; they were devoted to one another, but they also weren’t in any hurry to take the relationship to another level. On the other hand, Ali was occasionally troubled by the questioning looks that were leveled at them when they were out together in public.

Ali drove up the driveway from Manzanita Hills Road to her remodeled house. By the time she finished parking in the garage, Leland Brooks appeared in the kitchen doorway to collect her luggage.

“Oh, my,” he said, peering at her face. “It looks like you ended up in a pub fight and lost.”

“You’re right,” Ali said. “I did lose, but it happened in the academy gym, not in a bar.”

“If you say so, madam,” he said. “And, if you don’t mind my asking, how does the other fellow look?”

“I’m sorry to say he’s fine,” Ali said.

“So most likely you’ll be dining at home this weekend?”

Leland’s question made Ali smile. It was a very nice way of saying she looked like crap. It also meant that he was back to his old mind-reading tricks.

“Yes, please,” she said.

“I’ll probably need to go out and find some more food, then,” he said. “I was under the impression that you and Mr. Simpson would be going out a good deal of the time, but apparently that’s not in anyone’s best interest.”

“Thank you, Leland,” Ali said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Initially Ali had wondered about the advisability of keeping Leland around after the demise of his previous employer, who had also been the previous owner of Ali’s home. He was a godsend.

B. arrived in time for dinner at eight. Afterward, they sat outside on the patio and watched as a late-summer thunderstorm rumbled away off in the west without ever dropping any rain on Sedona proper. They talked about lots of things including Brenda Riley’s visit and Ali’s encounter with Jose Reyes.

“So nobody at the academy is giving you a free ride,” B. said. “Have your parents seen your shiner yet?”

Ali shook her head.

“No guts, no glory,” he said. “We’d better go have breakfast at the Sugarloaf tomorrow morning and give your mother a shot at you. Otherwise you’re never going to hear the end of it, and neither will I. Now what say we go to bed?”

They went to bed early but not necessarily to sleep. When Ali woke up the next morning, B. was sitting in the love seat, shuffling through a set of papers. A tray with a pot of coffee and two cups sat on the side table.

Ali scrambled out of bed, pulled on a robe, and poured herself a cup of coffee. She would have sat down on the love seat, but the spot next to B. was already occupied by Sam. Rather than move Samantha, Ali went back and perched on the end of the bed.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The background check you ordered,” B. replied.

“It’s already here?”

“Stu’s been a busy little bee. And he gets things done. He must have dropped it off last night. Leland found it just inside the gate when he went down this morning to collect the newspaper. From the looks of this, your friend’s ex-boyfriend is a pretty interesting character.”

With that, B. handed Ali the first of several pages.

“But wait,” Ali said as soon as she read the top line of the header. “This is about somebody named Richard Lowensdale. I’m sure Brenda told me Richard’s last name was Lattimer.”

“That may be what he told her,” B. corrected, “but if you keep reading, you’ll learn that Richard Lattimer is a figment of someone’s imagination. Richard Lowensdale is the guy who was raised in Grass Valley, California, and worked for Rutherford International in San Diego. As far as Stu can discover, Richard Lattimer doesn’t exist.”

Continuing to read the report, Ali was appalled. “It looks like everything Richard Lowensdale told Brenda is a lie.”

“Pretty much,” B. agreed.

Yes, Richard had worked for a defense contractor, but as a minor player, not a big one. It turned out that Rutherford International was a small, minority-owned company with a niche market that supplied drone controllers. Lowensdale had a degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, but his career wasn’t exactly stellar. For one thing, he had spent time bouncing from one employer to another. For another, Stuart Ramey’s search of various databases revealed no patents issued in his name and no scientific papers listing him as author. His only listed hobby included a lifelong interest in model airplanes-remote-control model airplanes.

“Model planes,” B commented. “That fits.”

“What fits?” asked Ali.

“He’s worked on drones. UAVs. Unmanned aerial vehicles-like the ones our troops are using in the Middle East.”

“Aren’t those a lot bigger?” Ali asked. “Like Piper Cubs?”

“Some are,” B. agreed. “The ones they’re using in Afghanistan, the Predators that fire the big missiles, are about that big, but the ones Rutherford was working on are much smaller. The most they could possibly carry would be a forty-pound payload, and some not even that much.”

“So what’s the big deal then?” Ali asked.

“There’s an even smaller variety that’s about the size of those remote-control helicopters that were such a hit at Christmas a couple of years ago. They can look in a window of a building and take out a single target sitting in the room without damaging anyone else.”

“So there’s less chance of collateral damage,” Ali said.

“Exactly,” B. agreed. “They cost a lot less because of size. They can go places where it would be too dangerous to have a piloted aircraft. Regardless of size, drones are relatively silent. They fly low enough to avoid radar detection. They can do precision targeting, and if you release enough of them at once, you can create a swarm.

“Think about it. If you have a single offensive weapon flying at any given target, chances are you’ve got a missile defense of some sort that has a good chance of taking that one missile transport device down. If you’ve got several hundred tiny drones heading in all at the same time, defenders can probably take out some, but not all of them.”

“Like trying to chase off a swarm of killer bees with a fly swatter.”

“Exactly.”

“So Lowensdale worked for Rutherford and then he stopped,” Ali said. “How come?”

“Because the bottom dropped out of the drone market,” B. explained. “For a long time it looked like Rutherford was going to snag one of the big cushy military contracts. When that didn’t happen, when those opportunities went away, so did most of Rutherford’s employees, including Richard. The only people left working there are the owner and her husband, Ermina and Mark Blaylock and maybe a secretary. Definitely a skeleton crew.”

“Richard Lattimer or Lowensdale or whoever he is told Brenda that he was an integral part of the design team. Was he?”

“I think it’s more likely that he was just a cog in the wheel. When the layoffs hit, Lowensdale was let go right along with everyone else.”

Ali studied a line in the report. “It says here that he was laid off in February of last year.”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s over a year before Brenda had any inkling he was no longer working in San Diego. Every time she made plans to go down there to see him, he came up with some phony excuse or another as to why she shouldn’t come to visit. They were in this supposedly serious relationship without ever laying eyes on one another. How on earth could he deceive her like that for so long?”

“You tell me,” B. said with a smile. “On paper, at least, he’s nothing special. He has two degrees to his credit-a BS from UCLA and an MBA from Phoenix University. He also routinely signed documents with the PE designation, even though there’s no record of his ever having earned it.”

“Physical education?” Ali asked.

“Professional engineer. Requirements vary from state to state, but you have to take and pass exams that demonstrate an understanding of all kinds of engineering principles with an emphasis on your own specialty. I suspect he’s an adequate kind of guy.”

“Adequate but not brilliant,” Ali said.

“And with a real tendency to inflate his accomplishments. I’m thinking his BS was totally appropriate.”

Ali agreed and went back to reading. After being laid off in San Diego, Lowensdale had moved back to Grass Valley. His parents-his mother and stepfather-had died in a car crash more than two years earlier, leaving Richard as their sole heir. For a while he had renters living in the house, but after he lost his job and needed a less expensive place to live, he got rid of the renters-evicted them, actually-and then had moved back to Grass Valley in July.

“What a creep,” Ali said. “He’s spent the past year living forty miles or so from Brenda, all the while claiming he was still in San Diego.”

“Right. Since he was no longer there, no wonder he needed to find one excuse after another to explain why Brenda shouldn’t go to San Diego to visit him.”

“What’s this house in Grass Valley like?” Ali asked.

After shuffling through some extra papers, B. plucked a single sheet out of the bunch.

“According to his Zillow report, Lowensdale’s place on Jan Road is valued at two hundred eighty-five thousand.”

“That’s pretty reasonable,” Ali said. “Especially for California real estate. Must be fairly modest, but still, if he hasn’t worked in more than a year, what does he do for money?”

“He doesn’t appear to need much,” B. said. “He was on unemployment for a while, but there was also some kind of insurance settlement-with an undisclosed amount-that came as a result of the drunk-driving incident that killed his mother and stepfather. His ride is a ten-year-old Cadillac, which, like the house, he inherited from his mother. He apparently orders online and has everything delivered-food, clothing, books, electronics, you name it. His medications come from an online pharmacy in Canada. Oh, and as far as Stu can tell, he doesn’t have garbage service, or at least he doesn’t pay for it.”

“What about his father?” Ali asked.

B. gave Ali a puzzled look. “Did his father have garbage service?”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “Richard told Brenda that his father committed suicide. Did he?”

“That part was true. His father blew his brains out in his office at the Grass Valley Group/Tektronix plant while Richard was a junior in high school. His mother remarried two days after her first husband’s funeral. She married a guy who was supposedly one of the father’s best friends, which sounds all too familiar to me,” B. added.

“If the wife was screwing around behind his back, that might account for the father’s suicide,” Ali offered. “And look here. It says Richard has never been married and has no kids, but I distinctly remember Brenda saying that one time when she was planning on going to visit him, he told her she couldn’t come because his daughter was sick. His nonexistent daughter.”

“There you go,” B. said. “So yes, we know that he lied about that-or at least, according to Brenda he lied about it-but he has no criminal record, no pending lawsuits, and no bankruptcies. He’s coming through this downturn with an excellent credit rating. On paper the guy looks solid.”

“Which is how he must have looked to Brenda too,” Ali said. “What happens now?”

“You told Stuart to mail the report to her,” B. said. “I’m sure he will, but it probably won’t go out until Tuesday.”

Ali emptied her coffee cup. “That’ll be plenty of time,” she said. “He’s kept the wool pulled over Brenda’s eyes for this long. I’m sure an extra day or two isn’t going to matter. Let’s go have breakfast and show my parents what having a daughter in a police academy really means.”

When the long weekend was over, Ali gave B. a ride to Sky Harbor to catch a plane for D.C. after which would be another trip back to Taiwan. From the airport, she headed back to the academy.

For the next two weeks, Ali Reynolds threw herself headlong into the program and worked her butt off. In a way she hadn’t anticipated, helping Brenda had inarguably helped her. The antagonism from Jose Reyes and some of his cronies that had been the bane of her existence during the earlier weeks faded into the background, sort of like the bruising and swelling around her eye.

Donnatelle had taken Ali’s advice and had spent much of the weekend on the practice range and hitting the books. By the middle of the week, she had managed to retake and pass the evidence handling test and had eked out a qualifying score on the target range as well. Each evening that week, there were impromptu study sessions in the common room of the women’s dormitory, with Jose and some of his pals in attendance.

There were no e-mails from Brenda Riley and no calls either. Ali took that to mean that her well-intended advice about seeking treatment had come to nothing. The same thing must have been true about the background check. Richard Lattimer/Lowensdale may have turned out to be a liar and a cheat, but Ali resigned herself to the idea that Brenda would do what Brenda would do regardless.

On the last Friday afternoon just before graduation, Sergeant Pettit once again paired Ali and Jose for what would be her final attempt at a hip toss try with a wily adversary. Ali figured the instructor was looking for a repeat of their previous performance. What the instructor didn’t see as Ali approached Jose was the wink he sent in her direction.

When the confrontation started, instead of the expected hip toss, Ali surprised both Jose and Pettit by taking him down with a simple leg sweep. Once Jose was on the ground, she cuffed him and it was over. The fact that he had put up zero resistance made Ali feel like she was cheating the system, but when Sergeant Pettit came over to slap her on the back and tell her “Good job,” she didn’t tell the instructor otherwise. She just reached down and helped Jose up.

“We’re even now?” Jose asked her with a grin.

She nodded and smiled back. “Even,” she said.

When she removed the cuffs and shook hands with Jose, Ali knew it really was over. She was ready to go home and be a police officer, and so was he.