Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  Ali stopped behind her. “Donnatelle, is something wrong?”

  “I flunked the evidence handling test,” she said. “Sergeant Pettit just told me if I screw up again, I’m out. I can’t lose this chance,” she sobbed. “I can’t.”

  When she finally managed to push open the door to her room, Ali followed her inside uninvited. Donnatelle heaved herself down on the bed, still weeping. Looking around, Ali noticed that, unlike the comfortable messiness of her own room, this one was eerily neat. Nothing was out of place. The only personalization consisted of a framed photo on the small study desk—a picture of Donnatelle flanked by three smiling youngsters, two boys and a girl. The girl, clearly the youngest, was missing her two front teeth.

  “Are these your kids?” Ali asked.

  Donnatelle nodded but didn’t answer.

  “Who takes care of them while you’re here?”

  “My mom,” Donnatelle said.

  Ali didn’t ask about the children’s father. He wasn’t in the photo, and he probably wasn’t in the picture anywhere else either.

  “What did you do before you came to the academy?” Ali asked.

  Sniffling, Donnatelle sat up. “I was a maid, in a hotel,” she said. “But I wanted to do more. I wanted to do something that would make my kids proud of me—something besides making other people’s beds. So I went back to school and got my GED. The sheriff said he’d give me a chance, but I’m not good at taking tests, I’m scared of guns, and Sergeant Pettit has it in for me.”

  School had always been easy for Ali. She aced written exams at the academy in the same way she had aced exams in high school and college. And she had come here with a more than nodding acquaintance with her own handgun and how to use it. Her notable failure with Jose Reyes was the first real black mark on her academy record.

  Donnatelle, on the other hand, had come to the academy with a school record that was less than exemplary, but Ali found her determination to improve herself for the sake of her children nothing short of inspiring.

  “That may be true,” Ali said ruefully, “but I seem to remember you were fine in the hip toss. You threw your guy down and you don’t have a black eye either. Besides I think Sergeant Pettit has a problem with women—any women.”

  Donnatelle sat up and gave Ali a halfhearted smile. “But my guy wasn’t as big or as tough as yours was.”

  “Are you going home this weekend?” Ali asked.

  Donnatelle shook her head. “It’s too far. I’m going to stay here and work on the evidence handling material. They’re going to let me retake the exam next week. As for the gun thing?” She shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “Had you ever handled a gun before you got here?”

  Donnatelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not ever.”

  “You need to practice,” Ali said. “Spend as much time on the range this weekend as you can.”

  “I was going to, but now I can’t,” Donnatelle said. “They told me the range here is going to be closed because it’s a holiday.”

  “Use a private one then,” Ali said. “Go practice somewhere else.”

  “But where?”

  “Just a minute,” Ali said. She returned to her room and woke up her iPhone. She returned to Donnatelle’s room a few minutes later with a list of five shooting ranges in the nearby area.

  “Try one of these,” she said. “And next week, when I get back, maybe I can help you with some of the written material.”

  “You’d do that?” Donnatelle asked.

  “Absolutely,” Ali told her with a smile. “After all, the girls on the thin blue line have to stick together, don’t we?”

  Rising from the bed, Donnatelle went into the bathroom and washed her face. Then rushing to keep from being late, they hurried to their next class. When the recruits were finally dismissed at four o’clock on that scorching Friday afternoon, Ali joined what seemed like most of Peoria in migrating north on I-17 in hopes of escaping the valley’s crushing heat. On the way Ali speed-dialed High Noon Enterprises and spoke to Stuart Ramey, B.’s second in command about doing a background check on Richard Lattimer, originally from Grass Valley, California. Ali could have gone directly to B. with her request for information, but she had grown accustomed to dealing with Stuart during B.’s many absences. Besides, Ali assumed B. was probably dealing with a killer case of jet lag and there was a very good chance he was napping. She gave Stuart all the information she could remember from what Brenda had told her. She even dragged out the scrap of paper with the addresses on it and gave that information to Stuart as well.

  “You want me to mail this to that address in Sacramento?” Stuart confirmed. “Do you want a copy too?”

  “Why not?” Ali said. “I’m a little curious about this guy. The idea that he could get a fairly intelligent, accomplished woman to fall for him sight unseen is a little over the top.” Of course, Ali realized that Brenda had severe “issues,” but she was nonetheless baffled. Brenda had, after all, worked as a journalist, albeit the eye candy variety.

  Stuart laughed aloud. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “And you’d also be surprised at the number of requests we get these days that are just like this—somebody checking out the real deal of the new person who’s supposed to be the love of his or her life.”

  “How long does it take?” Ali asked.

  “The background check? Not long,” Stuart said. “A couple of days at most, but this is a three-day weekend, so some of my sources may not be back online until Tuesday.”

  “That’s all right,” Ali said. “No rush.”

  As far as she was concerned, there was no big hurry. Yes, she had agreed to order the background check on Brenda’s behalf, and she was doing so because Ali Reynolds was a woman of her word. But Ali could see that Brenda’s problems went far beyond her simply being dumped by a boyfriend. Somehow, in the last few years of troubles, Brenda Riley had lost herself.

  That could have been me, Ali thought. If it hadn’t been for the people around me, I might have gone down the tubes the same way.

  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 Café. 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 checke
red 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 her
e 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.