Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  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.

  7

  San Diego, California September

  On Friday afternoon, Mark Blaylock made his way through the deserted administrative offices of Rutherford International. They had finally let Mina’s secretary go, so now it was just the two of them. They’d hung on to the office space in hopes that things would turn around, but that wasn’t happening. They had gotten a hell of a deal by paying the lease in advance, but time was up. The landlord had someone who was interested in moving in.

  Renters for the warehouse/manufacturing spaces in the office park complex were few and far between at the moment, so he was letting them hang on to their storage space at a greatly reduced rent. That gave Mark and Mina a place to store the office equipment and furniture they had been unable to unload. How much longer they’d be able to manage even that paltry amount of space was a question for which Mark had no easy answer.

  Mark slammed open the door to his wife’s office, then he went inside and collapsed into the nearest chair.

  “How’d it go?” Mina asked.

  Mark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something wrong with the controls. The drone flew fine for a while, like there was nothing at all the matter with it. I was putting it through its paces and it was perfect, but when I tried to land it, everything went to hell.”

  “It crashed?” Mina asked.

  “I’ll say,” Mark said with a nod. “And I don’t know why—no idea.”

  “What about the wreckage?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Mark said. “That’s the only good thing about all this. It went into the water. No one will ever find it.”

  The water in this instance was the Salton Sea, near Mark’s rustic cabin. It was possible that someday if the lake dried up, someone might find the wreckage, but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

  “Good,” Mina said.

  That was all she said. She could have said a lot more. When Mark had insisted on doing the test run himself, she had worried about how capable he was, but right then there really wasn’t anyone else to do the critical flight. They’d let everyone go, and Mina sure as hell couldn’t fly one of the damned things herself. When Mark said he could do it—that it was “dead simple”—she had believed him. Evidently she’d been wrong about that, but playing the blame game wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Ermina Blaylock was nothing if not absolutely practical.

  “What can we do to fix this?”

  “I’m no engineer,” Mark said, shaking his head. “And I don’t have the technical skills to sort it out. We need help, Mina, and we need it fast. If we’re going to make this deal work, we’re going to have to bring back someone from engineering.”

  That was a risk and they both knew it. When the military contract went away, they had bought up an entire warehouse of UAVs as scrap and for pennies on the dollar with the understanding that the UAVs would all be destroyed. Rutherford International had been paid a princely sum to make sure they were. T
he powers that be were concerned that if one of the UAVs happened to fall into the wrong hands, people unfriendly to the United States might manage to reverse engineer the product and come up with a workable drone design of their own.

  Together Mark and Mina had falsified records showing the scrapped UAVs had all been destroyed and a helpful inspector had signed off on the paperwork. Now after months of putting out discreet feelers, Mina had finally stumbled across a potential customer, one Enrique Gallegos, who wanted to buy several working UAVs, for which he was prepared to pay an astonishing amount of money into a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Before anything could happen, however, Mark and Mina needed to put on a successful demo flight. Mina was grateful that Enrique Gallegos hadn’t been on hand to witness this afternoon’s show-and-tell disaster.

  It was easy to see that once they made the sale to Gallegos, they’d be financially whole again, but all of that depended on their having a working product. Right now they didn’t.

  “We need it to work,” Mark said desperately, giving voice to what Mina herself already knew to be true. “We’re going down for the third time.”

  Mina couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the man. She slept easily each night while he lay awake trying to find a way around their disastrous cash flow problems. Gallegos had been very specific in his request. He needed his UAVs capable of making an hourlong flight. He also wanted them equipped with some kind of self-destruct application.

  Mina was good at playing stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She understood that Gallegos’s principals intended to use the UAVs to smuggle illicit cargo—drugs most likely—from somewhere in northern Mexico to predetermined landing areas in the United States well north of the last Border Patrol checkpoints. If each drone was capable of carrying a valuable ten-kilogram payload, she was a little puzzled by the need for a self-destruct mechanism, but she had agreed that any UAVs they sold would be so equipped.

  “What about Richard Lowensdale?” Mina asked Mark casually. “Maybe we could bring him in on a consulting basis.”

  Mark let his breath out. “I never liked Richard,” he said. “I’m not sure he can be trusted.”

  “Yes, but he’s a good engineer, and he knows the product,” Mina said.

  “But how the hell are we going to pay him?”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Mina said. “Maybe I can get him to defer payment until after he gets us up and running. To bring him on board, though, I’ll have to go see him. We can’t risk sending him an e-mail about any of this. I don’t want to put anything in writing.”

  “Yes, definitely,” Mark agreed. “Nothing in writing.”

  He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to go home and shower. It was hot as hell out there today, but by now the ATVers are all showing up for their long weekend. I was glad to come back to town.”

  Once Mark left, a worried Mina paced the small confines of her office. If the feds could pull a wrecked 747 out of the ocean and reassemble it, they could do the same thing to a drone that had gone down in the Salton Sea. All the parts, even the smallest integrated circuits, had source codes that would come straight back to Rutherford and to her. There were laws, federal laws, against selling supposedly scrapped equipment to unauthorized purchasers. Enrique Gallegos was definitely not authorized. Mina wanted to be rich again—she liked being rich—but she most definitely didn’t want to go to jail.

  Two nights later, she sat in a darkened bar in the Morongo Casino outside Palm Springs. She sipped a tonic with lime and waited for Enrique to pull himself away from the baccarat table. The casino was far enough out of the way for Mina to meet him there without raising any San Diego eyebrows.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  She nodded. “My husband is hung up on the idea of blowing up the hardware,” she said. “It’s possible, of course, but in order to make sure it works, we’d have to take another drone out of our inventory. And there’s always the very real danger of an event like that leaving a debris trail. We’ll need to do a test run.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If you want us to use two UAVs—one for us to blow up and the other for you to own—then you’ll need to pay us in advance for two UAVs.”

  Enrique lifted his glass to his lips. “Sounds expensive,” he said. “I don’t know if I can make that work.”

  “We’re the ones taking all the risks,” Mina said. “If we get caught, Mark and I could end up in jail for a very long time.”

  That’s what Mina said, even though she had already decided that she would disappear long before any possible fallout hit. She’d be gone; the money would be gone; and Mark—poor old Mark—would be the one left holding the bag.

  Without another word, Gallegos stood up and walked away. He didn’t say he’d be back, but Mina was sure he would be, and she was right. He returned twenty minutes later.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll buy two of them up front.”

  Mina was impressed. Twenty minutes wasn’t very long to get the go-ahead on that kind of expenditure. Whoever was behind this was someone with very deep pockets.

  “We’ve already paid a quarter of that amount as an advance on the other drone, with another quarter due after a successful demo and the remainder on delivery,” Gallegos continued. “We’ll buy the second one at half price on the same terms—a quarter now and the rest on completion of a successful demonstration.”

  All of which means they really want this, Mina told herself.

  “Seventy-five percent, not fifty,” Mina said. “And I’m going to need that first quarter up front in cash. I need operating capital.”

  And running money.

  8

  Barstow, California

  Valerie Gastellum Sandoz, Brenda’s older sister, was the member of the family drafted by their mother to make the seven-and-a-half-hour, almost four-hundred-mile trip from San Francisco to Barstow in order to bail Brenda out of jail. She’d had to use one of her precious vacation days. So when it came time to sign Brenda out of the jail, Valerie was not a happy camper.

  She and Brenda were sisters; they had never been pals. Brenda had been the golden child, from grade school on. She had been an exemplary student, a cheerleader, a star, while Valerie merely plugged along in the background. Val had been a late bloomer who married for the first time at age thirty-seven. While her younger sibling had embarked on her high-flying broadcasting career, Valerie had labored away in school, changing majors several times before finally settling in to become an architect. She had worked her way up from several lowly drafting positions until she landed herself a decent position in a commercial architectural firm in the Bay Area.

  Now that their situations were reversed, with Valerie in the catbird seat and Brenda on her uppers, Valerie was not amused by her younger sister’s plight, and she wasn’t very sympathetic either.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Valerie demanded as they headed west on California Highway 58. “Mom’s been frantic. Where the hell have you been all this time?”

  “I went to Sedona,” Brenda answered. “I went to see a friend from L.A., Ali Reynolds. I thought she might help me, but she didn’t. She’s becoming a cop.”

  “Too bad she didn’t arrest you before you wrecked your damned car. Did you talk to the insurance adjuster?”

  Brenda shook her head. She didn’t want to say there was no insurance adjuster. Her auto insurance had been canceled two months ago, after her second DUI. Not canceled really, but they had raised the premium so much that she couldn’t afford the payments. Her insurance stopped when the premiums stopped. The remains of her wrecked car had been towed to the impound lot and they were going to stay there.

  “Thank you for coming to get me,” Brenda said contritely sometime later.

  “If it had been up to me, I would have left you to rot in jail or else walk home,” Valerie continued. “Mom has been beyond upset. You were gone for a week and a half. Did it ever cross your mind that she was worri
ed? Would it have killed you to take out your cell phone and call her?”

  There was nothing Brenda could say in response to Val’s tirade. Before the wreck she hadn’t wanted to call and hadn’t answered her mother’s calls. Since the wreck her phone had been MIA and was probably even now toasting its circuit boards in the impound lot. As for her other reason for not calling? Telling Val that she’d been hospitalized for four days with DTs didn’t seem to strike just the right note. Besides, Val was on a roll. She wasn’t interested in any response.

  “The only reason I agreed to come get you is that I was afraid Mom would try to do it on her own. She can’t drive anymore. At least, with her macular degeneration, she shouldn’t drive anymore, but she still does. And since you’re her favorite, she would’ve tried to come riding to your rescue herself if I hadn’t told her I’d do it.”

  Brenda said nothing. Had she been drinking, she would have fought back. But if being sober meant sitting there and having to take this kind of bitching out, she didn’t think it was worth it.

  “With three DUIs, you are not under any circumstances to drive Mom’s car, understand?” Valerie added.

  Brenda nodded. That pretty much went without saying. Besides, the cops had just confiscated her driver’s license.

  “I won’t,” she said. “Just take me to Mom’s.”

  “What about your apartment?”

  Brenda didn’t want to admit to her sister that three weeks ago she’d been evicted from her apartment because she hadn’t paid the rent. For months. That was one of the reasons she’d hit the road. She’d been living out of her car, but she was still afraid that someone might see her and recognize her.

  Was that what hitting bottom really meant—living out of your car or not caring if people knew you were living out of your car? Which was worse? And did it really matter? Whatever possessions she’d had left had been in the car with her. Now the car was gone and so was everything else.

  She tried to lighten the somber mood. “It’s like they say in that old song: ‘I figure whenever you’re down and out, the only way is up.’”