Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  Finally the spasm of nausea ended. The odor was still there, slightly dissipated in the cold wind blowing down from the mountains. If there was something dead inside the purse, then maybe John was wrong about what had happened at the reservoir. Maybe the shoes by the lake didn’t mean that someone had committed suicide. Yes, that was the point when John Connor definitely should have called the cops and reported what he had found, but he didn’t do that. He couldn’t.

  There would be too many questions, ones that couldn’t be answered without jeopardizing his future and his friends’ futures too. But he couldn’t just leave it alone either. Someone had been calling on the telephone inside the purse, looking for whoever owned the purse, and John Connor—this John Connor, not the teenager from the movies or the old TV series—was the only one who could answer that call.

  Covering his mouth and nose with his shoulder, John returned to the purse and dug around inside it. Peering inside, he saw something that looked like a twig. When he pulled it out, he saw what it really was—a severed finger with a bloodied nail that gleamed in the yellowish light.

  When John saw that, it was time for him to barf again.

  This was far worse than he could have thought possible. With his eyes still watering, he forced himself back to searching the purse until he found the phone, an old flip Motorola. When he opened it, the message light lit up—fourteen missed calls, all of them listed as “Mom.” A check of the battery life showed that it was down to a single bar.

  With his hands shaking, John checked the details screen and copied the phone number into his own phone. Then, stowing the nearly dead Motorola in his shirt pocket, he zipped up the purse, locking in the odor, and returned it to the trunk. Then he punched send on his phone.

  “Hello.”

  John breathed a sigh of relief when the man answered the phone after only one ring. He wanted to talk to a man, not a woman. It would be easier.

  “Hello,” the man said again. “Is anyone there?”

  John cleared his throat. “I’m here,” he said. “My name is John Connor. Who’s this?”

  “My name is Camilla Gastellum.”

  A woman, John thought. A woman with a very deep voice.

  “I live up in Grass Valley,” he said hurriedly. “I heard this phone ringing a little while ago. It was inside a purse I found.”

  “Inside a purse?” the woman asked. “A yellow leather purse?”

  “Yes.”

  “The purse probably belongs to my daughter, Brenda. Where did you find it? And where is she?”

  Those were questions John Connor didn’t want to answer. “I found the purse by a lake, ma’am, a lake outside of town here. The purse was there along with a pair of tennis shoes.”

  There was a long pause before “They were all by themselves?”

  “Yes,” John said, “there was no one around at all.”

  “I’m down in Sacramento, and I don’t drive. Could you maybe bring them to me?”

  Remembering what was inside the purse, John knew he couldn’t inflict that on anyone else.

  “No,” he said. “That won’t work. I can’t do that.”

  There was another long silence on the end of the phone. For a moment John was afraid the person had hung up, but then the silence was followed by a deep sigh.

  “I’m sorry to hear that you’re involved in all this, young man, but you need to do the right thing. I understand there’s been a homicide in Grass Valley. The dead man’s name is Richard Lowensdale. He and my daughter were involved at one time. A detective came to talk to me about this tonight. I believe his name is Morris—Detective Gilbert Morris. As much as I hate to say it, you’ll need to take that purse to the police department there in Grass Valley. Talk to Detective Morris. Tell him exactly what you told me. Let him know what you found and where you found it.”

  John really wanted to say, “No. I can’t possibly.” Instead he mumbled, “Yes, ma’am. I will.”

  After Camilla Gastellum hung up, John stood there for a while longer, still holding his own phone and crying. He was crying because he wished he had never picked up the purse in the first place. Now, because he had made that stupid phone call on his own phone, the cops would be able to trace it back to him. Even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, he’d be drawn into it. He and Pete and Tony and Jack would all end up being kicked off the basketball team. He would never go to West Point.

  “Oh well,” he told himself finally, “I can still enlist.”

  He knew where the Grass Valley Police Department was on Auburn Street, but he didn’t want to go there by himself. Instead, he put the purse back in the trunk, then he went home and woke up his parents. He told them the truth, all of it.

  “It’s okay, son,” Will Connor said, crawling out of bed and reaching for his clothes. “You did the right thing. Let me get dressed and we’ll go see the cops.”

  36

  Grass Valley, California

  Detective Gil Morris had been asleep for just two hours when the phone rang at a little past one.

  “What now?”

  “You’re needed,” said Frieda Lawson, Grass Valley’s night watch desk sergeant. Regardless of rank, nobody argued with Sergeant Lawson. It simply wasn’t done.

  “Great,” Gil muttered. “Is somebody else dead?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Frieda said. “I’ve got somebody here who’s asking to speak to the detective in charge of the Lowensdale case.”

  “That would be me, then,” Gil said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Despite the seeming urgency, he needed to clear his head. He took the time to grab a shower, wishing that he had more than just one ragged towel. He would have to do something about that very soon. He either had to buy more towels or go to the laundromat, one or the other.

  He stopped off in the kitchen long enough to reload ink into his pen and to grab an additional supply of three-by-five cards. Then he drove back to the department, watching for black ice as he went.

  In the waiting room, Sergeant Lawson sat at her desk behind a glass partition. Two people rose from chairs as Gil walked into the room. Gil recognized the older man as Will Connor, the foreman at the local Discount Tire franchise. Beside him, looking miserable, stood a young man Gil also recognized. John Connor, Will’s son, had been a tight end on the Grass Valley High football team and was currently a point guard on the varsity basketball team.

  Will Connor stepped over to Gil and greeted him with a firm handshake. “Sorry to drag you out of bed like this,” he said, “but I didn’t think it should wait until morning. This is my son, John.”

  John stepped forward too. He held out his hand, but he averted his eyes. On the floor next to the boy’s feet sat a purse, a big yellow leather purse. On the chair beside him was a paper bag.

  “Do you want to come on back?” Gil asked, thinking he’d talk to them in one of the interview rooms and gesturing toward the security door that opened into the rest of the department.

  “I think we’d better off doing this outside,” Will Connor said.

  “Why?” Gil asked. “What’s going on?”

  “My son found this purse earlier tonight up near the Scotts Flat Reservoir,” Will said. “The purse and the shoes. I haven’t looked inside the purse, but he tells me there’s a finger inside there—a bloody finger. It’s pretty rank.”

  “Crap,” Gil said, reaching for his latex gloves. “Let’s go outside and take a look.”

  Once outside, Gil offered Will and John Connor some Vicks VaporRub to put under their noses and gave himself a dose of it as well. Then he opened the purse and spilled the stinking contents into a Bankers Box he had brought outside for the purpose. He used a hemostat to gather up the bloodied finger and dropped it into an evidence bag, which he quickly closed, but isolating the finger did little to diminish the odor. It had bonded onto the leather itself, leaving the gagging stench to cloud the air. Gil zipped the purse closed. That helped some too.

  At that point
, John reached into his pocket and extracted a cell phone. “This was in the purse,” he said. “I heard it ringing. When I tried to answer it, I found . . . that . . .” He nodded in the direction of the evidence bag.

  “I called the number later on my own phone and talked to an old woman named Camilla Gastellum who lives in Sacramento. She said the purse probably belonged to her daughter and that I should bring it here and talk to you. She said her daughter’s name was Brenda. Brenda Riley.”

  When it comes to solving homicides, Gil told himself, I’m three for three.

  He put the lid on the Bankers Box. He would inventory all this later and then he would send it to the crime lab.

  “There’s a pair of shoes too,” John said quickly, handing over a paper grocery bag. “Tennis shoes. I found them at the same time. They were with the purse.”

  “Where did you find all this treasure?” Gil asked.

  Will Connor answered before his son had a chance to reply. “John and some friends were up by Scotts Flat Reservoir earlier tonight. That’s where they found them. He and his buddies were just hanging out . . .”

  Will was talking quickly, trying to gloss over the where, when, and why. And Gil got it. He understood. He recognized John Connor because he had seen his photo before in the sports section of the Daily Dispatch. The kid had a great record, and a whole lot of his future would be riding on what happened tonight.

  Gil remembered how, as a kid, he had walked on the wild side—gone to wild keggers and hung out with the wrong crowd. For a while during his senior year, it looked like he wasn’t going to graduate with his class, but he managed to pull his GPA out of the fire at the last minute. Gil knew that no one would have been more surprised than his high school principal, Mr. Dortman, to learn that Gilbert Morris had grown up to be not only a cop but a well-respected homicide detective.

  So Gil didn’t need to ask what John Connor and his pals had been doing on a Sunday afternoon and evening at the Scotts Flat Reservoir in the middle of the winter. He already knew. They had definitely been up to no good, probably with booze or girls or both.

  “Who else was there?” Gil asked.

  John sighed. “Me and Tony Alvarez, Pete Bishop, and Jack Whitney.”

  Gil recognized those names as well. All four of the kids were starters on the Grass Valley varsity basketball team. If they got booted off the team, it was the end of what was starting to look like a championship season. Even so—even with all that at risk—John Connor had nonetheless done the right thing. He had picked up the purse and the shoes and had brought them to Gil.

  “Tell me about the shoes,” Gil said. He held them up to the outside light. They were Keds, white Keds. Considering what had gone on at Richard Lowensdale’s house, they should have been speckled with blood. They weren’t, and they weren’t especially dirty either.

  That struck Gil as odd. If someone had been out tramping around in the woods in them, they should have been a lot dirtier.

  “They were right there on the edge of the lake,” John Connor was saying. “Like somebody walked up to the water, kicked off their shoes, and went for a swim. I looked around. It’s real sandy there. There could have been footprints coming and going, but I couldn’t see them in the dark.”

  “Any sign of a struggle?”

  John shook his head. “It was like she just took off her shoes and walked into the water on her own.”

  Gil nodded. “We’ll need to check that out.”

  There was a problem with that. The Scotts Flat Reservoir was out in the country. That made for a whole other set of complications.

  “Let’s get your statement first,” Gil said. “Then we’ll need you to go back up to the lake so you can show us where all this went down.”

  Gil picked up the box and the bag. “I’ll take these inside so we can maintain the chain of evidence,” he said. “Then we need to go to an interview room so I can ask you some questions.”

  John nodded.

  “I’ll be recording the interview,” he said. “It’s important that you tell the truth. You know it’s against the law to lie to a police officer.”

  John looked briefly at his father for guidance and then nodded again. The hopeless slump of his shoulders told Gil that the kid knew he was screwed, that he understood his hope of going to West Point was all over.

  “All right,” he said, sounding resigned. “Let’s get this done and over with.”

  “Just to be clear,” Gil added, “I have no particular interest in knowing what you and your friends were doing up at the reservoir tonight. You weren’t drinking, were you?”

  John Connor’s eyes shot up and met Gil’s questioning gaze. His shoulders straightened. “No, sir,” he said. “I was not.”

  It was clearly an honest answer. John Connor had not been drinking, but that didn’t mean the others hadn’t been.

  “Who else saw the shoes and the purse at the lake?” Gil asked.

  “No one else. I was the only one.”

  “All right, then,” Gil said, leading the way back inside. “We’ll do the interview first. That shouldn’t take long, and then we’ll go back out to the lake so you can show me what you found where. Then we’ll get you home to bed. Wouldn’t want you to miss school tomorrow.”

  “No school tomorrow, sir,” John Connor said. “Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

  John didn’t mean anything by that remark. It was informational only. Still it hit Gil like a blow to the gut. If his own kids were still here, he would have known that tomorrow was a school holiday.

  “Come on,” he said gruffly. “Let’s get going.”

  During the interview, Gil asked only a few cursory questions about what John and his friends had been doing at the reservoir in the middle of the night. He let the answer “Hanging out” pass without demanding any more details. Gil focused instead on what had happened after John and his unnamed friends came back to town. How John had gone off on his own to open the purse, what he had found there, and his phone call to Camilla Gastellum.

  When the interview was over, Gil picked up his phone and called one of the county detectives, Frank Escobar. He and Frank had worked together before on occasion, but they also went back a long way—back to some of those same wild high school keg parties. Gil wouldn’t have to explain the situation with John Connor and his friends to Frank in any great detail.

  “I’ve got a problem,” Gil said, once Frank came on the phone. “A kid from Grass Valley was out at the Scotts Flat Reservoir tonight, hanging with a couple of his buddies. They found an abandoned purse and a pair of women’s tennis shoes beside the lake. I’m thinking this could be a suicide, but according to the kid there’s no sign of a body.”

  “Wait a minute,” Frank said. “If I’ve got a possible suicide out in the country, what does it have to do with you?”

  “It has to do with a homicide I’m working here in Grass Valley,” Gil said. “The perp whacked off a few of the victim’s fingers. Guess what the kid found inside the purse?”

  “A finger?”

  “Yes, and puked his guts out too.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “So my possible suicide turns out to be your possible prime suspect.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” Gil agreed. “So if you don’t mind, once I inventory all this stuff, I’ll turn it over to the crime lab for analysis. Later on, if your potential suicide turns into an actual suicide, we’ll trade evidence as needed.”

  “Can you tell me where on the Scotts Flat Reservoir?” Frank asked.

  “Somewhere close to the dam,” Gil said. “I’m sure the kid can show us, but we’re going to need to give him some cover on this.”

  “What kind of cover?”

  “You tell me,” Gil said. “Middle of winter, middle of the night, middle of basketball season.”

  “Gotcha,” Frank Escobar said. “How about if you bring your confidential informant and I bring my crime scene tech and we all have a middle of the night powwow at the Scotts Fla
t Reservoir?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Gil said. “See you there.”

  Not wanting to have someone locked in the back seat of his unmarked vehicle, Gil let John Connor ride out to the lake in the front seat of Gil’s Crown Vic with his father caravanning behind. On the way Gil couldn’t help thinking both those guys were incredibly lucky: John had a great father and Will had a great son. For a change, this was a father and son duo who actually seemed to deserve one another.

  At the lake, things were exactly the way John had described them. There was no sign of a struggle—and no sign of a body either. If Brenda Riley had walked into the lake and drowned herself, as cold as the water was this time of year, it could be weeks or even months before she floated back to the surface.

  In the meantime, though, Gilbert Morris was hot on the trail of clearing his third case in three days. In the annals of homicide investigations, that had to be some kind of record.

  37

  Laguna Beach, California

  While the three dogs—two big and one tiny—gamboled on the beach and darted in and out of the water, Ali walked beside Maddy Watkins.

  “They make quite a pack, don’t they?” Maddy observed. “I’ve never cared much for little dogs, but I promised Velma that I’ll take Candy back to Washington with me when the time comes, which will probably be sooner than later.”

  “Her color’s bad,” Ali said.

  “Yes,” Maddy said. “I know.”

  As they walked, it had occurred to Ali that she had an odd collection of friends. Sister Anselm, Velma, and Maddy were all decades older than she was, yet she felt at ease with them in a way she couldn’t understand. She remembered Aunt Evie telling her once that she, Ali, was “an old soul.” Maybe being widowed in her early twenties had propelled her into a version of adulthood that usually came to people much later in life.

  “Losing a friend is always hard,” Ali said.

  Maddy stopped walking abruptly and looked up at her.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not having a friend is what’s hard. When Velma and I hooked up by accident on that round-the-world-cruise, it was a stroke of good fortune for both of us. We were by far the oldest people on the trip. There were some things we physically couldn’t do, but we didn’t do those things together. These past few years our friendship has been a huge blessing. I’ll miss her terribly when she’s gone, but I wouldn’t have missed out on knowing her for the world.”