Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  “But here’s what I don’t understand,” Mona said. “Why would someone do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Leave a bloody thumb to rot inside a perfectly good purse?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that either,” Gil admitted. “But I’m going to find out. Having the thumb match my homicide victim gives me enough probable cause to ask for a search warrant. So that’s my next step—getting a warrant to search Brenda Riley’s residence.”

  “Today,” Mona said, smiling.

  “Of course today. First thing.”

  “Good luck with that,” Mona said. “You do know it’s a holiday, right? If it hadn’t been for your damned thumb, I wouldn’t be here either. I don’t think you’re going to find many judges at your beck and call at the moment. Do yourself a big favor, Gilly. Take the rest of the day off. Get your search warrant tomorrow; execute it tomorrow.”

  “No,” Gil said. “I’ll get it today.” He started to leave, then turned back to her. “What about the computer? Did you find anything on that?”

  Mona shook her head. “Nope. Not a thing. Someone reformatted the hard drive about four o’clock on Friday afternoon. There’s nothing left on it at all. Since he was a Mac user, your victim might have used iDisk or some other kind of web-based backup system, but to gain access to that, you’ll need his passwords.”

  Good luck with that, Gil told himself.

  “That reformatting timetable is within an hour or two of what Millhouse estimates the time of death. That also means there probably was something on the computer,” Gil said. “Something incriminating that the killer didn’t want us to see. What about the vacuum cleaner?”

  “No prints. We opened up the bag. Didn’t find much in it. Looks like it hadn’t been used in a very long time.”

  Remembering the mess inside Richard’s house, that seemed more than likely.

  “But the motor’s burned up,” Mona added. “Like somebody turned it on and left it standing in one place in the living room until it overheated. It’s a wonder it didn’t burn the place down.”

  “If they weren’t cleaning, what were they doing?”

  “Have you ever used a vacuum cleaner, Gilly?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Kirbys are supposed to be excellent for cleaning but they’re very high on the noise scale. I think maybe the killer was using the vacuum for noise cover.”

  Remembering what Ted Frost, the real UPS driver, had told him, Gil nodded. “I’ll bet you’re right,” he said.

  Gil left the lab and went straight back to the department to draw up his request for a search warrant. Yes, he knew it was a holiday, and no, he didn’t care. That had always been one of Linda’s major complaints about him. She claimed he was too stubborn, too bullheaded. That once he got an idea in his head, he wouldn’t let it go. This was probably more of the same. Gil was determined to find a judge who would sign off on his request for a warrant, and he would, holiday or not.

  At ten a.m. Gil had his warrant request in hand and was on his way to track down District Court Judge William Osborne when Sergeant Kathleen Andersson, the Sunday day shift desk sergeant, stopped him on his way out the door.

  “Chief Jackman wants to see you,” Kathleen said.

  “But I’m on my way to pick up a search warrant,” Gil argued.

  “Take my advice,” Kathleen told him. “This didn’t sound like an invitation—more like an order. ASAP.”

  More like a summons to the principal’s office, Gil thought. Reluctantly, he reversed course and headed for the chief’s office.

  “I hear you’ve been a very busy boy this weekend,” Chief Jackman said when Gil entered his office. “From what I see on the time clock, you worked damned near around the clock for three days.”

  “Three homicides in three days means working round the clock, and since I’m the only guy on the Investigations Unit who’s in right now—”

  “Good work on the first two,” Jackman interrupted, “but I’ve got to tell you, we can’t handle this kind of expense. It’s unfortunate that Investigations is so shorthanded at the moment, but while your team members are legitimately off work for one reason or another, they’re still on my payroll. In the meantime, you’re running up enough overtime that it’s turning into a budget disaster.”

  It seemed to Gil that the chief would have been better off mentioning that to the killers who made the messes rather than to the cop charged with cleaning them up. That’s what he thought, but he didn’t mention it aloud, because Jackman didn’t leave room in his rant for any kind of reply.

  “And don’t you go tracking Judge Osborne down at home today either,” Jackman continued. “He just called to tell me you were on your way. He read me the riot act about it. He and his wife are trying to have a relaxing day off. The last thing they need is you turning up on their front porch.”

  “I need a search warrant,” Gil explained, “for a person of interest in the Richard Lowensdale homicide.”

  “Yes,” Jackman said. “By all means, let’s talk about that.” He clicked a few buttons on his computer. “That would be for the residence of one Brenda Arlene Riley on P Street in Sacramento, correct?”

  Gil nodded.

  “And your person of interest would be the same person who apparently went for a one-way swim in the Scotts Flat Reservoir over the weekend.”

  “We don’t know for sure that it’s a case of suicide,” Gil began. “Yes, Brenda Riley’s personal effects—her purse and her shoes—were found next to the lake, but as far as her committing suicide—”

  “Do you personally know of a single woman who would just walk away from her shoes and purse for no reason? Here’s some news from the front, Detective Morris. Your prime suspect offed herself. She left her shoes and purse there as a message, and not a message for you either. It’s just a fluke that the Connor kid brought the purse to you, but if she did commit suicide, that’s the county’s problem and not ours. Your pal, Detective Escobar, can be the guy who pisses off Judge Osborne. We don’t have to. Let him be the one who goes to Sacramento to search her house. That way it’s on the county’s budget, not the city’s.”

  In other words, this was a budgetary issue that had nothing to do with the real world of justice, crime, or punishment.

  “So here’s what I’m thinking,” Jackman continued. “I want you to stand down, Detective Morris. Take the rest of the day off. Get some sleep. In other words, no more damned overtime! And before you start writing checks on all this accumulated OT, you might want to think twice. Once your unit members get their butts back on the job, you can take it out in comp time. Fair enough?”

  It wasn’t fair, but this was a rhetorical question that came with an obligatory answer. Right or wrong had nothing to do with it. “Yes, sir,” Gil said.

  “Very well then,” Jackman said. “Do us all a favor and head home.”

  Still steaming, Detective Gilbert Morris did exactly that.

  39

  Salton City, California

  In the old days, Ali had sped around on L.A. area freeways with wild abandon. Today, as she made her way north to the ten and then east toward Salton City, she was glad to have the rental’s GPS giving her play-by-play directions. It was early enough on a holiday morning that people weren’t yet creating their own day-off rush hour traffic jams. The only downside was that she did much of the three-hour-plus drive heading straight into the rising sun—a blinding rising sun.

  Not sure what kind of food she would find available in Salton City, Ali stopped off in Palm Springs for close to an hour to have breakfast and take on a load of coffee. By the time she turned onto Heron Ridge Drive, it was verging on nine thirty. Heron Ridge Drive was far longer than she expected, winding north along the edge of the Salton Sea. The name had a grand sound to it. The reality was nothing short of grim. Yes, there were clusters of motor homes parked here and there, but most of the few permanent structures looked as though they weren’t long for the w
orld.

  At least, that seemed to be the case until Ali caught sight of the Blaylock place, which looked more like a fortress than a house. The windows and doors of the structure were covered with closed roll-down shutters—metal roll-down shutters. It occurred to Ali that although they weren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, they were probably downright impervious. A silver sedan of some kind was parked in the driveway. Other than that, the place looked deserted. Abandoned. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would be inside the structure with all the shutters rolled down and buttoned up. Too dark. Too hot. Too claustrophobic.

  Ali drove past once. Then she turned around in another driveway about half a mile farther on. As she drove past the Blaylock driveway a second time, she was startled to see a beefy woman standing in the middle of the street with her hands planted on her hips. When Ali started to drive past, the woman flagged her down.

  Ali pulled up next to her, stopped, and rolled down her window.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked.

  “I was looking for the Blaylocks,” Ali lied. “Mark and Ermina.”

  “That’s their place over there,” the woman said, pointing toward the roll-down shutter marvel. “Nobody’s home. I saw her leave first thing this morning. She was all alone in that big old Lincoln of hers. I don’t know where Mark is. His car is here, which usually means that he’s here too, but I can’t imagine he’d be inside the house with all those shutters down all the way. One thing for sure, he wasn’t in the Lincoln with that battle-axe of his when she left. Who are you?”

  The woman went from volunteering information to demanding it in one easy segue.

  Ali didn’t want to make the mistake of impersonating a police officer. With all the Blaylocks’ burgeoning financial difficulties, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to pretend to be the minion of a circling creditor. And the way the woman referred to Ermina implied there was no love lost between this frowsy neighbor in her faded tracksuit and Ermina Blaylock.

  “It’s actually about her Lincoln,” Ali said confidentially. “There’s a lien on it. I’m doing some scouting for the repo company.”

  “You mean to tell me Miss High and Mighty is about to lose that fancy car of hers?” the woman said with a wide-faced grin. “Don’t that just beat all! And it would serve her right too. Care for a cup of coffee? I just made a new pot.”

  Ali could hardly believe her luck. She held out her hand. “Coffee would be nice,” she said. “My name is Ali Reynolds, by the way.”

  “Like that old baseball player from Oklahoma?”

  “No,” Ali said. “I’m Ali with one L not two. And you?”

  “Florence Haywood,” the woman said. “Most people call me Flossie. Just pull right in and park in the driveway. Jimmy went off to play keno at the casino. He won’t be back for hours.”

  All her life Ali had marveled at her mother’s ability to know everything that went on in town and outside it. From Edie Larson’s station behind the lunch counter at the Sugarloaf Café, she managed to keep her finger on the pulse of everything that went on in and around the Verde Valley. At the police academy down in Peoria, Ali had sat through several classes on the ins and outs of conducting interrogations, but nothing she had been taught there could hold a candle to what she had learned at her mother’s knee.

  Ali knew at once that Flossie was golden. She was nosy, she was lonely, and she hated Ermina Blaylock’s guts. From Ali’s point of view, that was definitely a win-win-win situation.

  40

  Grass Valley, California

  Chief Jackman had ordered Gil to go home for the day in no uncertain terms. When Gil did so, he left his city-owned Crown Vic in the departmental parking lot and headed home in his bedraggled five-year-old Camry, which had been sitting forlorn and abandoned in the city parking lot since Gil been called out to the Herrera brothers crime scene on Friday afternoon.

  On the way, Gil drove past Target. A few blocks beyond that, he made up his mind. Pulling a quick U-turn, he went back and parked in front of the store. He wasn’t sure how much room was left on his Visa card, but he was about to find out.

  Pushing a shopping cart, Gil marched through the homemaking aisles on the first genuine shopping spree of his entire life. He bought a set of dishes—four place settings of all blue dishes because blue was his favorite color and a set of silverware for four, stainless not silver of course. He picked up a set of twelve glasses—four each of three different sizes. He bought a toaster— $29.95—a dish drainer, a nonstick set of fry pans, a couple of spatulas, and a laundry basket. He bought two bath towels, two hand towels, and two washcloths as well as a new shower curtain to replace the moldy one with several missing rivets that currently hung in his bathroom.

  Gil bought himself a new set of plain white sheets, a fitted sheet and a flat one that came with a pair of matching pillowcases. Then, just for good measure, he bought one of those bed-in-a-bag things that came with a blue plaid comforter and a couple of decorative pillows. At least from now on his damned AeroBed would look like a real bed. He also bought a four-drawer dresser that came in a box, some assembly required.

  When he got to the checkout stand, he held back on the dresser just in case he ran out of room on his credit card. Fortunately, the charge went through without a hitch. Now, thank God and Visa, the time for Gil Morris to keep his clothing in one of Linda’s discarded suitcases was finally a thing of the past.

  He was alone now. It was high time he started living his own alone life.

  Leaving Target, just for good measure and just because he could, Gil made two more stops on the way home. He went to the grocery store and replenished his supply of bread, cereal, milk, and cleaning supplies. Then he stopped by the liquor store and picked up a box of fifty Antonio y Cleopatra cigars. He was determined that the next time he had to show up at a crime scene, he would be the one handing out the smokes.

  Before Linda took off, one of the things that had always mystified Gil about the woman was that whenever she was pissed at him, she turned into a housecleaning demon. In the past Gil had dreaded those cleaning marathons because he understood that the cleaner the house got, the more trouble he was usually in.

  That Monday morning Gilbert Morris finally started to understand it. Huffing on one of the previously prohibited cigars and using his old cracked dinner plate as an ashtray, Gil went to work. He swept; he mopped; he dusted; he scrubbed. He decided that once he paid off his credit card purchases, he was going to buy himself a new television set, maybe even a baby flat-screen. He had seen some of those on sale at Target too and was surprised by how little they cost.

  He unwrapped the dishes as well as the glasses and the silverware and ran them all through the dishwasher. He put his dirty clothes into the laundry basket along with his dirty sheets. He threw away his musty bath towel, the dead shower curtain, and his ragged, much-used sheets. He knew that Linda would never have considered putting new sheets and pillowcases on the bed without laundering them first, but Linda had taken the washer and dryer. Gil would be damned if he’d go to the laundromat and spend good money washing and drying brand-new sheets and pillowcases. He would sleep on them as is.

  Linda had left the toilet bowl brush behind, but no toilet bowl cleaner. Fortunately he had picked up some of that at the grocery store. He didn’t want his toilet bowel to resemble the ones he had seen in Richard Lowensdale’s house. It took several tries and lots of scrubbing before, to his immense satisfaction, the stubborn stains finally disappeared.

  He cleaned the bathroom sink until it gleamed and did the same thing to the porcelain sink in the kitchen. By then the dishwasher had run through its cycle. With the dishes still almost too hot to handle, Gil took them out and arranged them in the cupboard the way that suited him best, with the plates on the upper shelf and the glasses and cups on the lower one. This was his kitchen now; Gil would do things his way, not Linda’s way.

  The relatively mindless work of cleaning and scrubbing allowed plenty of time f
or thinking. Maybe that was what Linda had always known—the link between cleaning and thinking.

  Gil let his mind wander back through the intricacies of those two somehow intertwined cases—Richard Lowensdale’s murder and Brenda Riley’s apparent suicide. Some of the puzzle pieces didn’t make sense. For one thing, a luminol test of the shoes from the Scotts Flat Reservoir showed no sign of blood spatter of any kind. The booties might have accounted for that. Still, with as much blood as Gil had found on the scene, it surprised him that there were no traces at all. And for shoes that had evidently walked through the woods, the soles had been pristinely clean, with no dirt or gravel caught in the tread.

  Since John Connor had handled the purse, Gil had been obliged to take a set of elimination fingerprints on the boy, but he was relatively sure that his manner of questioning John had left the kid—a good kid, evidently—plenty of wiggle room. There had been no questions about John’s friends in the interview, and no mention of them in Gil’s written report either. There was no reason to suspect that John and his friends were in any way responsible for what had happened to Brenda.

  What mystified Gil most, however, were the contents of the purse, all of which he had carefully inventoried. It was the usual women’s purse junk—a compact, several tubes of lipsticks, all the same color, two packages of new tissues as well as a loose collection of old ones, a change purse along with some loose change, a package of dental floss, some aspirin, several pens, a tampon container, and a wallet. The wallet contained four twenty-dollar bills, one credit card in Brenda’s mother’s name, and three crumbling photos—one of a man and a woman and a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary cake, and two high school senior photos of two women who looked very much alike. From the hairstyles Gil estimated that the photos were most likely of Brenda herself and maybe a female relative. A sister, maybe?

  But what didn’t fit in with all that was the bloodied thumb. Why had Brenda taken it along to begin with? Without the thumb, it seemed likely that she would have gotten away with killing Richard Lowensdale. After all, as far as Gil had been able to discover, there was no physical evidence linking Brenda to the crime.