Fatal Error

by J. A. Jance

  This evening she would have her final meeting with Enrique. He would give her receipts for the last transfers of money while she, in turn, would hand over a key to the warehouse and the alarm code. Tomorrow evening, about the time Mina was boarding her flight for Paris, Enrique would send a crew to Engineer Road to pick up the UAVs.

  And sometime much later tonight, long after her meeting with Enrique ended, Mina would go to the warehouse, drag Brenda out of it dead or alive, and dump her somewhere in the Anza-Borrego wilderness where no one was likely to find the body.

  Tomorrow, with all of Mina’s hard work finished, Sophia Stanhope would go shopping and field-test her brand-new credit cards and ID. Mina had left the cabin in Salton City with nothing. Had she carried loads of luggage out of the house and into the car, she might have raised suspicion. On Tuesday she would do some serious shopping, probably at South Coast Plaza, where she would know no one. It pleased her to realize that she needed everything and she could afford everything: new underwear, new lingerie, new shoes, new makeup, new perfume, new clothes. And she’d also need some new luggage to transport all her purchases.

  Mina was looking forward to that leisurely shopping spree. She’d be able to take her time, without Mark rolling his eyes at the expense or pointing at his watch to move her along. When Mina and Mark were first together, he had enjoyed spoiling her. He had given her carte blanche to buy whatever she had wanted. She, in turn, had loved every minute of it. Once money got scarce, though, and Mark started pinching pennies, it wasn’t nearly as much fun. Too bad, Marky. Bye-bye.

  Bottom line, most men were probably pretty much like Mark, she realized—fine to begin with, maybe even pleasant, but eventually troublesome, boring, and ultimately inconvenient. If you were lucky enough to be a woman with money of your own, why bother?

  A few miles beyond the turnoff to Borrego Springs, Mina noticed a spot where the road had been straightened, leaving behind a generous pullout. She stopped there and walked over to the edge. Beyond the shoulder of the road was a steep drop-off that ended in a rock-strewn desert wash some fifty yards below. She was looking out at a stark landscape that remained largely unchanged since the days of a Spanish explorer, Juan Bautista de Anza.

  Mina realized then that she would need something to contain the body. A bedroll might work, preferably a brown bedroll that would blend in with the desert surroundings. And she’d also need a way of making sure the body stayed inside the bedroll as it tumbled down the embankment.

  Back in the Lincoln, Mina marked the location as a destination on her portable GPS. She’d be coming back here late tonight. This was the perfect spot, and she didn’t want to miss it in the dark.

  43

  San Diego, California

  When Brenda awakened again she was wet. Or at least slightly damp. And she had befouled herself as well. She could smell it, but there was nothing she could do. That was the thing about being in the dark. Sometimes she was awake, but mostly she slept or maybe it just seemed like she slept. It was hard to tell the difference.

  She tried not to think about her kidneys shutting down, but they would. Eventually she would lapse into unconsciousness. At this point, that seemed like a welcome idea. At least she wouldn’t feel the torture of hunger and thirst.

  The temperature in the room hadn’t changed, but she was hot now. Burning. So she was probably running a fever. Whenever she thought about it, she tried to flex her ankles. Wasn’t that what people did on long plane trips so they didn’t develop blood clots in their legs that could go to their hearts and lungs and kill them? But again, dying didn’t seem like such a bad idea. At least it would be over.

  Sometime long ago she had talked to . . . no, she had interviewed—there had been lights and cameras—a man who had spent days lost in the snowy Sierras. He had talked movingly about how hard it had been to resist the temptation to simply lie down in the snow and let the cold have its way with him.

  This was the same thing even though it was just the opposite. She had loved Uncle Joe with all her heart, but she could never live up to the standard of courage he had set. She was no longer willing to choose to live that one more day. She was done. All she wanted was one thing—for it to be over.

  Salton City, California

  Once Flossie Haywood started talking, there was no stopping her.

  “We’ve been coming here for years, and we’ve known Mark Blaylock all along since before his first wife died. His missus is Miss Johnny-come-lately around here. She couldn’t be bothered slumming it, and we never saw hide nor hair of her until about three months ago, when she showed up with a U-Haul truck full of furniture from their other house.”

  “From the one they lost in La Jolla?” Ali asked.

  It was important to put in bits and pieces of the story herself from time to time, so Flossie would feel like this was a conversation rather than a question-and-answer session.

  Flossie nodded. “All kinds of fancy-schmancy stuff. And what did she do with the old stuff Mark had used for years? Tossed it out on the side of the street. Some Mexicans came by in pickup trucks and gathered it all up. Probably took it down to El Centro or Brawley and sold it at the swap meet. It was good enough to use, of course. Jimmy was going to go over and rescue some of the plastic chairs and the like. I told him if he did that, I wouldn’t speak to him for a week. I wouldn’t give a woman like that any more reason to look down her nose at us than she already had. I’ll be damned if I’d be seen picking up her leavings. More coffee?”

  Ali nodded and pushed her cup in Flossie’s direction. “Please,” she said. “Great coffee.”

  Flossie nodded. “Folgers,” she said. “I can’t stand all that Starbucks rigamarole. Five bucks for a cup of coffee? No way! So where was I?”

  “She was moving her furniture into the house.”

  “Oh, yes. Her furniture. And that’s it. Furniture, but no appliances. No washer or dryer. I’m good friends with Selma Thurgood, who runs the laundromat. It’s one of those wash-it-and-fold-it kinds of places. I like to go there to save on water. That way we don’t have to go into town to empty our tanks as often. And it’s fun sitting around the laundromat jawing with people from all over the country while you wait for your clothes to finish up.

  “Selma has a dry-cleaning service that comes over from Indio twice a week, to pick up and drop off. She told me she never did a lick of business with Mina Blaylock. She must take hers somewhere else. She sure as hell doesn’t do her own washing and ironing at home.”

  “You call her Mina?” Ali asked.

  “That’s what Mark calls her. Short for Ermina. I mostly don’t talk to her one way or the other. For one thing, she treats that poor husband of hers like he’s so much crap. Jimmy Haywood may not be the brightest match in the box, but he married me and stuck by me, and he gets my respect, every day of the year. You don’t see me taking off for days at a time a couple of times a month and leaving him out here batching it. That just ain’t right.

  “And if you ask me, Mark Blaylock is just a regular sort of guy. His first wife died, you know, and he married Mina on the rebound. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s lived to regret it. He used to invite us over for a beer now and then, or a barbecue, but not since she rode in on her broom.”

  “What’s the deal with the shutters?” Ali asked.

  “There was a big fish die-off a few years back. This whole place stunk to the high heaven. People just had to walk away and leave their places for a while ’cause they couldn’t stand to live in ’em. Of course, it wasn’t enough to keep the damned looters out. They came through and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. After that a lot of people just gave up and didn’t bother comin’ back. Not Mark. He said he’d be damned if he was going to let the bad guys chase him away. That’s when he installed the shutters. You ever seen things like that?”

  “On shops in some places,” Ali said. “Never on houses.”

  “It’s the neatest thing. It works on something like a TV cli
cker, but it’s even smaller. All you have to do is push the up and down buttons and them shutters just slide up and down as smooth as you please. I tried it once too,” Flossie confided. “But don’t tell Jimmy. He’d be mad enough to chew nails.”

  “You tried it?” Ali asked.

  “Sure. Mark drinks some. He came home one night and had misplaced his clicker—not his television clicker, his shutter clicker. And there he was, stuck. Had to sleep the rest of the night in his car. He was pissed as hell about it. So he went out the next day and got himself a replacement—two replacements, actually. One to keep in his car and one to keep in a fake light fixture out in his carport. He told Jimmy about the extra, in case something went wrong with his house—like an electrical fire or something—so Jimmy and I could let the firemen inside to put it out.

  “So one day, when Mark wasn’t here and when Jimmy wasn’t here either, I went over and tried it for myself. Works like a charm. They go up and down as smooth as glass with just the touch of a button. If I ever have another house that isn’t a motor home, I’m going to get me a set of shutters just like ’em.”

  “My company is worried that Mina is trying to pull a fast one,” Ali said.

  “You mean like take the car and make a run for it?”

  Ali nodded.

  Flossie shook her head. “I saw her leave. She didn’t have no luggage with her. Just her purse and a briefcase and what she was wearing. That was it.”

  Ali let her breath out. “That’s good news then,” she said. “And you haven’t noticed anything unusual the past few days?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Flossie said. “Mark was gone overnight this week. Friday night, I think it was. That’s unusual for him. He’s pretty much a stay-at-home. And then, there was the fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “Middle of the night, Sunday morning, a little after three, I wake up smelling smoke. Believe me, you can’t buy smoke detectors better than I am. Anyway, I look out the window, and there Little Miss Hissy Fit is tossing stuff into Mark’s barbecue grill and it’s burning like crazy.”

  “You could see all this from here?” Ali asked.

  “Since I got my cataracts fixed, my eyesight is downright amazing. So I look out there, and she’s got this roaring fire going in the grill. Like a bonfire. Only it stank to the high heavens. Mark only burns mesquite in his grill. He’s like a purist or something. But she must have put some kind of plastic crap in there. That’s what it smelled like. Burning plastic. I wanted to turn her in to somebody for burning garbage like that. We have waste management here. There’s no excuse, but Jimmy told me to be a good neighbor and keep quiet, so I did.

  “But then yesterday afternoon, what do I see? Poor Mark is out there in the yard wrestling with that Weber grill of his. He loaded all the ashes in a wheelbarrow. Took ’em over to the beach, dug a hole, and buried ’em. We could go take a look if you want.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was curious. So after Jimmy went off to the casino, I went over there with his metal detector. Screamed like a banshee, so there must be metal of some kind down there. I was going to wait for Jimmy to come home to check it out, but I know how to work the business end of a shovel. Want to go take a look?”

  “Absolutely,” Ali said. “Sounds like a great idea.”

  44

  Grass Valley, California

  There was yellow crime scene tape plastered across the front porch of Richard Lowensdale’s house. There was crime scene tape strung across the broken front gate. There was no crime scene tape on the driveway or on the side entrance into the garage.

  Donning yet another pair of latex gloves—he would need to go to the supply room for a set of refills soon—Gil let himself into the musty garage. The ten-year-old Catera was still in the same spot. Gil couldn’t help wondering who would take the car, or would it be left here to molder away?

  The oil was exactly where Gil remembered seeing it—on a wooden shelf over the workbench. It was in a cardboard box that had been cut off so that the bottles stood half exposed above their cardboard container. Reaching up, Gil pulled the first one out of its corner spot. The heft of it, the play of the heavy liquid inside the plastic, told Gil that he was wrong. What was in his hand was, as advertised, a bottle of premium motor oil with, according to the buzz on the bottle, an engine-cleaning chemical additive.

  There were a dozen bottles in the box—four wide and three deep. And all of the bottles in the front row clearly contained oil. The same held true for three of the bottles in the second row. When he picked up the fourth one, however, it seemed lighter than air, and instead of ponderous liquid, there was something or maybe two somethings inside the bottle that rattled when Gil shook the container. At first glance, the bottle appeared to be unopened. There was still a manufacturer’s seal over the cap, but the bottle had clearly been tampered with.

  Gil returned that bottle to its place and tried the first bottle in the back row. Like the one with the rattle, this one weighed considerably less than the bottles filled with oil, and whatever was inside this one wasn’t liquid. It rustled when Gil shook it. Something inside went up and down with a kind of thump, but the noise didn’t resemble the rattle in the other bottle. Whatever was inside this one took up far more space.

  The second bottle in the back row was similarly loaded. The last two were entirely empty. No rattle, no thump.

  Gil returned all the bottles to the cardboard container, then he lifted it down from the shelf. Because the load wasn’t evenly distributed, he almost spilled it out onto the workbench. Then he lugged it out the door and down the driveway to his Camry, where he loaded it into the trunk.

  He drove straight home and carried the box of bottles into the garage, where he placed them on his own workbench. After switching on his overhead work light, he examined the bottles from the back two rows. Under the rays of the lamp, it was easy to see that the bottoms of some of the bottles had been tampered with—cut through with something sharp and then glued back together.

  Gil started with the one that had rattled. The glue, probably some of Richard’s model airplane building epoxy, had created a bond, but not enough of one that it was impervious. Gil fastened the bottle upside down in a vise. Then, using a well sharpened wood chisel and an ordinary hammer, he gave the glued surface a sharp whack. The bottom gave way and disappeared into the bottle. Reaching inside, Gil pulled out the plastic bottom as well as two small items. Gil didn’t regard himself as any kind of technical genius, but he recognized a pair of computer thumb drives when he saw them.

  Setting those aside, Gil performed the same operation with one of the two thumper bottles. When the bottom gave way, it fell into the bottle, but only an inch or two, not nearly as far as the one with the thumb drives. It took some effort on Gil’s part to coax the bottom piece back out of the bottle. Then, removing the bottle from the vise, Gil whacked the open end several times on the top surface of his workbench. On the third try, a sheaf of money came shooting out through the opening—a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  For a moment all Gil could do was stare. The pile of money lying there on his workbench was more cash in one place than he had ever seen before. He performed the same operation on the next bottle with similar results, and with a stack of money that was almost equal in size to the first one. Of the two remaining bottles, both empty, both had been cut open but not glued back together.

  Standing and looking at the cash as well as the empty bottles, Detective Morris was able to draw several interesting conclusions. Richard Lowensdale had been involved in some kind of illicit behavior for which he was being paid in cash. His killer had come to the house expecting to find it and had, presumably, gone away empty-handed. That was what the missing fingers were all about. The killer had tortured Lowensdale expecting him to reveal his hiding place, and he had not.

  So what was Brenda Riley’s role in all this? Was she an active participant in what Richard had been doing? Had they been partners of some
kind, and Brenda had betrayed him? Or had Brenda somehow stumbled upon what was going on and ended up in jeopardy right along with Richard? And did Brenda’s part in this whole puzzle have anything to do with the key that she had kept hidden in her tampon container?

  Thoughtfully, Gil put the two thumb drives in the front pocket of his jeans. He didn’t have a computer at home. The family desktop had decamped to Mt. Shasta City with Linda and the kids. As for the money? Gil returned that to the applicable bottles and put the bottles back in the box. Then, he hefted the loaded box of oil up to the top shelf over his own workbench.

  From where Gil was standing, it looked for the world like a perfectly innocent case of oil. He really was the kind of guy who still did his own oil changes.

  45

  Salton City, California

  Curious, Ali followed Flossie Haywood as she trudged across the road and through the rock-strewn sandy shoreline. Flossie carried the shovel. Ali lugged the metal detector, which she found to be surprisingly heavy.

  But the walk gave her some time to consider. Richard Lowensdale’s murder had taken place on Friday. Mina had lit her middle-of-the-night bonfire sometime overnight between Saturday and Sunday. What if she was burning evidence? Or trying to burn evidence? If Ali encouraged Flossie to dig up the leavings—or if she even allowed it—there was a good possibility they would both be tampering with possible evidence in a criminal proceeding. Ali wanted to know what Ermina Blaylock had been burning in the worst way. That was Ali—plain Ali. But the one who was almost a cop—almost a sworn officer—didn’t want to do anything that might make it easier for Mina to get away with what she had done and whatever she was hiding, regardless of what it was.