Fatal Error (10 page)

Ali’s one attempt at duplicating her mother’s sweet roll recipe had been nothing short of disastrous. Fortunately, Leland Brooks had come to her rescue. For the remainder of the week Edie and Bob Larson were gone, Leland had agreed to come in each day to handle the baking. Leland went back home each morning about the time Ali and the substitute short-order cook turned up to take over.

When Ali had first broached the topic of a Caribbean cruise as that year’s Christmas present to her parents, they had turned the idea down cold. Both of them had insisted that they couldn’t possibly be away from the restaurant for that long. Ali, however, had refused to take no for an answer. She had found a substitute cook and had sorted out a passport renewal for her mother and a new passport for her father. But it was only when she agreed to come in to the restaurant herself every day to keep an eye on things that Bob and Edie finally acquiesced.

To Ali’s knowledge, this was the first long vacation her parents had ever taken together. From the tenor of the short e-mail updates Edie sent home on a daily basis, it seemed they were having the time of their lives. Ali was not having the time of her life. She was tired. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. She put on her smile every morning when she put on her uniform—a freshly laundered Sugarloaf Café sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. She did her best to be cheerful and pleasant as she served coffee and wiped up spills, but the truth was Ali Reynolds was still annoyed. She was also bored.

This wasn’t the way her life was supposed to be right now. She
loved her parents and was glad to help with giving them a break, but the truth was she shouldn’t have been available to work for a week as a substitute server in the Sugarloaf Café. The way she had seen her future, she should have been working as the media relations officer for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. The problem was, she wasn’t.

The previous September, Ali Reynolds had graduated third in her class at the Arizona Police Academy in Peoria. For someone who was the oldest member of her class and a female besides, that had been a big accomplishment. She had been tossed into a class filled with much younger recruits, and she had made the grade.

Her parents, her son and daughter-in-law, and B. Simpson, her significant other, all of them beaming with pride, had shown up for her graduation. They had congratulated her and told her what a great job she had done. And she had shaken hands with all her fellow graduates, who, like her, were going back to towns all over the state of Arizona to begin their law enforcement duties. The whole experience had been an incredible high.

As a result, nothing could have prepared her for what happened to her the following Monday morning. Dressed in a perfectly creased uniform, she drove to Prescott fully expecting to resume her media relations duties. Before the scheduled preshift roll call meeting at nine, however, Sheriff Gordon Maxwell called her into his office, sat her down opposite his desk, and gave her the bad news.

“I’m sorry to do this, Ali, but I’m going to have to furlough you.”

At first Ali didn’t think she’d heard him right. “Furlough?” she repeated. “As in let me go?”

He nodded.

“Are you kidding? I just busted my butt for six weeks getting through the academy.”

“I understand,” he said. “And no, I’m not kidding. Believe me, I’m very, very sorry. The county budget-cutting axe fell on every aspect of county government about three weeks ago. I knew then this was going to happen. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to drop out without finishing the course. And you did great, by the way.”

“Right,” Ali replied sarcastically. “I did so well that now I’m being fired.”

“Furloughed, not fired,” Maxwell insisted. “Once the fiscal situation straightens out, I fully expect to bring you back as a sworn officer, but right this minute my hands are tied. Last in, first out, and all that jazz. Hell, Ali, it was either you or Jimmy. He’s got a couple of kids and really needs this job.”

Deputy Jimmy Potter happened to be a recent hire as well. He and Ali shared office space in the Village of Oak Creek Substation. He was a nice guy with a wife and a pair of preschool-aged children. Ali could see that Sheriff Maxwell had a point. Ali had no dependents. Her financial situation made work an option for her rather than a necessity, but she really wanted this job. She loved it. She was good at it.

“So that makes me expendable?” Ali asked.

“Not expendable, not at all.”

Despite what he said, it turned out Ali Reynolds was indeed expendable. Without ever attending that morning’s roll call, she turned in her laptop, her cell phone, her weapons, and her badge and went home. She wasn’t in disgrace, but it certainly felt like it.

In a way, losing the media relations job was somehow worse than losing her newscasting job in California years earlier. Her response to that had been to pack up and go home to Sedona. This time she was already
in
Sedona. That left her nowhere else to run. L.A. was big enough to allow for a certain amount of anonymity. Sedona was another proposition entirely. Everyone
seemed to know she’d been laid off. Even though most of the comments came in the inoffensive guise of harmless well-wishing, the lack of privacy in both her love life and job situation bothered her.

She had been forced to sit on the sidelines licking her wounds and watching while the media storm over the “sweat lodge wars” once again catapulted the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department to national prominence. And who was doing the media relations work for the department in the midst of that maelstrom? The guy with his face on TV and voice on the radio was Mike Sawyer, a twenty-two-year-old college kid Ali had brought on board as an unpaid summer intern while she was down in Phoenix at the academy. Instead of returning to school to work on his master’s degree in the fall, he had stayed on.

It irked Ali that Sheriff Maxwell couldn’t scrape up enough money to pay her but had managed to find enough funds in the budget to pay Mike. It probably wasn’t a living wage, because Mike was living with his parents, but still . . .

One of the customers at the counter held up his coffee mug and caught Ali’s attention. “Can I have a refill?”

“Sure.”

Ali poured coffee, dropped off a check, picked up some menus, and put them back in the holder over by the cash register.

So what had Ali done since that day of her surprising “furlough”? She’d read books, dozens of them. She was just now working her way through
The Count of Monte Cristo
. It was a book Mr. Gabrielson, her English teacher at Mingus Mountain High, had recommended to her years ago. With nothing else pressing, Ali had decided this forced hiatus was a perfect opportunity to read all those books she had said she would get around to reading someday when she had time. At the moment finding time for reading was not a problem.

Reading aside, Ali Reynolds was bored. She was beyond bored. When she’d been working for the department, she’d enjoyed everything about her job including the hour-and-a-half commute on those days when she’d drive from Sedona to the county seat in Prescott. Yes, she hadn’t been well accepted by some of the old-timers there, but she’d been working on getting along with them and she was surprised to discover that, once she was sent packing, she missed everything about her work for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, including some of the prickly clerks in the front office.

Ali’s mother had suggested that Ali give the garden club a try, but Ali’s lack of anything resembling a green thumb precluded that. She had zero artistic skill, so taking up drawing or painting wasn’t an option. She didn’t play golf or tennis. She didn’t ride horses. She wasn’t into hot-air ballooning.

When B. was in town, the two of them had fun hiking in Sedona’s red-rock wilderness, but these days B. was out of town as much or more than he was home. Most of the time her parents were bound up with the Sugarloaf Café and their own peculiar squabbles. Chris and Athena were building their own lives together and getting ready for the birth of their twins.

Ali had Leland Brooks to fall back on, of course. He kept her house running in tip-top shape. Theirs was a pleasant, untroubled relationship with each respecting the other’s privacy, but Leland wasn’t someone she could talk to, not really talk.

What Ali missed more than anything was having friends, close friends. Her best pal from high school, Reenie Bernard, had been dead for years. Dave Holman was still working for the sheriff’s department as their lead homicide investigator. Dave and Ali were friends, but when Dave wasn’t at work, he was preoccupied with raising his two teenaged daughters.

Ali had one new friend, a seventysomething nun named Sister
Anselm. They had met in the course of caring for a badly injured burn victim and had bonded after surviving a shootout with a suicidal ecoterrorist. Sister Anselm lived at Saint Bernadette’s, a Sisters of Providence convent in Jerome that specialized in treating troubled nuns. Unlike Ali, Sister Anselm was fully employed, either at the convent itself or traveling all over Arizona as a patient advocate for severely injured and mostly indigent patients.

Had anyone asked Bob and Edie Larson about their religion, they would both have claimed to be Lutheran. Because Sunday mornings were big business at the Sugarloaf, other than attending occasional weddings and funerals, they’d barely stepped inside a church of any kind for years. Having grown up as a relatively unchurched child, Ali had remained so as an adult and had raised Chris without regular church attendance. In advance of the twins’ birth, Athena and Chris had joined the congregation of Red Rock Lutheran.

All that background made the growing friendship between Ali and Sister Anselm seem unlikely, but the two women managed to get together once a week or so for a quick dinner or for one of Leland Brooks’s sumptuous English teas. Sister Anselm was a trained psychologist, and it sometimes occurred to Ali that their visits turned into informal counseling sessions in which Ali ended up grumbling about being let out to pasture.

It was at Sister Anselm’s gentle urging that Ali had broached the idea of sending Bob and Edie away on a January cruise. January, of course, was the best time for them to go since it was still far too chilly in Sedona for a full snowbird onslaught. That would come later in the spring.

The front door opened. Ali was pulled from her reverie by a group of eight people who piled into the room, bringing with them a gust of cold air and a buzz of conversation. Jan Howard, the Sugarloaf’s longtime waitress, had been outside on a break,
puffing on one of her unfiltered Camels. She hurried inside as well. She grabbed up a handful of menus and helped the new arrivals sort themselves into three groups. A four-top and a two-top went to booths in Jan Howard’s station. The other two made for Ali’s counter. As they sat down to study the menus, Ali went to make a new pot of coffee.

For the next two hours she worked nonstop. When they finally closed the Sugarloaf’s front door on the last lunchtime customer at two thirty in the afternoon, Ali was beyond tired, and that was before they finished doing the cleanup work necessary to have the place ready to open the next morning.

When it was finally time to head home, she could hardly wait. She was ready to shower, take a nap, and sit with her feet up.

She had earned it.

I
n terms of getting sober, Brenda’s breaking and entering arrest the previous October had proved to be pivotal. That humiliation was the last straw, the one that had finally convinced her to crack open the door to her very first AA meeting. Since then, she’d been fighting for sobriety on a daily basis and was halfway through those first critical ninety meetings in ninety days.

Just past noon on a Friday in late January, Brenda Riley’s cell phone vibrated inside her pocket just as the AA meeting moderator was leading the Serenity Prayer. Her mother, Camilla Gastellum, hadn’t been feeling well that morning as Brenda left for the meeting. Concerned about her, Brenda hurried out of the church basement and answered the phone without bothering to check caller ID.

“Hi, Mom,” Brenda said. “Are you okay?”

“Someone just called here looking for you,” Camilla said. “At first I thought she might be another bill collector, and I wasn’t going to give her your number. It turns out, though, that she’s
calling about your book. She says you’ve contacted her before and wanted to interview her.”

Of the fifty-seven names listed in Richard Lowensdale’s Storyboards folder, Brenda had spoken or attempted to speak with all of them. Some of them had refused to speak to her outright or had accused Brenda of lying about their particular iteration of Richard. Others had been happy to have the mask ripped from the face of their present or former “cyber-lover” so they could begin to come to grips with the emotional damage he had done in their lives. Embarrassed by their own gullibility, some of those spoke to Brenda only on condition of anonymity.

Brenda was a trained journalist. She knew how to follow stories, and she had done so. Using the storyboard data as a starting point, she had tracked down one woman after another. What she found most disturbing in all this was that the details she discovered about the women’s lives appeared to coincide with the information gleaned from Richard’s files. Each of them had willingly revealed her innermost life to a man who had given her nothing but empty lies in return. From what Brenda’s mother was saying, it appeared that one of the reluctant interviewees was now ready to come forward.

“Did she leave her name?” Brenda asked.

“No, but I did give her this number. I hope that’s okay. She said she was going to call.”

“Sure, Mom,” Brenda said. “That’s fine. Are you okay?”

“I’m still feeling a little puny. I think I’m going to go lie down for a while.”

“Turn off the phone then so you can get some rest.” Brenda’s phone alerted a new incoming call from a number unavailable phone. “I’m sure that’s her calling now. I have to go.”

“Is this Brenda Riley?”