Fatal Error (20 page)

On the one hand it was infuriating that Richard Lowensdale had preyed on needy women by exploiting them through their various weaknesses. No wonder Brenda had wanted to expose him. No wonder she was writing a book on cyberstalking. Why wouldn’t she? But that still didn’t explain why she had gone missing. Maybe Richard had learned what she was doing. If he had
threatened her somehow, maybe Brenda wasn’t out drinking. Maybe she was in hiding.

But what really got to Ali and what sent her temper boiling was the fact that this extra material had been available for months. Ali hadn’t seen it, and most likely Brenda hadn’t seen it either. Ali had requested that original background check, but what she and Brenda had been given was a severely edited version, a redacted version.

Seeing red, Ali picked up her phone and dialed B.’s cell phone. She was prepared to leave him an irate message. She wasn’t prepared for him to answer the phone.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m on a break. I was just getting ready to call you.”

“You’ll be sorry,” Ali said. “You’re in deep doo-doo at the moment.”

“Me? What have I done?”

“It’s not what you did; it’s what you didn’t do. I believe this is called a sin of omission.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Richard Lowensdale’s background check, both of them. There’s the part you gave me and passed along to Brenda, and there’s the part you left out. Why?”

There was a pause and a sigh. “It was a judgment call,” B. said at last. “My judgment call.”

“Why?”

“The material in the background check Brenda got was from readily available sources—sources that are open to most anyone with access to a computer. The other stuff Stuart dug up was a little dicier.”

“You mean the stuff Stuart hacked.”

“Yes,” B. said. “The stuff he hacked. As I remember, he found evidence of a number of girlfriends Brenda probably didn’t know about. From what you had told me about her mental state right
then, I didn’t think she could handle it. I was afraid learning about all that would push her over the edge. I’m the one who told Stuart to send out the ordinary background check material and leave out the rest.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this at the time?” Ali asked.

“Because right then it looked as though you were on your way to becoming a sworn police officer—an officer of the court. If you were in possession of possibly ill-gotten material, that would have been bad for you, bad for Stuart, and most likely bad for me too.”

“In other words, CYA.”

“Pretty much,” B. said. He sounded genuinely contrite, but Ali wasn’t buying it.

There must have been something in her voice that told B. the conversation was headed in a bad direction. When the call waiting sound clicked, he sounded downright relieved.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got another call. Do you mind if I take it?”

“Under the circumstances,” she said, “that’s probably an excellent idea.”

Ali was still mad as hell as she showered, dressed, checked out of the hotel, and headed for Laguna Beach. She had no idea where she would spend the night, but she could probably find a decent spot somewhere near Velma.

That, however, wasn’t what was on her mind as she drove south. It seemed to her that any decision about how to proceed with Richard Lowensdale’s background check should have been hers to make and not B. Simpson’s.

T
rying to put some distance between his nose and the smelly basement, Gil hurried down the hall. Halfway to the end he found a small bedroom stacked floor to ceiling with what appeared to be unopened moving boxes, as though the guy had recently moved in and hadn’t quite gotten around to unpacking. The killer had clearly been searching for something, but Gil could imagine the perp looking at that massive wall of boxes and deciding not to bother searching there. Trying to hide something in among all those boxes would have been too much trouble.

There was a powder room off the hallway next to that first bedroom. The surprising cleanliness Gil had found in the kitchen didn’t extend all the way to the bathrooms. This one was filthy. Both the sink and toilet bowl were permanently stained black with grime.

What was apparently the master bedroom was situated at the end of the hall. Next to it was a built-in linen closet. The contents of that—sheets, pillowcases, extra blankets, a quilt or two,
towels, washcloths, bars of soap, and spare rolls of toilet paper—had been spilled onto the hallway floor.

Stepping around that, Gil went into the master bedroom, which was small in comparison to its counterparts in new construction. An unmade king-sized bed with a tangled mound of covers and grimy sheets occupied most of the floor space. The dresser at the foot of the bed sat against the wall with a small television set and DVD player perched on top of it.

Once again, Gil found the presence of the electronic equipment surprising. Like that in the living room, these devices—valuable electronic devices—had been left untouched. They hadn’t been stolen or broken. Next to the bed was a solo bedside table. If there had been two of them at one time, its mate was missing, but every drawer in the room had been upturned and emptied, with its contents spilled out onto the floor or bed. On the table, however, along with an old-fashioned reading lamp, Gil saw a television remote, a set of car keys, and a worn leather wallet.

Picking up the wallet, Gil opened it and counted through a dozen hundred-dollar bills. He slipped the wallet into an evidence bag. Once again, this was no ordinary robbery. The wallet and car keys had been right there in plain sight.

Why not take them?
Gil wondered.

The bathroom off the master bedroom was in slightly better shape than the one down the hall, but the presence of one towel bar and only one disgustingly dirty towel testified to Richard Lowensdale’s solitary and unwashed existence.

The sound of voices from the front of the house told Gil that the crime scene team had arrived. By the time he returned to the living room, both the plastic bag from the victim’s head and the tape gag had been removed and placed in separate evidence bags.

“Some sign of blunt force trauma here on the head,” Fred Millhouse said as he dictated his initial findings while, at the
same time, wielding a small handheld video recorder. “Enough to knock him out, but most likely not enough to be fatal.”

While the coroner continued taping, Gil removed the wallet from the evidence bag and looked through it until he located a driver’s license in a clear plastic sleeve. From the photo it looked to Gil as through the victim was definitely Richard Lowensdale, although that comparison wouldn’t be enough to constitute a positive ID.

Gil closed the wallet, returned it to his evidence bag, and then added it to the growing collection of evidence being placed in a Bankers Box. He had just made a notation on the inventory sheet when he noticed that one of the CSI techs, Cindra Halliday, was about to remove the victim’s iPod.

To Gil’s way of thinking, Cindra looked far too young for the job, like she should have been enrolled in a high school biology class rather than being out in the field doing crime scene investigation.

“Is there any way to tell what he was listening to?” Gil asked.

The young woman shrugged. Instead of putting the device into its designated evidence bag, Cindra took it over to the table, examined a collection of power cords, chose one, and plugged in the device. A moment later, the tiny screen lit up. She shook her head. “It’s called ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before’ by some guy named Willie Nelson. Never heard of him. What do you think that means?”

What Cindra’s question really meant was that Detective Gilbert Morris was old. Ancient, really, and out of touch. How could she
not
know Willie Nelson? How young was she?

“Beats me,” Gil said wearily. “You guys do your stuff. I’m going to go talk to some of the neighbors and see if any of them noticed something out of the ordinary.”

Once again grateful to leave the stink of the living room behind
him, Gil had walked only as far as the front porch when Officer Dodd came through the crooked gate and started up the walkway.

“I’ve got the info you needed,” he said, handing Gil a Post-it note. “The stuff about Ted Frost—his phone number and address.”

At that point most cops would have reached for a notebook. Not Gil Morris. He took the Post-it note and stuck it to one of the cards in a leather wallet that carried not only his supply of extra three-by-five cards but a fountain pen too. Gil had inherited the pen, a Cross, from his father. The wallet had been a Father’s Day present from Linda and the kids before it all went bad. Fortunately for Gil, the wallet and pen had both been in his shirt pocket the day Linda’s father had shown up—unannounced as far as Gil was concerned—to move them out.

Gil liked starting his day by sitting at the kitchen counter—both the kitchen table and his rolltop desk had gone north in Linda’s U-haul—and going through the ritual of filling his gold pen with that day’s worth of ink. He liked taking careful notes on the blank cards. He felt that set him apart from the beat cops. Unlike Allen Dodd, Gil wouldn’t have been caught dead passing out Post-it notes.

“Thanks, Allen,” Gil said. “I’ll give him a call.”

But not right away. Gil had studied the street while he’d been standing smoking the cigar. Now he did so again, going inch by inch over the street that bordered Richard Lowensdale’s fenced yard. Brittle dry grass took root at the edge of the pavement, so there was no dirt that held the possibility of finding either tire tracks from a vehicle parked in front of the house or of footprints going to or from it. There was no way to tell if the killer had parked there, coming and going in plain view of the neighbors, or if the perpetrator had parked some distance away and arrived at the victim’s doorstep on foot.

Gil had directed Cindra and the rest of the CSI team to dust the gate and the doorbell as well as the front door assembly for prints, but he wasn’t especially hopeful. This was a killer who had gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure there were no identifiable footprints left behind. Gil had a feeling that he would have exercised just as much care about leaving behind any latent fingerprints.

The killer had clearly spent a considerable period of time inside Richard Lowensdale’s home. Either he had known his presence there was unlikely to be challenged, or he had an entirely believable reason for being there.

Gil didn’t have much in common with Monk, the neurotic detective in the TV series. For one thing, as far as Gil knew, he didn’t suffer from any obsessive compulsive disorders, but when it came to crime scenes, he trusted his instincts. This one struck him as exceptionally cold-blooded.

It was one thing for the Herrera brothers to get all drunked up together, shoot the shit out of one another, and, as a consequence, break their poor mother’s heart. Had either of them lived long enough to be put on trial, it seemed to Gil that the charges against them would have tended more to voluntary homicide than to murder.

Richard Lowensdale’s murder was on another scale entirely. What Fred Millhouse had referred to as blunt force trauma probably had been delivered for one purpose only—to disable the victim long enough for the killer to use the tape to bind him to the chair. Then, after disabling the guy, the killer had set the iPod ear buds in the guy’s ears and had queued up Willie Nelson to sing the same song over and over until the device finally ran out of juice. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist (which Gil Morris wasn’t) or an experienced homicide cop (which he actually was)
to figure out that the killer was broadcasting a message with the choice of that particular piece of music, but what message was it? Was it from a rival or maybe a disgruntled lover?

The most chilling aspect of the whole scene had been the presence of that single out-of-place dining room chair in Richard Lowensdale’s living room. Gil knew as sure as he was born that the killer had sat on that chair, waiting and watching, while Richard Lowensdale struggled for air inside the taped plastic bag. It seemed likely that he or she had stayed there until Richard gave up trying for a last gasping breath.

Murder as a spectator sport,
Gil thought once more. The idea of someone doing that seemed astonishingly heartless. The house had been thoroughly searched for something, but nothing had been taken—at least not as far as Gil could tell. The model airplanes had been smashed to pieces, but the wallet and car keys were there. The electronic equipment was there.

In Richard Lowensdale’s case, killing him was the main point, maybe even the only point. And the killer had gone to great lengths to make sure that the victim was helpless, that he couldn’t fight back.

For the first time Gilbert Morris was forced to confront the idea that the killer might be female. Unless Richard turned out to be gay or a switch-hitter, it was likely he had been taken out by a woman, one with a very serious grudge.

Richard Lowensdale’s house was the last one on the street. Just above the house was a small paved turnaround. Beyond that stood a piece of property covered with second-growth forest. Determined to learn something, Gil set off down the hill. The neighbors would have noticed the police activity around the house and he expected they would be eager to speak to him. That’s how things usually worked in small towns. Most of the time witnesses were glad to come forward and help out.

Unfortunately most of the residents of Jan Road had been at work or at school on Friday afternoon. The only exception was Lowensdale’s next-door neighbor, a gray-haired retiree named Harry Fulbright, who had spent part of the day out in his yard trimming an overgrown laurel hedge.

“Sure,” he said. “I remember seeing the UPS driver go past here right around two thirty. Not the regular UPS guy,” he added. “Ted must have been sick that day, ’cause it was earlier in the day than he usually shows up. But it was definitely UPS. Woman in a brown uniform and a brown leather jacket.”