Fatal Error (24 page)

“When I’m here by myself, I generally sit in the dark and listen to music,” she explained. “I have macular degeneration. Sitting
in the dark helps keep me from thinking about how much I can’t see. So tell me,” she added, sounding resigned, “what kind of trouble is Brenda in this time?”

“What can you tell me about Richard Lowensdale, Mrs. Gastellum?” Gil asked.

“Please,” she said, “call me Camilla. Richard and Brenda were supposedly engaged for a time, but he never actually gave her a ring. It turned out that he had other girlfriends—several other girlfriends. She found that out this past October.”

“That would be when she allegedly broke into his house?” Gil asked.

“She didn’t ‘allegedly’ break into his house,” Camilla said. “She really broke into his house. She started working on her book right after that—a book about something called cyberstalking. I don’t know much about it, but she claims that’s what Richard has been doing. And what he did to her personally really hurt her,” Camilla added. “She sort of went off the deep end for a while, but I thought she was finally pulling out of it. You know, that she was starting to recover. At least that’s what I was hoping. But you still haven’t told me what this is all about, Mr. . . .”

“Morris,” he supplied. “Detective Gilbert Morris.” He removed a business card from his wallet, placed it in her hand, and closed her fingers around it. “That has all my contact information on it.”

“But why are you here?”

He didn’t want to lower this boom on Camilla Gastellum. She was truly an innocent bystander. Still, he had no choice.

“I need to speak to your daughter,” he said. “I need to speak to Brenda.”

“Why?”

“A man was murdered in Grass Valley sometime over the weekend, possibly on Friday afternoon. When I left to come here, we still hadn’t established a positive ID, but indications are that our
victim is Richard Lowensdale. Someone put a plastic bag over his head and taped it shut. He died of asphyxiation.”

“Oh,” she said. And then a moment later she added, “No, that’s not possible. My daughter could never do something like that. Ever.”

“Even so,” Gil began, “you can see why we’re interested in speaking to your daughter. She may know something.”

Camilla Gastellum stood up abruptly. “You aren’t here to talk to Brenda. You’re here to arrest her. You think she did it.”

“Mrs. Gastellum, please—”

“You need to go now,” she insisted. “You’re no longer welcome in this house. And the next time you come back, it had better be with a search warrant.”

Camilla escorted him back to the front door. He heard the security chain lock into place as the door closed behind him. Gil headed back to Grass Valley feeling like he was making real progress. He had a suspect. True, Brenda Riley might be among the missing. He didn’t for even a moment consider that Camilla Gastellum knew her daughter’s whereabouts, but someone did, and Gil was determined to find that person.

In his experience, most people didn’t disappear without a trace. Somewhere in Brenda’s mother’s house on P Street he would find a clue—an e-mail to a friend, a plane or hotel reservation—that would tell him what he needed to know. But in order to find that information and have it admissible in court, he would have to come back with a properly drawn search warrant. To get a warrant, Gil would need to have enough pieces of the puzzle in place to convince a judge that he had probable cause. Probable cause took work, sometimes a whole lot of work.

O
n his way back to Grass Valley Gil called Fred Millhouse. “How are you doing on next of kin?” Gil asked.

“I’m getting nowhere fast,” Fred said. “As far as I can tell, Lowensdale is an only child. Both of his parents are deceased, which leaves me at a bit of a loss about what to do about getting a positive ID.”

“Maybe one of the neighbors will give us a hand.” Stopped briefly at a stoplight, Gil shuffled through his stack of three-by-five cards. “Try getting ahold of Harry Fulbright. He’s one of Lowensdale’s neighbors. He’s a grizzled old Vietnam War vet who clued us in on the presence of that second UPS delivery person. I’m about half an hour out,” Gil added. “I’ll meet you at the morgue.”

Harry Fulbright and Fred Millhouse were waiting in Fred’s office when Gil arrived. Once the formality of the positive ID was out of the way, Gil returned to his office and tackled the unpleasant duty of notifying both of Richard Lowensdale’s fiancées that the man they knew by another last name had been murdered. Passing along that kind of news to grieving friends and relations
was always difficult. In this case it was even more complicated since, in the process, he would also be revealing the fact that their supposed loved one was also a cheat.

Gil dialed the East Coast number first. It was already the middle of the night in New York, but it had to be done. He tried to be kind, but ultimately there was no way to soften the blow.

Janet Silvie listened to what he said with utter mystification. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said. “Is Richard dead or isn’t he?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Gil said patiently. “Officers went to the address you gave the nine-one-one operator, the house on Jan Road, to do a welfare check. Once they, they discovered the body of a man who has since been positively identified as Richard Lowensdale. We can find no record of anyone named Lydecker living there. Our assumption is that Richard Lowensdale and Richard Lydecker are one and the same.”

“You’re wrong,” Janet declared. “That’s just not possible.”

“If you happened to have a photo of Mr. Lydecker,” Gil suggested, “perhaps you could fax it to me.”

“I don’t have any photos of him,” Janet replied. “None at all. He’s so self-conscious about the scar.”

“What scar?” Gil asked.

“Richard was in a terrible car wreck when he was sixteen, just after he got his license. He was driving. His best friend was killed in the accident, and Richard was left with a terrible scar on his right cheek. He’s spent his whole adult life looking at his face in the mirror every morning, seeing the scar, and remembering what he did to his friend.”

“Then most likely the dead man isn’t Mr. Lydecker,” Gil said. “I was there at the morgue for the positive identification. There was definitely no scar visible.”

“Thank God,” Janet Silvie said. “I’m incredibly relieved, but
if Richard—my Richard—isn’t dead, where is he? If you thought you’d found him and you were wrong, does that mean no one is looking for him?”

The truth was, Gil had been looking for Richard Lydecker with all the tools at his disposal, and he had come up empty.

“You should probably call in an official missing persons report.”

“But I already did that.”

“No,” Gil corrected. “The call you placed to the com center turned into a welfare check. I don’t think it was ever passed along as a missing persons report.”

“Can’t you do that much at least?” Janet demanded. She sounded angry.

“Ms. Silvie,” Gil explained patiently. “I’m a homicide investigator. That’s what I’m doing—investigating a homicide that may or may not be related to your Mr. Lydecker. Since I know nothing about him, however, I can’t do the missing persons report. I suggest you call this number tomorrow—”

“Like hell,” Janet responded coldly. “Richard is my fiancé. You expect me to just sit here and do nothing? That is so not going to happen. I already called my boss and told him I’m taking a few days of personal leave. I’ll be in California as soon as I can possibly make it. I’ll be on the first plane out of Buffalo tomorrow morning. I’ll call you back after I make the reservation and let you know what time I’ll be there.”

The idea that Janet Silvie was coming to Grass Valley complicated Gil’s life, but it would make it far easier to interview her.

“Good,” he said. “Will you want to be picked up at the airport?”

“No. I’ll rent a car. If no one else is going to lift a hand looking for Richard, I need to have my own wheels so I can do it myself. My guess is that once you find that crazy woman, that Brenda, the one who was always making up terrible stories about Richard and
threatening him, you’ll find Richard too. They were engaged once. When Richard broke it off, she went crazy.”

Gil didn’t let on that Brenda Riley was among the missing, and he wasn’t at all sure who was crazy and who wasn’t, but he didn’t argue the point. “Let me give you my phone numbers,” he said. “That way you can get in touch as soon as you get to town.”

After putting down the phone, he sat and stared at it for a while. He’d never had a next-of-kin notification go quite so haywire. He personally was convinced that, scar or no scar, Richard Lowensdale and Richard Lydecker were one and the same. Gil was convinced; Janet Silvie wasn’t.

Shaking his head, he picked up the receiver and dialed the number for Dawn Carras in Eugene, Oregon. Once again he gave a recitation of who he was and what had happened—that the body of a murder victim, presumably Richard Lowensdale, had been found and that his investigation into the matter indicated that Lowensdale was in fact Richard Loomis, the man Dawn had reported missing earlier in the day.

Dawn heard him out in such aching silence that for a while Gil wondered if the connection had been broken.

“Did you say Lowensdale?” Dawn asked finally.

“Yes. Richard Lowensdale.”

“That sounds like it could be the name she told me,” Dawn said, her voice suddenly hollow and devoid of any inflection. “But if Richard had to go by another name, he probably had a very good reason.”

Yes,
Gil thought,
because he’s a lying creep
.

“She who?” Gil asked. “Who was it who gave you that other name?”

“Brenda. Richard’s ex-fiancée. Somehow she gained access to his computer, and she started calling all of Richard’s friends and trying to tell us what a terrible person he was. That his name
wasn’t really Richard Loomis, that it was Richard Lowensdale, that he was a liar and a cheat.”

Which seems to be absolutely true
, Gil thought.

“How did she get inside his computer?” he asked.

“I have no idea, but I’m sure Brenda is behind whatever has happened.”

Gil thought it interesting that both Janet and Dawn seemed to know about the alleged stalker, Brenda, who probably really was a stalker. It seemed unlikely, however, that Janet knew about Dawn and vice versa.

“Do you have a photo of Mr. Loomis?”

“No,” she said. “Richard doesn’t allow any photographs of himself.”

Right,
Gil thought.
The car wreck.

“He was terribly disfigured by a campfire accident when he was younger,” Dawn said. “You can imagine how painful it must be to live with that kind of disfigurement.” She paused and then added, “Do you think there’s a chance my Richard is still alive?”

Richard, Richard, Richard,
Gil thought.
You lying turd!

“No,” Gil said. “I don’t think so.” It was a brutally honest answer.

“What should I do now?” Dawn said. “If I come down there, do you think I could help find him?”

With Janet Silvie already planning on flying in from Buffalo, the last thing Gil needed was for Dawn to show up as well. His investigation was already complicated enough without having two feuding fiancées land in the middle of it. He remembered what Rachel had said about selling tickets to the catfight.

“It might be best if you didn’t do anything right now,” he said. “If I find anything out, I’ll be sure to be in touch with you.”

“All right,” she said quietly. Dawn sounded strangely subdued. “Thank you for calling me. I appreciate it.”

Gil gave her his cell phone number in case something came
up, not that he thought anything would. He was dead tired. He was sitting there wondering if he should give up for the night and go home when Janet Silvie called back.

“Getting from here to Sacramento is going to take all day,” she said. “Even if I leave here at seven-oh-five a.m., I won’t be there until after six tomorrow night. That’s the best I can do.”

Gil was relieved to hear it. He wasn’t thrilled that Janet was coming, but he hoped he had managed to deflect Dawn Carras. He stayed at the office for a while longer but not much. He was verging on putting in another twelve-hour overtime day. When Chief Jackman found out about that, he would not be thrilled.

Gil went back to his house. Opening the door, he stopped in the doorway and surveyed his desolate surroundings. There were only three pieces of furniture in the living room and that was it. Linda had left him the low-profile Ekornes recliner that she had always hated because it was so hard to get in and out of it. Truth be known, Gil loved it, but every time he settled into it and tried to relax, the phone rang. Still it was better than having no chair at all. Linda had also left Gil a single television set, his son’s cast-off nineteen-inch. It was old-fashioned, definitely not high-def. It was also dying. On the right-hand side of the screen was a black border almost two inches wide. The television sat on top of the chipped brass and glass coffee table that had been deemed unworthy of moving.

That was the living room. In the kitchen he had no table, just a single stool parked by the kitchen counter. His cooking equipment included a coffeepot and his place-setting-for-one set of dishes. The only reason he still had a microwave was that it was a built-in. He had no pots and pans. No extra glasses. For bedroom furniture, he had the AeroBed that he and Linda had once used for out-of-town guests. Oh, and a pair of suitcases. When Linda removed the dresser and the chest of drawers in the bedroom,
she had dumped Gil’s clothes out of his drawers and into a pair of open suitcases on the bedroom floor. She had taken the washer and dryer too.

That was it. Linda had been gone for two months now. She had told him it was all about the job, but when he had driven up to Mt. Shasta to see the kids, they had told him about the new man in her life—someone she had hooked up with at last year’s all-class reunion, one she had attended solo because, surprise, surprise, Gil had been working.