Fatal Error (9 page)

He had hoped things would be different with Mina, but the flirting had come to naught. Later, when he’d been given his pink slip, rather than facing up to his own shortcomings, Richard had convinced himself that was why he’d been let go—because Mark had somehow caught on to what Mina was thinking. That was the real reason Richard had dropped that little programming bomb into the Rutherford works. It was the best way for him to even the score. And now, months later, when they finally knew they had a problem, not only did they not know he was responsible for their difficulty, they had come to him to fix it. How wonderful was that?

Richard wanted to leap off the couch and dance a little jig. Instead, he sighed and shook his head as though he were allowing himself to be persuaded entirely against his will.

“All right,” he said resignedly. “What do you need and when?”

“I need to fly a ten-kilo payload, one hundred or so miles, to predetermined coordinates.”

Richard had been wondering about the end user. Mina’s statement provided the answer. After all, this was California. Other businesses might be struggling to survive, but the illegal drug industry was still booming. Richard wanted Mina to verify it, though. He wanted her to understand he wasn’t as dumb as she thought he was.

“I suppose that means we’re dealing with one of the drug cartels,” Richard said.

Mina looked him square in the eye and didn’t deny it, and she didn’t object to his use of the word
we
either. In fact, she used the same word herself.

“We’ll make a lot of money,” she said.

“Who’s we?”

“All of us—you, me, Mark. How long do you think it’ll take to troubleshoot the problem?”

The real answer was about two minutes, but he didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t pay for two minutes.

“I don’t know how you expect me to do that,” he said. “I don’t have any of the code, and even if I did, finding something like this won’t be easy.”

Mina reached into her purse and pulled out a thumb drive, which she handed over to him. “I brought the latest version of the programming with me. Here it is,” she said. “Everything you need should be on that.”

The fact that Mark and Mina still had drones and were getting ready to sell working models meant that the Blaylocks had gone over to the dark side. From Richard’s point of view there was a definite upside to working the dark side—lots of money.

“It’ll take me at least six months, but that’s not a guarantee,” he said. “Fifty thou total. All communications are to be done this way, in person and eyeball to eyeball. No e-mails back and forth; no telephone communications; all payments to be made in cash. Half down; half on delivery.”

“Five months, not six,” Mina countered. “I need to be able to do the test flight before the end of January. I’m offering twenty thousand down, and ten a month until the job is completed. Plus, I’ll give you a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus in January after a successful test flight.”

Once again Mina reached into her oversized purse. This time she plucked out a packet of cash and handed that to him as well. “Count it if you want.”

Richard didn’t have to count it. He knew it was all there. He
couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. He’d had no idea that she knew him so well. The fact that she was offering more than he’d asked was surprising.

“Oh,” Mina added. “There is one more thing. We’ll need the ability to remotely detonate this thing.”

“As in blow it up?”

“Yes,” she said. “Blow it to pieces.”

“That’s a little more complicated,” Richard said with a laugh. “But I get it,” he added. “It’s like the beginning of one of those old
Mission: Impossible
stories on TV where they say, ‘This tape will self-destruct in thirty seconds.’”

Mina frowned. “I don’t think I ever saw that movie.”

“It wasn’t a movie,” Richard said. “It was an old TV series. From the sixties.”

“I never saw that either,” Mina said.

But Richard had seen those shows, countless times. Ron Mills, Richard’s stepfather, had loved
Mission: Impossible,
especially Cinnamon. He had owned DVD versions of all three seasons. Richard had found those DVDs in the same box in the basement where he had found his mother’s prized boxed sets of
Murder, She Wrote
VCR tapes.

“Too bad,” he said. “You’re missing out on an essential piece of Americana.”

Mina stood up and gathered her purse. Richard didn’t bother getting up to show her out. He looked at the money—money he had never expected to see. Without having to pay taxes and at his current rate of expenditure, that much money and the rest Mina had promised him would last for a very long time.

Richard felt an immense sense of satisfaction. He had Mina Blaylock just where he wanted her. Richard knew that if there was that much money lying around just for the asking, then there was obviously far more where that came from.

Brenda’s enforced jail-based sobriety didn’t exactly take. It lasted long enough for Valerie to drive her home to Sacramento from Barstow. It lasted long enough for Brenda to be far too sober during the name-calling blowup between her sister and her mother, Camilla, when Valerie dropped Brenda off at their mother’s P Street home.

“Here’s your jailbird,” Valerie had said, opening the door so Brenda could make her way inside. “I brought her home to roost.”

Camilla heaved herself up out of the chair and hurried to meet them. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said, hugging Brenda close. “When I didn’t hear from you, I was worried sick.”

“She’s a drunk, Mom,” Valerie said. “She wrecked her car and she damned near killed herself. She probably would have done us all a favor if she had.”

“Valerie,” Camilla said, “you mustn’t talk like that.”

“Why not? You don’t think she’s learned her lesson, do you? Just wait. She’ll be drinking again the minute your back is turned.”

“Valerie . . .”

“Save your breath, Mom. I don’t want to hear it, and the next time she gets in hot water, don’t bother calling me. I did this once. I won’t do it again.”

Valerie had slammed out the door on that note and hadn’t been heard from again. She hadn’t phoned. Camilla called and left messages. Valerie didn’t call back.

As for Brenda? Unfortunately, Valerie’s assessment proved to be correct. Brenda was all right for a couple of days, but then she got around to opening the mail, including the background check on Richard—Lowensdale, it turned out, not Lattimer. Reading through the material and uncovering the fabric of lies behind everything
he had told Brenda was enough to push her off the deep end once more.

That night, after her mother was asleep, she let herself out of the house, walked six blocks to the nearest liquor store, and bought a supply of booze that she smuggled back into the house and upstairs to her room. One of the pieces of furniture in the room was her mother’s old hope chest. From Brenda’s point of view, the best thing about it was the fact that it came with a lock and key. Brenda deposited her booze purchases in among mother’s extra sheets and pillowcases, then she turned the old-fashioned key in the lock and hid the key in her purse, concealed in her hard plastic tampon holder.

She drank the rest of the night, reading and rereading the background check and fanning her anger to a fever pitch. She was furious to think that while she had been sick with worry about Richard’s health, he had been fit as a fiddle and only an hour or so away. She thought about calling him, but then she realized that wouldn’t work. He had stopped taking her calls, and once he recognized her new cell phone number, he wouldn’t take calls from that device either. No, what was called for was a visit—a personal visit, one where Brenda would have the opportunity to let Richard have it. She wanted to talk to him face-to-face and tell him how contemptible he was.

She fell asleep around four a.m. and woke up at eleven. She had breakfast in the kitchen while her mother was having lunch. Camilla greeted her daughter with a smile. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said. “You’re keeping the same kind of hours you did in junior high.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Brenda said.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Camilla asked.

Yes,
Brenda thought.
Leave me alone.
“Can I borrow your car for a while this afternoon?”

“Well, of course,” Camilla said. “When do you expect to get your own car back?”

The answer to that was never. Valerie would have spilled the truth about that in a minute. Fortunately for Brenda, Valerie hadn’t hung around long enough to do a huge amount of damage.

“They’re getting the parts in,” Brenda lied. “It’s going to be a while.”

On that sunny afternoon in early October, Brenda stocked her purse with enough booze to tide her over, then she borrowed her mother’s car keys and took off for Grass Valley in Camilla’s twenty-year-old Taurus. All the way there, Brenda rehearsed exactly what she would say to Richard Lattimer Lowensdale. By the time she reached the house on Jan Road, she was only partially drunk, but she had worked herself into a seething rage.

Ready for war, she marched up to his door, stomped across the front porch, and gave the doorbell button a furious punch. But nothing happened. Richard didn’t come to the door. The house was totally silent. Convinced he had recognized her and was simply hiding from her, she wandered around to the side of the house, where she found a second door. This one didn’t have a doorbell, but it did have a series of glass panes.

Without giving any thought to the consequences, Brenda picked up a rock and smashed one of the lower panes. Then she unlocked the door and let herself inside. Entering through a utility room, she found herself choking on the terrible odor. It made her throat hurt and her eyes itch. The kitchen was fine, but the mess in the remainder of the house was appalling.

Richard had passed himself off as an urbane, witty, neat guy, yet here he lived in a squalid hovel. Brenda wandered through the filthy house, letting the scales fall from her eyes. Richard had lied about far more than his name and his place of employment. Everything about him was false.

With Richard not there, Brenda was ready to vandalize the place. Standing in the living room, surveying the mess, she caught sight of the most logical target. Richard’s command central, his computer desk, stood at the far end of the room.

Brenda remembered Richard’s telling her that he never turned off his computer.
Maybe I’ll turn it off for him,
she thought.
Permanently.

She looked around for a suitable weapon and settled on a sooty fireplace poker. She carried it over there and was ready to smash the CRT when she saw there was an open file showing on the screen. The file name was Martinson in a folder called Storyboards.

Scanning through the open file, Brenda learned far more than she wanted to about Lynn Martinson’s sad life—her drug-addicted son, her difficult ex-husband, her complicated job, and her loving relationship with someone named Richard Lewis who had a troublesome ex-wife named Andrea and a teenaged daughter, Nicole, who was also involved with drugs. Lynn’s social security number was there. Her preferred nicknames and suitable terms of endearment were duly noted. There was also a log of calls and e-mail conversations that included transcripts of what Richard had said to her and what Lynn had answered in return. Glancing at the contents of the storyboard was like eavesdropping on a two-way conversation.

Suddenly a light went on in Brenda’s head. Making a mental note of Lynn Martinson’s name, Brenda hit the open file command. When a list of fifty-seven items appeared, Brenda scrolled through it. She found her own name, Brenda Riley, three-quarters of the way down the list.

She could have opened her file just then, but she didn’t dare take the time. She wanted the contents of this folder—all the contents. Fortunately Brenda was conversant with the Mac operating system. She went back to the Storyboards folder and
hit command P to activate the printer. As pages spun out of the printer, one after another, Brenda scanned one or two, realizing as she did so that she was far from alone in being victimized by Richard Lowensdale and his various aliases.

It took precious minutes and more than a hundred pages to print the storyboard folder. At one point, the printer ran out of paper and Brenda had to look around to find paper to load into it. As soon as the printing job was finished, Brenda reopened the Lynn Martinson file, leaving the computer much as it had been when she found it.

Then she picked up the printed material and fled. Back at her mother’s home on P Street in Sacramento, Brenda locked herself in her room and read through what she had printed, studying every single page and drinking as she read.

By the time she finished reading and passed out again—at five o’clock the next morning—Brenda Riley had given herself a new purpose in life: one way or another she would find a way to take Richard Lowensdale down if it was the last thing she ever did.

F
our months after graduating from the Arizona Police Academy, Ali Reynolds was doing something she had never expected to do again—manning her mother’s lunch counter in the Sugarloaf Café.

“Order.”

Summoned to the serving window by the café’s substitute short-order cook, Ali Reynolds picked up two platters of ham and eggs and delivered them to the two customers seated at her station.

This Friday morning in January the restaurant had been slammed from the moment Ali opened the doors at six a.m. until only a few minutes ago. Once the pace slowed slightly, Ali leaned her hip against the counter and gave herself permission to sip a cup of coffee.

Six days down, one to go,
Ali told herself.

Ali’s parents, Bob and Edie Larson, were on the next-to-last day of their seven-day Caribbean cruise. Ali was on the next-to-last day of filling in for them.

After nearly a week of working her mother’s early morning shift, Ali had a renewed respect for the jobs her parents had done in running their Sedona area diner for all those years. She also had a renewed respect for her mother’s killer schedule. Edie Larson came in to the restaurant at four a.m. every day to bake the restaurant’s signature sweet rolls as well as that day’s supply of biscuits.