Fatal Error (14 page)

B
renda Riley awakened confused and frightened in a terrible moving darkness. Somewhere nearby her cell phone was ringing, but she couldn’t reach it, couldn’t answer. Her hands were bound behind her. Her feet were bound too. There was a strip of something fastened to her face, and she was desperately cold.

She realized she had to be in the trunk—the large trunk—of a moving vehicle. She could hear the rush and scrape of pavement under the tires, but she had no idea where she was, where she was going, or how she came to be there.

Her memory was fuzzy. Foggy. She vaguely remembered being at home in the morning. After that she had gone to her meeting, her usual Friday noon meeting. And then she was supposed to meet someone for lunch, but right that minute, Brenda couldn’t recall the woman’s name. She had no idea of what had happened to her or how much time had elapsed. What she did know for sure was that she needed to pee desperately.

Brenda tried moving her legs and managed to make a few
feeble thumps with her feet. It didn’t do any good. The car kept on moving and her sudden movement, compounded by the cold, made her need to urinate that much more critical. If the person driving the vehicle heard the racket from the trunk, it made no difference, at least not at first, but then the car seemed to hesitate. It turned off the pavement onto a rough gravel track of some kind.

As the vehicle came to a stop, Brenda’s heart filled with dread. Moments later, the engine died. With a thump, the trunk release was engaged and the lid opened automatically. For a moment she was astonished by how bright the night sky was overhead. After the impenetrable darkness, the stars above were more brilliant than she had ever seen.

She heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. A moment later a woman’s face appeared in the starlit night. In that moment of clarity, Brenda recognized her. Mina Blaylock, the mystery woman on Richard’s list.

Brenda struggled against her bonds, tried to say something. “Please, let me out. I need to use the bathroom.”

For an answer, Mina reached inside. Brenda saw the hypodermic in her hand. She tried to dodge out of the way, but she couldn’t. The needle plunged deep into the muscle of her upper arm. That was one of the reasons Brenda was so cold. Her arms were bare. Where was her coat? Where was her blouse? Brenda tried to struggle, but she couldn’t escape the woman’s fierce gloved grip. At last Brenda lay still.

“Good,” Mina said. “That’s better.”

She reached inside the trunk again. As Brenda watched, Mina took Brenda’s purse out of the trunk. With the purse gone, so was Brenda’s cell phone and so was any hope of summoning help. Next Mina wrenched off Brenda’s shoes.

“Where you’re going, you won’t be needing your purse anymore, and you won’t need shoes either.”

Dimly, Brenda heard a sound from somewhere nearby. Mina heard it too. She looked over her shoulder, then slammed the trunk lid shut. There were more footsteps, hurried ones this time, then the engine turned over, and the car moved. As darkness enveloped her again, Brenda realized that her prison was now lit with an eerie reddish glow leaking into the trunk from the taillights outside the car. She wondered how much time had passed, enough to turn day into night.

Brenda considered briefly about the kind of substance that had been in the hypodermic. Moments later, however, she felt her heartbeat speed up. For a time she had difficulty catching her breath. Then, gradually, the drug overwhelmed her and she drifted into unconsciousness once again, unaware and unembarrassed that when she lost control of her mind, she also lost control of her bladder.

T
he trip from the Scotts Flat Reservoir to San Diego took more than ten hours. Mina stopped for gas only once, in Bakersfield. She worried that Brenda might awaken when the vehicle came to a stop and start bumping and thumping around in the trunk. Fortunately that didn’t happen.

Maybe she’s dead,
Mina thought. Considering how much Versed Mina had plugged into Brenda’s system, death by overdose would have been a likely outcome. Parking at the pumps, Mina stood for a moment listening. When there was no sound from the trunk, she hurried into the gas station, where she used the restroom and paid cash for her fuel as well as for bottled water and a collection of energy bars.

Back outside, there was still no sound from the trunk as Mina filled the gas tank and drove away. Once she was on I-5 heading south, Mina kept herself awake by thinking about Richard Lowensdale.

When Mina waved the hammer in front of Richard’s face, he must have known that it wasn’t an empty threat. He had fallen
still and silent just as Mina had known he would. That was what most people did when they were faced with an unanticipated threat: they complied.

That was exactly what Mina’s family had done all those years earlier when a gang of marauding Serbs had invaded their home in Bosnia. In hopes of surviving, they too had done exactly what they’d been told. Not imagining that people who had once been their neighbors would turn against them, Ermina’s family had allowed themselves to be herded into the living room, where a gang of armed thugs had opened fire and gunned them down.

That was the first defining moment of thirteen-year-old Ermina Vlasic’s life. Hidden in the stone cellar under the barn with her flickering candle and her precious books, she had heard the arriving vehicles first and then the shouting and finally the gunfire. Staying hidden was the only thing that saved her life that day. And only later, long after silence returned and as the sun set, she finally crept out of the cellar and went in search of her family.

She had found them, slaughtered in a bloody heap in the darkened living room, all of them riddled with bullets. Crumpled and dead, they had been left where they’d fallen to send a message to other Croats in the neighborhood—leave or die. It was a scene that was forever indelibly inked in her consciousness, and standing there in the carnage she had made the first decision of her new life: she decided to leave.

Leaving her loved ones where they lay, Mina went to her room, packed a bag with a few clothes and as many books as she could carry, and went in search of help. It was a group of Bosnian Serbs who had murdered her family. Ironically, it was another group of Serbs, a family whose farm was just down the country road, who took her in, cared for her, and who finally took her to the orphanage that had eventually led her to her adoptive home in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Mina had always supposed that was the difference between her and people like Richard Lowensdale and Mark Blaylock. She was tough. But for the first time in as long as Mina had known Richard, he had surprised her. He had stood up to her. She had thought he would cave, but he hadn’t. In the grand scheme of things, the fifty thousand dollars she had paid Richard was chump change, but it was Mina’s chump change.

Had she been able to keep on looking, Mina probably could have found Richard’s stash, but by then Mina’s other guest, treated with a hefty dose of Versed and bound with the same transparent packing tape she had used on Richard, had been left alone in the trunk of her parked Lincoln on a city street for far longer than she should have been. Still Mina waited until it was over, until Richard’s pitiful struggles ceased completely, before she rose from the chair and walked away.

And even though she walked away without her money, Ermina Blaylock had left Grass Valley with something unexpected—a grudging respect for Richard Lowensdale.

There was very little traffic as she made her way up and over the Grapevine, but by the time she hit L.A., rush hour was starting. Just past eight o’clock in the morning, Mina pulled into the shipping/receiving bay of Rutherford International in Clairemont Mesa Business Park and closed the rolling garage door behind her.

She had given Mark a strict set of instructions. Once he finished installing the programming fix, she had told him to pack the UAVs in shipping containers and put them in the shipping/receiving bay. When they weren’t there, Mina’s heart went to her throat.

What if Mark had betrayed her? What if he had unloaded the UAVs to someone else?

Then she turned on the lights in the assembly area. Much
to Mina’s relief, the UAVs were there, locked in the parts cage. They appeared to be properly boxed and labeled, so maybe moving them to the shipping bay was the only part of Mark’s to-do list that he had ignored.

Luckily Mina had her own cage key on her key ring. It was inconvenient for her to have to do all the moving and lifting herself, but she finally managed to lug all the boxed UAVs into the shipping bay. When she popped open the trunk of the Lincoln, a cloud of urine-permeated air rose up out of the trunk. It struck her as funny that she had cut off Richard’s fingers without a qualm but the smell of Brenda’s having wet herself made Mina want to gag.

Brenda was still asleep. After donning her gloves, Mina used a box cutter to slice through the tape imprisoning Brenda’s ankles, although she left her wrists firmly bound. Then, after removing the tape from Brenda’s mouth, Mina shook the unconscious woman’s shoulder.

“Wake up!” Mina ordered. “We need to get you out of there.”

Brenda’s eyes popped open. She looked around fearfully. “Where am I?” she rasped. “What’s happening?”

“I need you to walk with me,” Mina said. “It’s not far. Let me help you.”

She reached into the trunk, grabbed Brenda’s shoulder and wrestled her into a semi-sitting position.

“Please,” Brenda begged. “Not so fast. I’m dizzy.”

The slight pause seemed to bring more clarity to her thought processes. “Wait. I remember now. We went to lunch. That’s the last thing I remember. What are you doing?”

“Tying up a loose end is all,” Mina said. “Now come on.”

Eventually she was able to lever Brenda up and onto the edge of the trunk. Leaving Brenda’s arms taped behind her, Mina walked her prisoner from shipping/receiving into the assembly
room, where she shoved her into an old desk chair they hadn’t managed to unload with the rest of the furniture. Mina used that to wheel Brenda the rest of the way into the cage.

“Let me go,” Brenda said.

“No. That’s not possible.”

“I’ll scream.”

“Go right ahead,” Mina said. “Be my guest. No one will hear you.”

She turned and walked away. Brenda was screaming after her as she left, but Mina paid no attention. After locking the cage, she set the alarm, turned off the lights, and let herself out. She was weary, almost to the point of exhaustion, but she didn’t linger. Instead, she headed for the cabin in Salton City with every intention of giving Mark Blaylock a piece of her mind.

O
n Saturday morning, the Sugarloaf Café was an absolute zoo. By eight a.m. there were people standing outside in the cold because there was no room to wait for a table inside. By ten o’clock they were on the last tray of that morning’s sweet rolls, and Ali’s feet were killing her. Things had lightened up a little and she was finally grabbing a cup of coffee when her cell phone rang.

Hoping it might be B. cut loose from his morning conference sessions, she answered without glancing at the caller ID.

“Is this Ali Reynolds?”

She didn’t recognize the man’s voice and she wondered how he’d gained access to her cell phone number. “Yes, it is,” Ali said. “Who’s calling, please, and who gave you this number?”

“My name is Camilla Gastellum. I’m Brenda Riley’s mother. Have you seen her or heard from her?”

Obviously the gravelly voice that sounded like a man’s wasn’t.

“No,” Ali said. “The last time I saw Brenda in person or spoke to her was months ago, right at the end of August.”

“Yes,” Camilla said. “She was on her way home from seeing you when she wrecked her car. She landed in jail in Barstow charged with driving under the influence.”

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. “I had no idea.”

“She’s taken off again,” Camilla said. “She left home Friday morning and hasn’t been back.”

“I had an e-mail from her on Friday,” Ali said. “She said she was doing well and that she was working on a book about her former fiancé.”

“She may have been doing well then, but she probably isn’t now,” Camilla said disparagingly. “This is what always used to happen to her. She’d do all right for a while, then she’d fall off the wagon, go off on a binge, and disappear for weeks at a time.”

“But I still don’t understand why you’re calling me,” Ali said. “And how did you get my number?”

“I have macular degeneration,” Camilla explained. “I had a neighbor come over today to help go through my phone records, which are also Brenda’s since I pay the bill for her cell phone. She read off the numbers from last summer’s bill. I guessed that this one might be yours and here I am. And the reason I called you is you’re where she went for help the last time this happened. I was hoping lightning might strike twice in the same place.”

“She sent me an e-mail,” Ali said. “But she didn’t hint that anything was amiss.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure exactly what time. Sometime in the late morning or early afternoon. I could check my e-mail account and call you back with the time it was sent.”

“And what did she want?”

“From me? She wanted one of my friends to do a background check on Richard Lowensdale’s former employers, Mark and Ermina Blaylock.”

“Did she say why?”

“Something about meeting with Ermina sometime soon, but she didn’t give me a lot of detail about why she needed the information. Tell me about this book. What’s it about?”

“I tried to tell Brenda that Lowensdale was trouble, but she wasn’t interested. It seems he had any number of women hanging around and I suppose Ermina was one of them. When Brenda finally wised up about him, she decided to track down all his women friends. I believe what she said he was doing was cyberstalking.”