Fatal Error (19 page)

It took a moment for Gil to grasp what he was seeing. Two dining room chairs had been brought into the living room, one
to confine the victim and one to be used as an observation post. Murder was murder, and the bloody mutilations were nothing short of appalling, but the idea of sitting and watching while your victim struggled to take his last breaths moved what had happened in this room to a whole new level.

G
il was still struggling with that reality when the Nevada County coroner, Fred Millhouse, arrived on the scene.

“Hey, Detective Morris,” Fred said. “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this. Three in one week is more than I bargained for. Is it all right if I move this chair out of the way?”

“Just a moment,” Gil said, laying down another marker. “Let me get a photo first.”

While Fred went to work doing what he needed to do, Gil walked through the house. He was looking for evidence, yes, but he was also trying to get the feel of what he was seeing.

A good deal of the mess in the room was trash that had been there for a long time, but the wanton destruction of the model planes was recent. It had taken time to smash them one by one. If the plane smasher and the killer were one and the same, that meant that the culprit had been in the victim’s house for an extended period of time. This wasn’t a quick in and out. The killer had come here looking for something. The question was, had he found it and taken it?

Gil glanced again at the collection of electronics on the desk in the corner. Gil Morris was no geek, but he knew enough about computers to realize that the computer was a potential source of all kinds of useful information, including the names and e-mail addresses of the people the victim had corresponded with in the last days of his life. It would also tell investigators what, if anything, Richard Lowensdale had been working on at the time of his death. Gil looked around for a cell phone or a landline. At first glance, neither was visible. And if there were some way to view any of the footage from the security camera over the front door, that wasn’t readily apparent either.

Not wanting to observe Millhouse at his grim work and not wanting to be in the way, Gil let himself out of the overheated, dimly lit house into bright sunlight and a welcome January chill. He paused on the front porch long enough to search for evidence that the bloodied footsteps had exited this way. There was nothing visible to the naked eye, but luminol might reveal the microscopic presence of blood evidence. A more likely scenario told him that the perpetrator had walked around in the house long enough for the blood on the bottom of his feet to dry.

Gil stood on the porch’s top step and breathed in a lungful of fresh air. Even with the Vicks right there beneath his nostrils, some of the terrible odors of death still lingered. Gil walked down the cracked sidewalk and let himself out through the crooked gate. A patrol car was parked on the far side of the street. Officer Masters was inside and appeared to be talking on the radio.

Gil pulled the cigar out of his shirt pocket and mimed his need of a light to Masters.

When Dale Masters joined him at the rear of the black-and-white, he brought a second cigar for himself and a lighter, as well as a small metal container which, with the lid removed, served
admirably as a makeshift ashtray. Leaving ashes of any kind near a crime scene was a bad idea. The black-and-white had a perfectly functioning ashtray in the front seat, but smoking in city-owned vehicles was not entirely verboten.

Once they both lit up, Gil was pleased to discover that the cigars were impressively obnoxious—the kind Linda had always regarded as “pure evil”—but the smoke helped displace the last of the noxious odors.

“Thanks,” Gil said, holding up his cigar.

“You’re welcome,” Dale said. “You lasted a whole lot longer inside there than I did. By the way, I just got off the phone with Irene in Records. She said there was a B and E at this address on the twentieth of September of this past year. According to the report, an ex-girlfriend allegedly broke into the house in broad daylight while Lowensdale was off getting his Cadillac serviced.”

“New Cadillac?”

“Old,” Masters said. “The way I understand it, it used to belong to Lowensdale’s mother.”

Gil pulled out a new three-by-five card. “Name?”

“Mother’s name?”

“No. The B and E suspect.”

“Her name’s Brenda Riley. She used to be Lowensdale’s girlfriend.”

“They caught her in the act?”

“Not exactly. Lowensdale came home, saw a broken window, and realized someone had been inside his place. Even though nothing of value had been stolen, he raised enough of a stink that the chief finally agreed to have our guys come by to do a crime scene investigation. Her prints were found everywhere. No effort to cover them up whatsoever.”

“She’s in the system?” Gil asked.

Masters nodded. “She’s been booked for a number of moving violations, DUIs as well as driving without a license, and so forth. Once we told him who the perp was, Lowensdale declined to press charges. Said it was the aftermath of a bad breakup and since nothing was taken, he was prepared to let it go.”

“Brenda Riley?” Gil asked with his pen poised to write.

“Brenda Arlene Riley,” Masters confirmed. “She lives in Sacramento. Irene in Records can give you the exact address, but you may want to check. I believe there was something in that original nine-one-one call this morning about an ex being involved in all this one way or the other.”

“Thanks,” Gil said. “I’ll look into it.”

When Masters was called back to the radio, Gil stood there with a cloud of smoke circling his head while he studied his surroundings and the cracked and peeling exterior of Richard Lowensdale’s house.

Jan Road was steep. The house was built into the flank of the hill, but the sidewalk leading up to the house was level. A cracked concrete walkway went from the front porch to a small detached garage and from the garage to a side door near the back of the house. Looking at the elevations, Gil realized that meant there was probably a basement under the house and maybe under the garage as well.

Ready to resume his examination of the house, Gil followed the walkway door to door to door. There were no visible footprints anywhere.

He went back to the small garage and opened the side door wide enough so he could peek inside. There was definitely no basement in the garage. The hard-packed dirt floor reeked of decades of old grease and oil. Above the workbench, the wall was lined with a collection of antique tools. The smell and tools hinted that the garage had long been used by a homegrown,
do-it-yourself mechanic. What looked like most of a case of motor oil stood inside the remains of a cut-down cardboard box on a shelf above the work bench.

Clearly the garage had been built at a time when vehicles were smaller. Lowensdale’s ten-year-old black Cadillac Catera barely fit inside the four walls. If this had been a standard robbery, most likely the car would have been taken along with the electronics. No, this was definitely something else.

Leaving the garage, Gil went to what he assumed to be the back door of the house. The first room inside was a small utility room that held a washer and dryer, an older model top-loading set. The utility room opened into an old-fashioned kitchen complete with a single-bowl porcelain sink and knotty pine cabinets, as well as an avocado-colored fridge and matching stove that had to date from sometime in the seventies. There was no dishwasher. There was a small white microwave on the counter and the freezer was packed full of Nutrisystem food. Obviously Richard wasn’t much of a cook.

Considering the condition of the rest of the house, Gil fully expected the kitchen to be filthy. It was not. There was no junk on the floor and no dirty dishes in the sink. The counter was clean and the microwave wasn’t greasy. There was a dish drainer with a few clean dishes sitting in it—a single plate, a single glass, a single set of eating utensils. It reminded Gil of his own kitchen. Yes, this guy definitely lived alone.

The kitchen was far enough from the living room that the odor of putrid flesh didn’t penetrate. But the other smell, the one Gil had noticed earlier, was much stronger in this part of the house than it had been in the living room. Just outside the kitchen door in a hallway that evidently led to the bedrooms, he found a closed door that he assumed to be a possible broom closet.

When he opened the door, the stench was almost overpowering.
Covering his mouth and nose, Gil groped for the light switch using his pen. When the light came on, he found he was standing at the top of a set of planked wooden stairs that led down into a true garbage dump. In the living room, the trash made a layer on the floor that was walkable. Here the heap was tall enough to come halfway up the steps, tall enough to reach Gil’s shoulders if not his head. And on the steps were the faint fuzzy footprints he had seen before. The blood must have been nearly dry when the transfer was made. The prints ventured down only three steps then they turned and returned the way they had come. Whoever it was had considered wading into the garbage in search of whatever it was they wanted. But they hadn’t wanted it badly enough to go digging through the garbage. No doubt the stench had proved to be too much for the killer just as it did for Gil.

Stepping back, he switched the light back off and then slammed the door shut behind him. Shutting the door didn’t fix the problem. Even with it closed, the smell was still overpowering. It was almost as though the smell had leached into the wallboard and wooden trim. Gil wished fervently that Masters had offered him more than just that one cigar.

Unfortunately, at this particular crime scene, cigars were limited, only one to a customer.

A
li left the hotel to drive to Laguna Beach as mad at B. Simpson as she had ever been.

When she started reading the High Noon material, the item on top had been a copy of the e-mail Brenda had sent to her on Friday that she had in turn passed along to B. She read through that. There was nothing at all that indicated anything out of the ordinary. It was lucid. There were none of the self-justifying excuses that are often employed by someone intent on doing something stupid. In fact, the message was exactly the opposite of that—purposeful, organized, and with no senseless meanderings that would indicate a drunken rant. Yes, Camilla Gastellum believed her daughter had gone off on a bender. If so, the decision to do that had come after she sent the e-mail rather than before.

Next up was the Richard Lowensdale background check—the same material that had been sent to Brenda almost five months previously. A copy of that had been sent to Ali as well. It contained nothing new, nothing unforeseen.

Ermina’s background check came next, and it contained only
the bare bones of the story. She had been born in Croatia. There was nothing that explained how she had been orphaned. The story picked up again once she was adopted by a family in Missouri as a teenager. The adoptive mother died of heart disease a couple of years later, and the father committed suicide. Ermina moved to California and was doing minimum wage catering jobs when she hooked up with a widower named Mark Blaylock.

So far so good,
Ali thought.
Sounds like it was time for her to have some good luck.

But clearly the luck had recently turned bad once more. Their business, Rutherford International, had gone bust. In the documents section of the report, Ali found information about the Blaylocks’ bankruptcy proceedings, foreclosure proceedings on their home in La Jolla, property tax information on a home in Salton City, California, as well as a puzzling document certifying Rutherford’s contractual dismantling of forty-six UAVs, which was evidently shorthand for
unmanned aerial vehicles
, otherwise known as drones, as the form helpfully explained for the uninitiated.

Since Richard Lowensdale had previously worked for Rutherford and, as a consequence, the Blaylocks, there was nothing at all in Ermina’s background report that gave any hint about why Brenda had been seeking the information or if her inquiry about Ermina Blaylock had in any way contributed to Brenda’s sudden disappearance. There was a puzzling notation at the end of the report that said Stuart Ramey was awaiting more information from Missouri and would be sending that along as soon as it was available. Did Ali want him to fax it to her, or would it be all right for him to forward it to her cell?

She sent him an e-mail saying to send the information to her iPhone.

But then she hit the bottom set of papers, and that’s when it all went bad. Those sheets were evidently additions to the original
background check—they carried the same date stamp—but the material recounted there contained information Ali had never seen before. Apparently Richard had been “cyberdating” any number of women at the time he was involved with Brenda. Stuart Ramey was a skilled hacker who had managed to gain access to both Richard’s numerous e-mail accounts as well as his computer.

The Storyboard material Ali read there was nothing short of stunning. It included transcripts of supposedly private e-mails and instant messages that Richard had added to the files as they came in. In each case Richard was Richard, but the last names varied. All of the last names started with an
L
, and Ali was certain those were simply convenient aliases.

Ali remembered clearly how dismayed she had been when she learned Brenda Riley had been engaged to a man she had never met, but Brenda was certainly not alone. By Ali’s count there were over fifty women listed in the Storyboard file. A quick survey through the collected correspondence showed that most of the women involved were under the impression that Richard Whatever was their heaven-sent soul mate. More than once Ali saw discussions of possible ring purchases with Internet links leading to possible candidates.

Not surprisingly, Ali found Ermina Blaylock’s name listed in the Storyboard index, but when she checked the file, it contained little information other than Ermina’s name, her date of birth, and social security number, which Richard Lowensdale probably shouldn’t have had.