J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (48 page)

“Aren’t those a lot bigger?” Ali asked. “Like Piper Cubs?”

“Some are,” B. agreed. “The ones they’re using in Afghanistan, the Predators that fire the big missiles, are about that big, but the ones Rutherford was working on are much smaller. The most they could possibly carry would be a forty-pound payload, and some not even that much.”

“So what’s the big deal then?” Ali asked.

“There’s an even smaller variety that’s about the size of those remote-control helicopters that were such a hit at Christmas a couple of years ago. They can look in a window of a building and take out a single target sitting in the room without damaging anyone else.”

“So there’s less chance of collateral damage,” Ali said.

“Exactly,” B. agreed. “They cost a lot less because of size. They can go places where it would be too dangerous to have a piloted aircraft. Regardless of size, drones are relatively silent. They fly low enough to avoid radar detection. They can do precision targeting, and if you release enough of them at once, you can create a swarm.

“Think about it. If you have a single offensive weapon flying at any given target, chances are you’ve got a missile defense of some sort that has a good chance of taking that one missile transport device down. If you’ve got several hundred tiny drones heading in all at the same time, defenders can probably take out some, but not all of them.”

“Like trying to chase off a swarm of killer bees with a fly swatter.”

“Exactly.”

“So Lowensdale worked for Rutherford and then he stopped,” Ali said. “How come?”

“Because the bottom dropped out of the drone market,” B. explained. “For a long time it looked like Rutherford was going to snag one of the big cushy military contracts. When that didn’t happen, when those opportunities went away, so did most of Rutherford’s employees, including Richard. The only people left working there are the owner and her husband, Ermina and Mark Blaylock and maybe a secretary. Definitely a skeleton crew.”

“Richard Lattimer or Lowensdale or whoever he is told Brenda that he was an integral part of the design team. Was he?”

“I think it’s more likely that he was just a cog in the wheel. When the layoffs hit, Lowensdale was let go right along with everyone else.”

Ali studied a line in the report. “It says here that he was laid off in February of last year.”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s over a year before Brenda had any inkling he was no longer working in San Diego. Every time she made plans to go down there to see him, he came up with some phony excuse or another as to why she shouldn’t come to visit. They were in this supposedly serious relationship without ever laying eyes on one another. How on earth could he deceive her like that for so long?”

“You tell me,” B. said with a smile. “On paper, at least, he’s nothing special. He has two degrees to his credit—a BS from UCLA and an MBA from Phoenix University. He also routinely signed documents with the PE designation, even though there’s no record of his ever having earned it.”

“Physical education?” Ali asked.

“Professional engineer. Requirements vary from state to state, but you have to take and pass exams that demonstrate an understanding of all kinds of engineering principles with an emphasis on your own specialty. I suspect he’s an adequate kind of guy.”

“Adequate but not brilliant,” Ali said.

“And with a real tendency to inflate his accomplishments. I’m thinking his BS was totally appropriate.”

Ali agreed and went back to reading. After being laid off in San Diego, Lowensdale had moved back to Grass Valley. His parents—his mother and stepfather—had died in a car crash more than two years earlier, leaving Richard as their sole heir. For a while he had renters living in the house, but after he lost his job and needed a less expensive place to live, he got rid of the renters—evicted them, actually—and then had moved back to Grass Valley in July.

“What a creep,” Ali said. “He’s spent the past year living forty miles or so from Brenda, all the while claiming he was still in San Diego.”

“Right. Since he was no longer there, no wonder he needed to find one excuse after another to explain why Brenda shouldn’t go to San Diego to visit him.”

“What’s this house in Grass Valley like?” Ali asked.

After shuffling through some extra papers, B. plucked a single sheet out of the bunch.

“According to his Zillow report, Lowensdale’s place on Jan Road is valued at two hundred eighty-five thousand.”

“That’s pretty reasonable,” Ali said. “Especially for California real estate. Must be fairly modest, but still, if he hasn’t worked in more than a year, what does he do for money?”

“He doesn’t appear to need much,” B. said. “He was on unemployment for a while, but there was also some kind of insurance settlement—with an undisclosed amount—that came as a result of the drunk-driving incident that killed his mother and stepfather. His ride is a ten-year-old Cadillac, which, like the house, he inherited from his mother. He apparently orders online and has everything delivered—food, clothing, books, electronics, you name it. His medications come from an online pharmacy in Canada. Oh, and as far as Stu can tell, he doesn’t have garbage service, or at least he doesn’t pay for it.”

“What about his father?” Ali asked.

B. gave Ali a puzzled look. “Did his father have garbage service?”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “Richard told Brenda that his father committed suicide. Did he?”

“That part was true. His father blew his brains out in his office at the Grass Valley Group/Tektronix plant while Richard was a junior in high school. His mother remarried two days after her first husband’s funeral. She married a guy who was supposedly one of the father’s best friends, which sounds all too familiar to me,” B. added.

“If the wife was screwing around behind his back, that might account for the father’s suicide,” Ali offered. “And look here. It says Richard has never been married and has no kids, but I distinctly remember Brenda saying that one time when she was
planning on going to visit him, he told her she couldn’t come because his daughter was sick. His nonexistent daughter.”

“There you go,” B. said. “So yes, we know that he lied about that—or at least, according to Brenda he lied about it—but he has no criminal record, no pending lawsuits, and no bankruptcies. He’s coming through this downturn with an excellent credit rating. On paper the guy looks solid.”

“Which is how he must have looked to Brenda too,” Ali said. “What happens now?”

“You told Stuart to mail the report to her,” B. said. “I’m sure he will, but it probably won’t go out until Tuesday.”

Ali emptied her coffee cup. “That’ll be plenty of time,” she said. “He’s kept the wool pulled over Brenda’s eyes for this long. I’m sure an extra day or two isn’t going to matter. Let’s go have breakfast and show my parents what having a daughter in a police academy really means.”

When the long weekend was over, Ali gave B. a ride to Sky Harbor to catch a plane for D.C. after which would be another trip back to Taiwan. From the airport, she headed back to the academy.

For the next two weeks, Ali Reynolds threw herself headlong into the program and worked her butt off. In a way she hadn’t anticipated, helping Brenda had inarguably helped her. The antagonism from Jose Reyes and some of his cronies that had been the bane of her existence during the earlier weeks faded into the background, sort of like the bruising and swelling around her eye.

Donnatelle had taken Ali’s advice and had spent much of the weekend on the practice range and hitting the books. By the middle of the week, she had managed to retake and pass the evidence handling test and had eked out a qualifying score on the target range as well. Each evening that week, there were impromptu study sessions in the common room of the women’s dormitory, with Jose and some of his pals in attendance.

There were no e-mails from Brenda Riley and no calls either. Ali took that to mean that her well-intended advice about seeking treatment had come to nothing. The same thing must have been true about the background check. Richard Lattimer/Lowensdale may have turned out to be a liar and a cheat, but Ali resigned herself to the idea that Brenda would do what Brenda would do regardless.

On the last Friday afternoon just before graduation, Sergeant Pettit once again paired Ali and Jose for what would be her final attempt at a hip toss try with a wily adversary. Ali figured the instructor was looking for a repeat of their previous performance. What the instructor didn’t see as Ali approached Jose was the wink he sent in her direction.

When the confrontation started, instead of the expected hip toss, Ali surprised both Jose and Pettit by taking him down with a simple leg sweep. Once Jose was on the ground, she cuffed him and it was over. The fact that he had put up zero resistance made Ali feel like she was cheating the system, but when Sergeant Pettit came over to slap her on the back and tell her “Good job,” she didn’t tell the instructor otherwise. She just reached down and helped Jose up.

“We’re even now?” Jose asked her with a grin.

She nodded and smiled back. “Even,” she said.

When she removed the cuffs and shook hands with Jose, Ali knew it really was over. She was ready to go home and be a police officer, and so was he.

O
n Friday afternoon, Mark Blaylock made his way through the deserted administrative offices of Rutherford International. They had finally let Mina’s secretary go, so now it was just the two of them. They’d hung on to the office space in hopes that things would turn around, but that wasn’t happening. They had gotten a hell of a deal by paying the lease in advance, but time was up. The landlord had someone who was interested in moving in.

Renters for the warehouse/manufacturing spaces in the office park complex were few and far between at the moment, so he was letting them hang on to their storage space at a greatly reduced rent. That gave Mark and Mina a place to store the office equipment and furniture they had been unable to unload. How much longer they’d be able to manage even that paltry amount of space was a question for which Mark had no easy answer.

Mark slammed open the door to his wife’s office, then he went inside and collapsed into the nearest chair.

“How’d it go?” Mina asked.

Mark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something wrong with the controls. The drone flew fine for a while, like there was nothing at all the matter with it. I was putting it through its paces and it was perfect, but when I tried to land it, everything went to hell.”

“It crashed?” Mina asked.

“I’ll say,” Mark said with a nod. “And I don’t know why—no idea.”

“What about the wreckage?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” Mark said. “That’s the only good thing about all this. It went into the water. No one will ever find it.”

The water in this instance was the Salton Sea, near Mark’s rustic cabin. It was possible that someday if the lake dried up, someone might find the wreckage, but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

“Good,” Mina said.

That was all she said. She could have said a lot more. When Mark had insisted on doing the test run himself, she had worried about how capable he was, but right then there really wasn’t anyone else to do the critical flight. They’d let everyone go, and Mina sure as hell couldn’t fly one of the damned things herself. When Mark said he could do it—that it was “dead simple”—she had believed him. Evidently she’d been wrong about that, but playing the blame game wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Ermina Blaylock was nothing if not absolutely practical.

“What can we do to fix this?”

“I’m no engineer,” Mark said, shaking his head. “And I don’t have the technical skills to sort it out. We need help, Mina, and we need it fast. If we’re going to make this deal work, we’re going to have to bring back someone from engineering.”

That was a risk and they both knew it. When the military contract
went away, they had bought up an entire warehouse of UAVs as scrap and for pennies on the dollar with the understanding that the UAVs would all be destroyed. Rutherford International had been paid a princely sum to make sure they were. The powers that be were concerned that if one of the UAVs happened to fall into the wrong hands, people unfriendly to the United States might manage to reverse engineer the product and come up with a workable drone design of their own.

Together Mark and Mina had falsified records showing the scrapped UAVs had all been destroyed and a helpful inspector had signed off on the paperwork. Now after months of putting out discreet feelers, Mina had finally stumbled across a potential customer, one Enrique Gallegos, who wanted to buy several working UAVs, for which he was prepared to pay an astonishing amount of money into a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Before anything could happen, however, Mark and Mina needed to put on a successful demo flight. Mina was grateful that Enrique Gallegos hadn’t been on hand to witness this afternoon’s show-and-tell disaster.

It was easy to see that once they made the sale to Gallegos, they’d be financially whole again, but all of that depended on their having a working product. Right now they didn’t.

“We need it to work,” Mark said desperately, giving voice to what Mina herself already knew to be true. “We’re going down for the third time.”

Mina couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the man. She slept easily each night while he lay awake trying to find a way around their disastrous cash flow problems. Gallegos had been very specific in his request. He needed his UAVs capable of making an hourlong flight. He also wanted them equipped with some kind of self-destruct application.

Mina was good at playing stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She
understood that Gallegos’s principals intended to use the UAVs to smuggle illicit cargo—drugs most likely—from somewhere in northern Mexico to predetermined landing areas in the United States well north of the last Border Patrol checkpoints. If each drone was capable of carrying a valuable ten-kilogram payload, she was a little puzzled by the need for a self-destruct mechanism, but she had agreed that any UAVs they sold would be so equipped.