J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (66 page)

“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.

So here he was, living in an almost empty house on Rattlesnake Road. When he and Linda bought the house, they had gotten a great deal on it because the couple who lived there before were going through a nasty divorce. Gil probably should have thought about that and realized that a street address with the word
rattlesnake
in it was most likely a bad omen—that things probably wouldn’t turn out well if they tried living there. And they hadn’t.

Difficult as it was to fathom, he had fewer possessions now than he’d had in college. He had spent those two months going to work, doing his job, and feeling like a human train wreck. But today he had seen a real human train wreck, the bodily remains of Richard Lowensdale.

After spending so much time at the crime scene, Gil was appalled to see the resemblance between his place and Lowensdale’s house on Jan Road. His house didn’t stink like that—he still took the garbage out to the street every week—and it wasn’t overheated. All the same, it looked forlorn and empty and uncared for, and there were several discarded newspapers on the floor next to his chair.

Someday soon he was going to have to do something about that. But right now he needed sleep, and having an AeroBed in the bedroom beat the hell out of sleeping on the floor.

W
hen Brenda awakened once more, enough time had passed that her clothing was no longer damp. She had no idea what time it was or if it was day or night. She wondered if she was still wearing her watch, but with her arms fastened behind her, there was no way to tell if it was on her wrist or if it had been taken from her somewhere along the way. And even if she had been able to hold it up to her face, she wouldn’t have been able to see it. There was no light. Only the occasional rumble of an airplane passing overhead told her she wasn’t marooned in outer space.

She tried not to think about how thirsty she was, but her mind tricked her into remembering all the words to an old country/western song that her father used to sing:

All day I’ve faced the barren waste
Without a taste of water—cool, clear water.

Even when she concentrated on something else, the unwelcome words continued to echo inside her head.

Keep a’movin’, Dan.
Don’t cha listen to him, Dan.
He’s a devil not a man
And he spreads the burning sand with water.

How long will I last without food or water?
Brenda wondered.
Six or seven days? Longer? And how long have I been here already?

Then, just when she was ready to give up, when she was ready to pray to God and ask that in his mercy he take her, Brenda heard Uncle Joe’s voice, speaking to her from across the years, his voice low and filled with quiet dignity. “All I had to do each day was choose to live.”

Yes,
Brenda thought as she drifted back into a feverish sleep.
That’s what I choose too.

G
rass Valley High School was generally thought to be divided into three separate but relatively equal groups—the jocks, the nerds, and the druggies. The jocks were somewhat smart and drank beer; the brainy nerds were incredibly smart. They were also geeky and drank whatever; the druggies were habitual underachievers who spent lots of time smoking grass, some of which they managed to grow themselves in out-of-the-way places.

John Connor, whose parents were big
Terminator
fans, didn’t quite fit in any of the molds. He was a genuine jock—varsity football, basketball, and track. That should have put him firmly in the beer-drinking camp except for the fact that he was a born-again Christian who didn’t drink anything, including coffee or tea or even soda. And although he was smart and could have been a nerd, the coffee, tea, and soda prohibitions counted against him.

John may have been “born again,” but he wasn’t a fanatic about it and didn’t much believe in turning the other cheek,
which meant that he had knocked the crap out of several guys on the JV football team before they gave up and decided they could just as well be friends. Now, as seniors with their final football season behind them and with basketball season in full swing, John and his best pals, Pete Bishop, Tony Alvarez, and Jack Whitney, were spending Sunday of their long MLK weekend celebrating Saturday night’s basketball win and enjoying the fact that there was no school on Monday.

Tony’s cousin worked in a liquor store. As usual, Tony had provided the single case of beer and, as usual, John was the designated driver. Pete’s dad worked for Nevada County Irrigation, and Pete had grown up trailing his dad around the Scotts Flat Reservoir. On Sunday the boys followed Scotts Flat Dam Road across the dam and off into the woods to a secluded clearing where local teenagers did their illegal drinking.

Now, at eleven o’clock at night and with all the beer gone, they were heading back to town. Just east of the earthen dam, the drinkers started whining about needing a pee stop. John pulled off into a tiny parking area near the dam. While his friends went off into the woods to relieve themselves, John sauntered over to the edge of the lake. He and his father came here fishing sometimes in the summer, but now with a fringe of ice still clinging to the edge of the shoreline, fishing season seemed a long way off.

He stood there on the edge of the lake, watching a sliver of moon make a slender golden splash in the choppy water, and wondered what would happen to him; what did the future hold? John was still hoping for an appointment to West Point, but that was probably a pipe dream. Yes, John was smart and his GPA was outstanding, but his parents weren’t well connected, and there were always political ramifications to consider.

So he looked at the cold water and wondered what would happen if he didn’t get the appointment. Would he go on to college?
He’d had a couple of scholarship offers but not enough to cover the full freight, and his folks couldn’t really afford to pay his way. He could maybe try going the ROTC route or perhaps he would end up doing what his father had done and volunteer.

The water wasn’t giving him much of an answer. The chill wind sliced through his letterman’s jacket and made him shiver.

“Hey, John,” Jack yelled at him. “We’re done here. Are you coming or are you going to stand around gawking all night?”