J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (69 page)

“Then tonight, while Les and I were driving over from the Bay Area, some kid from Grass Valley called Mom too. It seems he spent this afternoon up in the mountains with some friends. According to him, he came across Brenda’s shoes and purse abandoned by some lake or other. The kid found Brenda’s cell phone in the purse and called Mom’s number. She told him he should
take it to the cops. I’m guessing Brenda knocked off Richard and then committed suicide.”

Ali was trying to pay attention, but her ability to listen was hampered by what Valerie had said earlier about Richard Lowensdale’s manner of death. A plastic bag over the head as a murder weapon? To Ali’s way of thinking, it sounded a lot like Ermina Blaylock’s dead father. In fact, it sounded
exactly
like Ermina’s dead father. And if Ermina had gotten away with murder once, maybe she had decided to do so again.

Valerie was still talking when Ali started listening again.

“I tried to tell Mom we shouldn’t bother you in the middle of the night this way, but she insisted. She said you were Brenda’s friend—that you’d want to know.”

“Your mother is right,” Ali said. “I do want to know. Now about that detective who came to see your mother. Does he have a name?”

“Just a sec,” Valerie said. She was off the phone for a moment, then she returned. “He left his business card. His name is Gilbert Morris. Detective Gilbert Morris. Do you want his numbers?”

Ali had gone out to the front room, where she hunted through her purse and found a pen. She jotted the name and phone number onto the back of Mina Blaylock’s background check.

“All right,” Ali said when she finished. “Please tell your mother thank you for having you call me. And tell her I’m sorry things are looking so bad for her, and for you too,” she added.

Up to that moment, Valerie Sandoz had been all business—just the facts, ma’am, and nothing more. But those few words of sympathy from Ali were enough to crack the facade.

“Thank you,” she muttered over what sounded like a sob. “Thank you very much.”

Then the line went dead.

There was no question about what Ali needed to do. Checking
the numbers Valerie had given her, she called the office number first and then the cell phone. In both cases she ended up reaching voice mail and left the same message. “My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m a friend of Brenda Riley. Her mother gave me this number. I understand you’re investigating Richard Lowensdale’s death. I may have some pertinent information. Please give me a call. Here’s my number.”

After leaving the messages, Ali sat on the sofa for a long time, watching a tiny silver of moon appear in the section of midnight sky that was visible beneath the overhang of the balcony above her unit. The slender sickle of light gradually disappeared into an equally blackened sea.

I shouldn’t have told Morris that I was Brenda’s friend,
she thought.
He probably won’t even bother to call me back.

Ali should have gone back to bed, but she didn’t. She sat there for a very long time, thinking, turning over one mystifying question after another, and looking for answers. Her “gut instinct,” as her friend Detective Dave Holman liked to call it, told Ali that Ermina Blaylock, not Brenda, had murdered Richard Lowensdale. But why? Had she too been duped by Richard and taken vengeance on him for playing her for a fool? And what about Brenda? Had she somehow put together the connection between Richard and Ermina? Was that what had prompted the background check request she had e-mailed to Ali shortly before her disappearance?

And what about Brenda?
Ali wondered.
Did Ermina murder her too? Then again, is Brenda really dead, or is that what Ermina wants us to think?

Ali switched on a table lamp and read through the background check one more time. There was nothing there in the written report that was the least bit damning. If it hadn’t been for Stuart Ramey’s going the extra mile, no one would have put two
and two together. No one would have connected what happened years earlier in Missouri to what happened to Richard Lowensdale this weekend.

Which means Ermina probably has no idea anyone is on to her.

Ali studied the background check some more and found the address on Heron Ridge Drive in Salton City. That way, if and when Detective Morris called her back, she’d be able to tell him what she had learned and give him an exact physical location to search.

And then Ali remembered something else—a snippet of something Sister Anselm had told her that day when they’d had tea together. Ali couldn’t remember the exact words, but it had something to do with stepping out with faith that you would be in the right place at the right time. Ali had come to California thinking she was being guided to do something for Velma Trimble, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe the real intended purpose was for her to do something about Ermina Blaylock.

If not me,
Ali asked herself,
then who?

By a quarter to five in the morning, she was dressed and ready to head out. It had been a pain in the neck, going through the process of putting her Glock in the lockbox and having a TSA agent supervise her locking it, just so she could bring it along in her checked luggage. And it had been a pain retrieving it from baggage claim at the end of the flight, but as Ali put on her small-of-back holster, she was glad to have it. Not that she intended to get into any kind of armed confrontation with Ermina Blaylock. Going after a suspect without backup was one of the dumbest things any cop could do. Still, she was glad to be prepared, just in case. As for her pal, the Count of Monte Cristo? He remained untouched in the suitcase and was likely to remain so.

After leaving the apartment, she rode up in the elevator and slid a note under the door of Velma’s unit. In the note, Ali explained that she had been unexpectedly called away and would
be returning later in the day. In the lobby she encountered a sleepy doorman who was able to check the schedule of the guest unit. No, it was not booked for tonight, and yes, she could stay in it for the remainder of the week if she wanted. It wasn’t booked again until the following Friday.

Driving north to the ten, she remembered that she had never returned her mother’s previous phone call. By now, Edie would have taken the first batches of sweet rolls out of the Sugarloaf’s ovens and would be getting ready to open the doors.

With her Bluetooth in her ear, Ali speed-dialed her mother’s cell phone.

“Is this about the babies?” Edie asked anxiously. “Is Athena in labor?”

“It’s not about Athena,” Ali said with a laugh. “I’m just now getting around to returning your call.”

“Oh,” Edie said. “It’s about time. I thought you had fallen off the edge of the earth.”

“Close to it,” Ali said. “I’m on my way to Salton City. You’ll never guess what happened. Do you remember Velma Trimble?”

“One of the two old ladies who came to the wedding? Was she the one with the dogs?”

“No,” Ali said. “Velma’s the other one. She’s had a recurrence of cancer, and she’s in hospice care at home. Mom, she gave me a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar donation for the Askins Scholarship Fund.”

“I’m sorry to hear she’s so bad off, but bless her heart,” Edie said. “What a wonderfully generous thing to do. But why are you going to Salton City? I was there once, years ago with your father. Back then it seemed like the end of the earth.”

I’m pretty sure it still is
, Ali thought.

“Do you remember last summer when my friend Brenda Riley showed up down in Phoenix?” she asked.

“The one with the boyfriend troubles and the drinking problem?”

“The very one,” Ali replied. “Now her former boyfriend, Richard Lowensdale, has been murdered. Brenda is high on the list of suspects, but I may have come up with another possible suspect who lives in Salton City. I’m just going over to have a look.”

“Do you have your Taser along?” Edie asked. “And have you done a spark check recently? You know what they say, ‘No spark, no zap.’”

“Yes,” Ali said, smiling. “I’ve got plenty of spark.”

“Oops,” Edie said. “Customers at the door. Gotta go. You take care.”

A
fter coming back from the reservoir at five a.m., Gil managed to grab three hours of sleep. Once he was up, he found he was out of cereal and milk, so he made do with a bologna sandwich and a cup of coffee.

Sitting at the breakfast counter, he listened to a message that had come in to his cell phone overnight. He hadn’t heard it because the phone had been in the other room on the charger. The caller, someone named Ali Reynolds, claimed to be a friend of Brenda Riley’s.

Just what I need right now
, Gil thought.
Somebody else telling me that poor, sweet Brenda would never do such a terrible thing.

Yes, Gil would call Ali Reynolds back—eventually. When he was good and ready. Right now, though, it took all his flagging energy to drag himself to the Nevada County Crime Lab.

“So what’s the deal with the amputated finger from Scotts Flat Reservoir?” he asked Mona Hendricks, the chief criminalist in charge of the lab.

“It’s a thumb, not a finger,” Mona corrected, studying Gil over the top of a chipped coffee cup.

“Well, excuse me all to hell,” Gil said. “It looked like a finger to me.”

Mona ignored his sarcasm and added some of her own. “Anybody ever mention that you look like crap this morning?”

Gibes from Mona went with the territory.

“Thank you so much for the update. Let’s just say I’m overworked, underpaid, and missing a lot of sleep at the moment.”

Mona grinned back at him. “I don’t think the underpaid part is going to wash. If you’ve got as much overtime in as I think you do, Randy Jackman is going to have a cow.”

Randolph Jackman was the Grass Valley chief of police and Gilbert Morris’s boss. Jackman was nothing if not a political animal. He had moved up in the world of law enforcement not on the patrol side as a cop on the streets but on the administrative side. His view of the world was firmly aligned with the bean counters of the world; he was more a city manager type than a Sergeant Joe Friday. Gil already knew that the overtime he had logged that weekend was going to be a headache, but when you stacked the OT up against three solved homicides, he figured he was all to the good.

“Let me worry about Jackman,” Gil said. “Tell me about the thumb. Does it belong to Richard Lowensdale?”

“I believe so,” Mona told him. “I had my people dust the wall next to the toilet in Lowensdale’s bathroom. That’s always a good place to pick up usable prints. On the wall we found prints that match the two fingers that were found at the crime scene, and there are prints that match the thumb print too. So, yes, that would mean this thumb also belongs to Lowensdale unless there were two people using the facilities at that address who are both going around getting fingers whacked off.”

“Let’s hope not,” Gil said sincerely.

Mona rolled her eyes. “That was a joke, Gilly! Get yourself
some coffee and get on the beam. Of course it’s Lowensdale’s thumb. There aren’t any other damned prints in the whole house. Lowensdale was the only person living there, and whoever killed him was wearing gloves.”

“I’ve got two women who claim their missing fiancées lived at that same address—Richard Lydecker and Richard Loomis.”

“They’re mistaken,” Mona said decisively. “I’m telling you Richard Lowensdale was the only resident. We didn’t find anyone else’s prints anywhere in that house.”

It annoyed Gil to think he was so tired that he’d totally misread Mona’s black humor remark.

“But here’s what I don’t understand,” Mona said. “Why would someone do that?”

“Do what?”

“Leave a bloody thumb to rot inside a perfectly good purse?”

“I don’t know the answer to that either,” Gil admitted. “But I’m going to find out. Having the thumb match my homicide victim gives me enough probable cause to ask for a search warrant. So that’s my next step—getting a warrant to search Brenda Riley’s residence.”

“Today,” Mona said, smiling.

“Of course today. First thing.”

“Good luck with that,” Mona said. “You do know it’s a holiday, right? If it hadn’t been for your damned thumb, I wouldn’t be here either. I don’t think you’re going to find many judges at your beck and call at the moment. Do yourself a big favor, Gilly. Take the rest of the day off. Get your search warrant tomorrow; execute it tomorrow.”

“No,” Gil said. “I’ll get it today.” He started to leave, then turned back to her. “What about the computer? Did you find anything on that?”

Mona shook her head. “Nope. Not a thing. Someone reformatted
the hard drive about four o’clock on Friday afternoon. There’s nothing left on it at all. Since he was a Mac user, your victim might have used iDisk or some other kind of web-based backup system, but to gain access to that, you’ll need his passwords.”

Good luck with that
, Gil told himself.

“That reformatting timetable is within an hour or two of what Millhouse estimates the time of death. That also means there probably was something on the computer,” Gil said. “Something incriminating that the killer didn’t want us to see. What about the vacuum cleaner?”

“No prints. We opened up the bag. Didn’t find much in it. Looks like it hadn’t been used in a very long time.”

Remembering the mess inside Richard’s house, that seemed more than likely.

“But the motor’s burned up,” Mona added. “Like somebody turned it on and left it standing in one place in the living room until it overheated. It’s a wonder it didn’t burn the place down.”

“If they weren’t cleaning, what were they doing?”

“Have you ever used a vacuum cleaner, Gilly?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Kirbys are supposed to be excellent for cleaning but they’re very high on the noise scale. I think maybe the killer was using the vacuum for noise cover.”

Remembering what Ted Frost, the real UPS driver, had told him, Gil nodded. “I’ll bet you’re right,” he said.

Gil left the lab and went straight back to the department to draw up his request for a search warrant. Yes, he knew it was a holiday, and no, he didn’t care. That had always been one of Linda’s major complaints about him. She claimed he was too stubborn, too bullheaded. That once he got an idea in his head, he wouldn’t let it go. This was probably more of the same. Gil
was determined to find a judge who would sign off on his request for a warrant, and he would, holiday or not.