J. Jance - Fatal Error

“Try not to worry,” Phyllis said reassuringly. “As I said, officers are currently on their way to that address.”

That was a small white lie because the officers weren’t on their way right that very minute. They wouldn’t get word until Phyllis notified Dispatch at the Grass Valley Police Department. Phyllis did that immediately, but she still felt that there was no real urgency to the matter. After all, it was a simple welfare check. No big hurry. No need for lights or sirens. The officers would get there when they got there, probably after taking their morning coffee break rather than before.

Phyllis then glanced at the clock on the wall across the room. It was almost time for her coffee break. Wanda Harkness, the operator at the next desk, had just come back from her break, and she was now involved in taking a call that sounded no more critical than the one Phyllis had just handled.

For the remainder of that Sunday morning, Phyllis and Wanda handled calls most of which shouldn’t have been 911 calls in the first place. One woman was frantic because her declawed house cat had escaped through an open door and taken off for parts unknown. What if a coyote caught it and ate it? Couldn’t they please do something to help? Someone else had crashed into an empty plastic garbage can hard enough to split it wide open. The car was most likely damaged, but apparently no people were. And one woman, an almost weekly caller, begged them to do something about the noise of those church bells: did they have to ring that loud every single Sunday morning?

Time dragged. Between calls, Phyllis sipped her coffee, worked the New York Times Sunday crossword, and kept an eye on the clock.

At eleven thirty-eight, Phyllis’s phone lit up. “Nine-one-one,” she said. “What are you reporting?”

“I want to report a missing person,” a woman said, sounding reasonably controlled. This one wasn’t panicky. She wasn’t yelling.

Caller ID said that the call had originated in area code 541. Phyllis recognized that as being somewhere in Oregon. Phyllis’s sister and brother-in-law lived in Roseburg.

“Is the missing person a child or an adult?” Phyllis asked.

“An adult. He’s fifty-three.”

“He’s a relative of yours?”

“Well, sort of. We’re engaged. At least we’re going to be. We had this little disagreement on Thursday. He sent me a link to an engagement ring he was thinking about getting me for Valentine’s Day. The problem is, I didn’t like the one he picked out, and I told him so, but I can’t imagine he’s still mad about that. We talked briefly on Friday morning. He was still upset, but he thought we’d be alright.”

“All right, then,” Phyllis said. “Let me get some information. What’s your name?”

“Dawn,” the woman said. “Dawn Carras from Eugene, Oregon.”

“And your missing fiance’s name?”

“Richard,” Dawn said. “Richard Loomis.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Yes. It’s nine sixteen Jan Road.”

Whoa! Phyllis thought. Another man named Richard AWOL from the same address? How interesting.

Phyllis managed to keep her voice even and businesslike as she checked Grass Valley records for any listing for Richard Loomis. She found nothing, just as earlier she had found no listing for Janet Silvie’s Richard Lydecker.

This seemed like more than a mere coincidence. Two women had called from opposite ends of the country on the same morning to report two missing fiances both of whom were named Richard and who evidently shared a residence with yet a third person, also named Richard. Once you added a psychotic ex-girlfriend into the mix, Phyllis’s Sunday morning shift at the com center was suddenly a whole lot more interesting than it had been earlier.

Dutifully she took down all of Dawn Carras’s information, but the moment Phyllis was off the phone, she called Grass Valley PD and spoke to Sandy in Dispatch.

“About that welfare check I called in earlier-”

“I forgot to get back to you,” Sandy said. “It’s turned out to be a whole lot more serious than a welfare check. Responding officers found a body. If this is Mr. Lydecker, the guy’s dead and has been for some time-a couple of days at least. The ME is on his way there right now. The cops on the scene said someone trussed him up with packing tape, put a plastic bag over his head, and taped that shut as well. Can you give me any additional details?”

“No,” Phyllis said. “I already gave you everything I had on that one, but it turns out I do have one more piece of the puzzle. I just had some other woman, one from Oregon this time, who called in a missing person report on her fiance. This guy is named Richard Loomis. He happens to live at the same address on Jan Road that Janet Silvie gave me for Richard Lydecker.

“The second caller is a woman named Dawn Carras who lives in Eugene, Oregon. According to her, she and Richard Loomis had a lover’s spat the other night because she wasn’t wild about the engagement ring he had chosen for her. They had words over it on Thursday evening. He was still upset when she spoke to him on Friday morning, but she expected that all would have blown over in time for their regular Saturday date-night phone call, but he never called.”

“So we’ve got three guys named Richard, one dead guy, and two missing fiances,” Sandy said. “What does it sound like to you?”

“Sounds like our little Richard was playing with fire and got burned. He must be one good-looking dude. Or else he’s loaded. Think about how ugly Aristotle Onassis was.”

“Who?” Sandy asked.

Phyllis Williams, Phyllis James back then, had been a freshman in high school on that day in November when President Kennedy was gunned down by Lee Harvey Oswald. Years later, she had been appalled when his widow and Phyllis’s own personal idol, Jackie Kennedy, had taken up with billionaire Aristotle Onassis. It seemed impossible to Phyllis that Sandy had no idea who Aristotle Onassis was, but then again, Sandy might be so young that she didn’t know who Jackie Kennedy was either.

This wasn’t the first time in Phyllis’s many years at the Nevada County Com Center that she had run headlong into a generation gap with her younger counterparts, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But if Richard Lowensdale, Richard Lydecker, and Richard Loomis were all one and the same, Phyllis wondered what exactly the guy had going for him. Whatever it was, it had obviously been good enough to attract women like flies to honey.

Too bad it wasn’t enough to save his life.

Los Angeles, California

Ali Reynolds didn’t awaken in her Los Angeles hotel room until after ten the next morning. As soon as she heard the rumble of planes overhead, she was surprised that she had been able to sleep through the racket. She ordered coffee and breakfast from room service. Knowing she needed to check on Velma before showing up at her home, Ali dialed Velma’s phone number in Laguna Beach and then waited for someone-a hospice worker, most likely-to answer.

What if I waited too long? Ali wondered.

“Velma Trimble’s residence.”

The voice on the other end of the line was brisk and businesslike.

“My name is Ali Reynolds,” she began. “I was told Velma wanted to see me-”

“Ali? It’s Maddy-Velma’s friend, Maddy Watkins. I’m so glad you called.”

When Velma had defied her cancer diagnosis by signing up for that round-the-world private jet cruise, she had been assigned a stranger, Maddy Watkins, as roommate by the travel agency. By the end of the trip, Maddy and Velma had become fast friends. Maddy, a wealthy widow from Washington State, was an aging dynamo who traveled everywhere by car in the company of her two golden retrievers, Aggie and Daphne. When she and Velma had been invited to attend Chris and Athena’s wedding, the two dogs had come along to Sedona.