J. Jance: Fatal Error

The guy on the stool next to Brenda’s moved away, clearing a place for Ali to sit. The bartender came forward. “What can I get you?” he asked.

“Do you have any coffee?” Ali asked.

Making a face, Brenda salted the side of her fist, licked off the salt, downed one of the shots of tequila, and then sucked on a lime wedge as she pushed the shot glass back across the bar. There wasn’t anything about this that was genteel cocktail-hour-type sipping, and Ali recognized it for what it was-serious drinking.

The bartender nodded in Ali’s direction. “Give me a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll make a new pot.”

“And maybe a menu,” Ali said. “We should probably have something to eat.”

The bartender picked up the empty shot glass. “Got it,” he said. “Coming right up.”

Brenda gave Ali a sly, squint-eyed look. “Are you really a cop?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Ali said. “But I’m going to be. What about you? My dad said something about your needing my help.”

Brenda nodded. “I do need your help,” she said, slurring her words ever so slightly. “It’s a long story, a very, very long story. I was engaged to a guy named Richard, Richard Lattimer. He dumped me.”

Which meant it was also an old story. As Brenda began to recount her tale of woe, some of Ali’s classmates from the academy, including Jose Reyes, wandered into the bar. Wanting to avoid them if at all possible, Ali steered Brenda and her latest shot glass into a sheltering booth in the back corner of the room, beyond the bank of pool tables. Once in that airless section of the room, Ali realized how much Brenda reeked of booze-not just what she was drinking now but what she had most likely been imbibing for the past weeks and months. This was way more than recreational drinking.

“What happened?” Ali asked, trying to seem interested but not intrusive.

“Richard was working down in San Diego. Things just seemed funny, out of sorts. I thought we needed to see each other face-to-face to get things sorted out. So I drove all the way down there to see him, and he was gone. I went by the place where he supposedly lived, but they had never heard of him. The same thing happened when I went by the place where he told me he worked. They said they had another man named Richard who worked for them once, but his last name wasn’t Lattimer. I was just frantic. I didn’t know what to think.”

Unlike Brenda, Ali had a pretty definite idea of what to think. In her current guise, Brenda Riley was clearly a very troubled person. Under those circumstances it made perfect sense that most right-thinking men would have done the same thing Richard Lattimer had done-run like hell in the opposite direction.

Their food came, along with another cup of coffee for Ali. She was starved and lit into her burger. Brenda picked at her fries and ordered another shot of tequila. Keeping count, Ali was astonished at her capacity.

“So anyway,” Brenda continued. “Like I said, he’d been acting all weird for weeks-sort of distant, like something was bothering him. That’s why I went down to see him-to surprise him. When I got back from San Diego, I called Richard and told him I knew he had left San Diego and that I knew he had lied to me.”

“What happened then?”

“He hung up on me. I tried sending him text messages and e-mails, but he blocked them. I haven’t heard from him since. That’s why I’m here. I need you to help me find him,” Brenda said miserably. “Even if he doesn’t love me anymore, even if he lied to me, I still love him. I need to be sure he’s okay. Finding him should be easy, right? I mean, especially now that you’re a cop.”

That was when Ali finally understood what Brenda wanted and why she was here. Ali also knew the ramifications. Using law enforcement tools and sources to track down personal information on someone who was not a suspect in a specific crime is illegal. Yes, cops did that kind of thing occasionally, but it was also grounds for instant dismissal if the snooping was discovered.

“Tell me about him,” Ali said.

The floodgates opened. “Like I said, his name is Richard,” Brenda said. “Richard Lattimer. He grew up in Grass Valley, California. We met in an Internet chat room, a support group for abandoned spouses. My husband had left me and his wife had left him. Once we met, we just clicked. I know it sounds trite, but it seemed like we had always been meant to be together. For one thing, we had so much in common. We both had cheating spouses in our backgrounds. Our fathers died at an early age when we were both in high school. His father committed suicide. Mine had a heart attack and died.

“Richard and I talked about everything, and he was always there for me. When the station fired me, he was the only one who stood by me. We spent hours on the phone, talking, texting, e-mailing. Whenever I felt like I was falling apart, he was there to bolster me up and help me get a grip. At least he was for a while. Once I wasn’t working any longer, there was no reason I couldn’t drive down to see him on occasion, but every time I made plans to go, something seemed to come up at the last minute. Once his daughter, Suzanne, was sick; once he got called out of town on a job-related problem; once he got called in to work on some kind of emergency and was there for five solid days, fixing some problem or another.”

“What does he do?” Ali asked.

“He’s an electronics engineer,” Brenda said. “He said he did highly classified work for a small defense contractor down in Southern California. He told me they really counted on him. He was always on call, even on the weekends. He had to have a suitcase packed and ready to go in case he had to take off at a moment’s notice.”

“So he was part of an AOG team?” Ali asked.

Brenda gave her a mystified look. “A what?”

“The way my ex explained it to me, it’s a term used by airplane companies, and it means ‘aircraft on the ground.’ Team members have to be ready to go wherever that broken plane is, repair the problem, and get it back in the air. Paul Grayson always had his own AOG bag packed. It took me a long time to realize that when he took off at a moment’s notice, it turned out he wasn’t fixing problems; he was making them.”

Brenda nodded, but she was so caught up in her tale of woe, Ali doubted if what she said had penetrated.

“I didn’t mind him being on call like that,” she said. “I know what it’s like to have a demanding job. I didn’t worry about it. I was patient. I didn’t want to rush him. We were supposed to get engaged on my birthday in May. He sent me links to a couple of jewelry websites. He showed me three different rings and asked me to choose which one I wanted. I did, and I didn’t even choose the most expensive one, but when he went to order it, that one was already sold out. We talked about what kind of wedding we’d have, where we’d go on our honeymoon, the kind of apartment we’d have. .”

Brenda’s voice drifted away into silence.

“But you didn’t get a ring,” Ali supplied.

“No, I didn’t,” Brenda said sadly. “I had made the mistake of telling my mother and my sister that I thought a ring was coming. They haven’t given me a moment’s peace about it since, especially my sister. She said I had to be out of my mind to get engaged to someone I had never met. That’s why I finally decided I had to go see him no matter what. I drove to San Diego without letting him know I was coming, and that’s when I found out he was gone.

“You have to believe me, Ali, this is all so out of character,” Brenda continued, barely pausing for breath. “Richard would never do something like this-especially like cutting me off without any reason. Something must be terribly wrong. I’m sure of it. What if he has cancer or something? What if he’s dying? What if he has only a few months to live and doesn’t want to drag me through it with him?”