J. Jance - Fatal Error

“How are your kids?” Maddy asked. “Aren’t those twins due most any day now?”

“Soon,” Ali said. “But how’s Velma?”

“The dogs and I drove down and have been here for the past three days. Aggie and Daphne weren’t trained to be service dogs, but try to tell them that. Aggie has barely left Velma’s bedside. By rights her son should be the one who’s here supervising the hospice workers, but he’s not. If you don’t mind my saying so, Carson is a real piece of work. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he and my own son were twins. Anyway, I believe Carson is a little afraid of me, and rightly so. He was ready to pull the plug on his mother four years ago when she first got her cancer diagnosis. And I don’t blame her at all for wanting people with her right now who don’t have a big vested interest in what’s going on.”

“What is going on?” Ali asked.

“She’s dying, of course,” Maddy said brusquely. “But she’s interested in tying up a few loose ends before that happens, you being a case in point.”

“I flew into L.A. last night,” Ali said. “If it’s convenient, I could come by later this morning. It’ll take an hour or so for me to drive there, depending on traffic.”

“Midafternoon is a good time,” Maddy said. “She takes a nap after lunch. If you could be here about three, it would be great.”

“Three it is,” Ali said. There was a knock on the door.

“Room service.”

“My breakfast is here, Maddy. See you in a few hours.”

Ali let the server into the room. Over coffee, orange juice, and a basket of breakfast breads, Ali opened the High Noon envelope, pulled out a wad of papers, and began to read.

Grass Valley, California

Detective Gilbert Morris of the Grass Valley Police Department wasn’t having an especially good weekend. Once upon a time, when Gil first hired on with the department, being promoted to the Investigations Unit was more of an honor than anything else. Sure you had a few car thefts and break-ins to investigate from time to time, but not many murders. Maybe one every two to three years. At that point, the Investigations Unit would get called out to do their homicide investigation dance. That, of course, was back before the meth industry came to town and set up shop.

People had started killing one another with wild abandon about the time Gil got promoted to the I.U., and there didn’t seem to be any sign of the homicide count letting up. That didn’t mean, however, that the city fathers had seen fit to adjust the budget enough to allow for any more than four detectives. In the short term that had been good for Gil’s overtime pay, but long-term it had been bad for his marriage. This week had been especially tough. Dan Cassidy, the lieutenant in charge, was out for knee surgery, Joe Moreno was off on his honeymoon, and Kenny Mosier’s father was taking his own sweet time dying in a hospital somewhere in Ohio. That meant Gil was the only Investigations guy in town, and this was fast turning into a very crowded week.

Friday was a good case in point. That night, two brothers, some of Grass Valley’s less exemplary citizens, had gone to war with each other and had both ended up dead. George and Bobby Herrera were a pair of homegrown thugs who had graduated from small-town thievery to running a meth lab out of their rundown apartment on the outskirts of town. Both had been pumped up on a combination of booze and meth. What started out as a verbal confrontation had escalated to physical violence when they took their furious sibling rivalry into the unpaved parking lot outside their apartment.

When weapons appeared, fellow residents ducked for cover and called the cops. By the time officers arrived on the scene, both brothers were on the ground. Bobby had died instantly. George died while en route to the hospital. Gil arrived at the crime scene to find both brothers were deceased, leaving in their wake a mountain of evidence and a daunting amount of paperwork.

Gil had spent all day Saturday working the crime scene. It wasn’t a matter of solving the crime, because the double homicide pretty well solved itself. Several witnesses came forward to claim that they had seen everything that had happened in the weed-strewn parking lot. A hazmat team came by to dismantle the meth lab George and Bobby had been running in their cockroach-infested one-bedroom apartment.

“It’s a good thing they’re both dead,” the hazmat guy told Gil. “If they had started a fire in their meth lab kitchen, the place would have gone up like so much dried tinder and the other people who lived here might not have been able to get out.”

Gil took one statement after another. The witnesses’ stories were all slightly different, but the general outlines were all the same. When the brothers were sober, they were fine. When they were drunk or high, look out. Bobby and George had been pleasant enough earlier that Friday morning, but by the middle of the afternoon they were screaming at one another and, as one young mother of a three-year-old reported, using some very inappropriate language.

Bobby, the younger of the two, had come running out of their downstairs apartment carrying a rifle of some kind and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Gil Morris had to admit, going barefoot in Grass Valley in January was something of a feat. Friday had been clear but very cold. Obviously Bobby was feeling no pain.

Bobby stood there holding the gun pointed at the door and yelling at his brother to man up and come outside. Otherwise he was a lily-livered something or other-several expletives deleted. At that point several of the neighbors, crouched behind furniture, saw the weapon, picked up their phones, and dialed 911. Unfortunately, before officers could get there, George emerged from the apartment. He was fully dressed and carrying a firearm of his own.

According to witnesses, both men stopped screaming for a moment. They seemed to be listening to the sound of approaching sirens before Bobby resumed his rant.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You had to go call the cops, didn’t you.”

Just like that, as though they were on the same wavelength, they both pulled their respective triggers. George was evidently the better shot of the two. His bullet removed most of his brother’s head. Bobby was dead the instant he was hit. Bobby’s shot went low and tore through George’s femoral artery. By the time the EMTs were able to get to him, he had lost too much blood and couldn’t be stabilized.

As a police officer, Gil found himself being grateful that those two dodos had killed each other without damaging someone else. Then, late Saturday evening as he was about to call it a day, he found himself face-to-face with Sylvia Herrera, Bobby and George’s grieving but furious mother.

“Why?” she wailed at him. “Why are my boys dead, my poor innocent babies?”

Bobby and George had been twenty-six and twenty-nine respectively. As far as Gil was concerned, they were a long way from babies. And they were a long way from innocent too. They were a pair of drug-stupefied losers, but Gil couldn’t say that to their mother, and Sylvia Herrera was inconsolable.

Finally, when she quieted enough for him to get a word in edgewise, Gil said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Herrera. It’s the drugs, you know.”

“Drugs?” she screeched back at him. “You say it’s the drugs?”

He nodded. She reached out a hand and waggled a finger at him, thumping him on the chest as she spoke, like a mother remonstrating with a difficult child.

“Don’t you know drugs are illegal?” she demanded. “You’re the police. You should stop them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “We certainly should.”