J. Jance - Fatal Error

On Saturday night it wasn’t necessary for him to call Linda in advance and tell her he was going to be late. Months earlier his wife of twenty some years had given up on being married to a policeman. She had taken the kids and the dog and the cat and had gone home to live with her folks in Mt. Shasta City. It was too bad, “a crying shame,” as some of the guys at work had put it. The truth is Gil had done his share of crying about it, although he’d never tell his buddies at the department a word about that. Instead, he kept a stiff upper lip and motored along from case to case.

He was sorry about losing his family, but there didn’t seem to be a damned thing he could do to fix it any more than he could stop the overwhelming flood of drugs that had taken the lives of Sylvia Herrera’s sons.

So Detective Morris dragged his weary body home to his empty house that was furnished with whatever leavings Linda’s father hadn’t been able to cram in the U-Haul. Linda had left him one plate, one bowl, one glass, one coffee cup, and one set of silverware. That simplified Gil’s meal planning, and it simplified clean up too. He washed every dish he owned after every meal. He thought about microwaving one of those Healthy Choice dinners, but he didn’t bother. They tasted like crap, and anyway he was too tired to eat. Or even drink. He stripped off his clothes, fell crosswise on the bed, and fell asleep.

The next morning Gil was still in his shorts, eating the crummy dregs from the bottom of a nearly empty box of Honey Nut Cheerios, drinking instant coffee, and wishing he had a toaster so he could have an English muffin, when the phone rang.

“Uniformed officers are reporting what appears to be a homicide at the top of Jan Road,” the dispatch officer for Grass Valley PD told him. And so, at eleven forty-five on a chill Sunday morning in January, Gil Morris found himself summoned to his third homicide case in as many days.

Yes, it’s a good thing Linda is gone, Gil told himself as he hurried into the bedroom to get dressed. Otherwise she’d be pitching a royal fit.

Grass Valley, California

Gil got dressed and drove straight to 916 Jan Road. The front yard was unkempt and weedy. There were dilapidated remnants of what might have been flower beds long ago, but no one had planted anything in them for a very long time. The front gate on the ornamental iron fence hung ajar on a single bent hinge. Two uniformed officers, Dodd and Masters, waited for Gil on the front porch.

“What have we got?” Gil asked.

“It’s pretty ugly in there,” Dodd said. “One victim, but he’s been dead for a while and the thermostat is set somewhere in the upper eighties.”

With no explanation needed, Dodd handed Gil an open jar of Vicks VapoRub. Nodding his thanks, he slathered some of the reeking salve just under his nostrils. It stank to high heaven, but it would help beat back the pungent odors that were no doubt waiting for him inside the house.

“Cigar?” Dale Masters asked, offering one of those as well.

Linda had put a permanent embargo on Gil’s having the occasional cigar. With her gone, it was time that prohibition was lifted.

“Thanks,” Gil said. He took the proffered smoke and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “If you don’t mind, I’ll save it for later.”

“Be my guest,” Masters told him. “You’re going to need it.”

“What happened here, forced entry?”

“Not that we can see,” Masters replied. “There’s a deadbolt on the front door, but it wasn’t engaged.”

That means the victim probably knew his killer, Gil thought. At least he let the bad guy into the house.

“But we might get lucky,” Officer Dodd said.

“How so?” Gil asked.

Dodd gestured to the upper corner of the front porch to where a CCTV security camera had been mounted on the wooden siding.

“The only way that’ll help us is if it’s turned on,” Gil said. “Now what about the coroner?”

“Fred’s on his way,” Dodd said. “He should be here any minute.”

Without waiting for the arrival of the coroner, Fred Millhouse, Gil slipped on a pair of crime scene booties and a pair of latex gloves. “Do we have a name?”

“Several actually,” Officer Dodd said. “We were originally sent here to do a welfare check on a guy named Richard Lydecker whose fiancee called nine-one-one to report him missing. Later another woman called looking for her missing fiance. She gave the nine-one-one operator the same address, only she says her guy’s name is Richard Loomis.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Gil said.

Dodd nodded. “County tax records say the residence is owned by someone else named Richard, only his last name is Lowensdale. So I’m guessing the dead guy is one of those three or maybe he’s all of them. According to them, Lowensdale is age fifty-three. Looks like he lives alone.”

My age, Gil thought.

“Were the lights on or off when you got here?” he asked.

“The overhead fixture in the living room was off. The desk lamp is on in the corner, but the blinds were closed in both the living room and dining room. The only way to see inside was through the window in the front door. That allows a view of the entryway only, not the actual crime scene, which is in the living room.”

“So no one could see what was happening from the outside.”

“I don’t think so. I suspect this all went down sometime in the course of the afternoon on Friday or maybe even Thursday. The porch light was off, and we found a UPS package here by the front door, so it was probably delivered on Friday afternoon at the latest. UPS doesn’t deliver on weekends.”

Gil paused long enough to look down at the label. Zappos. From information on the label and from the shape of the box, Gil figured the package probably contained a pair of shoes. The victim may have needed new shoes and he may have ordered new shoes, but he was never going to wear them.

“So the UPS guy may have some information for us,” Gil said. “Any idea who he is?”

“The local driver is named Ted Frost,” Dodd said. “I went to high school with him. He’s a good guy.”

Gil nodded. “See if you can get him on the horn.”

While Officer Dodd set off to do Gil’s bidding, the detective geared himself up for the task at hand. As he stepped on the grimy hardwood-floored entryway, Gil Morris encountered the appalling stench that immediately overpowered the puny efforts of his Vick’s Vaporub.

That one sickening whiff was enough to tell him that he was also stepping into a nightmare.

For a moment, after he crossed the threshold, Gil stood still, trying to get the lay of the land and assimilate what he was seeing and feeling. As expected, the house was unbearably hot. If he had been able to see a thermostat, he would have turned it down. The overheated air reeked with an ugly combination of odors. Fighting his own gag reflex, Gil catalogued the unwelcome but familiar smells-both the putrid odor of decaying flesh and the lingering coppery scent of dried and rotting blood. Beyond those two, however, was something else besides, something obnoxious that Gil couldn’t quite place.

As he stepped into the room, a small coat closet was to his immediate left. The door had been left ajar and the coats, jackets, and sweaters on the pole inside had all been pushed to one side in order to leave enough room for an old-fashioned Kirby vacuum cleaner that had been stowed in one corner of the closet.

For some strange reason that tickled Gil’s funny bone. Where was it written that vacuum cleaners always had to be stored in entryway closets? That was where Linda had kept her Bissell and where his mother had kept her Hoover. At that moment, Gil was without a vacuum cleaner and without much hope of ever having one either.