J. Jance - Fatal Error

For a moment John stood staring at the empty shoes. There was no other sign of life in this desolate place and no sign of a struggle either. John knew at once that if someone had gone into the water there, they had done so under their own power. They had gone in, and they hadn’t come back out.

Of the four buddies in the car, John was the only one who understood the implications of suicide, from the inside out. His grandfather, his mother’s father, had taken that road when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Gramps had left a note saying he wouldn’t put his family through the pain of watching him die, so he had handled it himself. With pills. And the pain of all that-of Gramps’s suicide and what had come after it-was one of the reasons the Connor tribe, previously a devout Catholic family, had abandoned Holy Mother Church and become devout Protestants.

Standing there in the moon-softened darkness, John saw the purse and the shoes and made several calculations. If someone had committed suicide here, he should probably call the cops. With three not exactly sober eighteen-year-olds in his car- his car -John couldn’t bring himself to do that. There would be questions: What were you doing out there in the woods in the middle of a cold January night? Who was with you? Why were you there? What did you see? All of which meant that if John did the right thing, it would be the wrong thing. He would be in trouble even though he hadn’t been drinking and his friends would be in even more trouble because they had been.

But he couldn’t just walk away either. That wasn’t an option. Gramps had done the same thing this person had done: he had gone off into the forest by himself and taken his pills, washed down with plenty of Irish whiskey. It had taken a week to find the body-a week in the heat of summer.

John remembered vividly the terrible sense of unknowing that his whole family had lived through back then, between the time Gramps went missing and the time someone finally found him. And he remembered his grandmother sitting there in her living room, rocking back and forth and saying that she would never forgive him for going off and leaving her alone like that without even letting her say goodbye. And he remembered his mother’s grief when the priest told them that since Gramps had taken his own life, there would be no mass.

John had been twelve at the time. He had been struck by the fact that the people who should have been there to help his grieving family-the cops and the priest-had made things that much worse.

John knew that somewhere nearby was a worried family waiting for answers. He also understood how much having those answers would hurt, but he knew from his own experience that knowing hurt less than not knowing. And so, without really thinking it through and without saying anything to the friends who were still waiting in the car, John reached down and grabbed up the purse and the shoes. On his way back to the driver’s seat, he popped open the trunk and dropped the three items inside.

“What was that?” Jack asked.

“Nothing,” John answered. “Just some trash someone left on the beach.”

“That’s John for you,” Pete said. “Eagle Scout all the way.”

Back in Grass Valley, John drove them to Pete’s house, where they all went inside, watched some DVDs and hung out. The other guys finally crashed, but John didn’t even try to sleep. A little past midnight he let himself out of the house. Instead of going home, he drove to the local Safeway. There, parked under one of the halogen lights at the far end of the lot, he got out the purse and brought it to the hood of his car.

It was large and made of some kind of soft leather. Intending to dump the contents out onto the hood, John was about to unzip the purse when a cell phone rang inside it. The noise startled him enough that he almost dropped the purse. Once he unzipped it, though, a foul odor spilled out of it, filling the air around him with an awful stench that was all too familiar. John had no choice but to step away from the vehicle. For the next few minutes he stood doubled over in the corner of the lot, retching onto the pavement.

He recognized the odor-the odor of death-because it was the same one that had lingered in his grandfather’s old Suburban no matter what remedies his father used to get rid of it. Ultimately they’d had to total the SUV even though it ran perfectly and didn’t have a scratch on it.

Finally the spasm of nausea ended. The odor was still there, slightly dissipated in the cold wind blowing down from the mountains. If there was something dead inside the purse, then maybe John was wrong about what had happened at the reservoir. Maybe the shoes by the lake didn’t mean that someone had committed suicide. Yes, that was the point when John Connor definitely should have called the cops and reported what he had found, but he didn’t do that. He couldn’t.

There would be too many questions, ones that couldn’t be answered without jeopardizing his future and his friends’ futures too. But he couldn’t just leave it alone either. Someone had been calling on the telephone inside the purse, looking for whoever owned the purse, and John Connor-this John Connor, not the teenager from the movies or the old TV series-was the only one who could answer that call.

Covering his mouth and nose with his shoulder, John returned to the purse and dug around inside it. Peering inside, he saw something that looked like a twig. When he pulled it out, he saw what it really was-a severed finger with a bloodied nail that gleamed in the yellowish light.

When John saw that, it was time for him to barf again.

This was far worse than he could have thought possible. With his eyes still watering, he forced himself back to searching the purse until he found the phone, an old flip Motorola. When he opened it, the message light lit up-fourteen missed calls, all of them listed as “Mom.” A check of the battery life showed that it was down to a single bar.

With his hands shaking, John checked the details screen and copied the phone number into his own phone. Then, stowing the nearly dead Motorola in his shirt pocket, he zipped up the purse, locking in the odor, and returned it to the trunk. Then he punched send on his phone.

“Hello.”

John breathed a sigh of relief when the man answered the phone after only one ring. He wanted to talk to a man, not a woman. It would be easier.

“Hello,” the man said again. “Is anyone there?”

John cleared his throat. “I’m here,” he said. “My name is John Connor. Who’s this?”

“My name is Camilla Gastellum.”

A woman, John thought. A woman with a very deep voice.

“I live up in Grass Valley,” he said hurriedly. “I heard this phone ringing a little while ago. It was inside a purse I found.”

“Inside a purse?” the woman asked. “A yellow leather purse?”

“Yes.”

“The purse probably belongs to my daughter, Brenda. Where did you find it? And where is she?”

Those were questions John Connor didn’t want to answer. “I found the purse by a lake, ma’am, a lake outside of town here. The purse was there along with a pair of tennis shoes.”

There was a long pause before “They were all by themselves?”

“Yes,” John said, “there was no one around at all.”

“I’m down in Sacramento, and I don’t drive. Could you maybe bring them to me?”

Remembering what was inside the purse, John knew he couldn’t inflict that on anyone else.

“No,” he said. “That won’t work. I can’t do that.”

There was another long silence on the end of the phone. For a moment John was afraid the person had hung up, but then the silence was followed by a deep sigh.

“I’m sorry to hear that you’re involved in all this, young man, but you need to do the right thing. I understand there’s been a homicide in Grass Valley. The dead man’s name is Richard Lowensdale. He and my daughter were involved at one time. A detective came to talk to me about this tonight. I believe his name is Morris-Detective Gilbert Morris. As much as I hate to say it, you’ll need to take that purse to the police department there in Grass Valley. Talk to Detective Morris. Tell him exactly what you told me. Let him know what you found and where you found it.”