J. Jance - Fatal Error

John really wanted to say, “No. I can’t possibly.” Instead he mumbled, “Yes, ma’am. I will.”

After Camilla Gastellum hung up, John stood there for a while longer, still holding his own phone and crying. He was crying because he wished he had never picked up the purse in the first place. Now, because he had made that stupid phone call on his own phone, the cops would be able to trace it back to him. Even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, he’d be drawn into it. He and Pete and Tony and Jack would all end up being kicked off the basketball team. He would never go to West Point.

“Oh well,” he told himself finally, “I can still enlist.”

He knew where the Grass Valley Police Department was on Auburn Street, but he didn’t want to go there by himself. Instead, he put the purse back in the trunk, then he went home and woke up his parents. He told them the truth, all of it.

“It’s okay, son,” Will Connor said, crawling out of bed and reaching for his clothes. “You did the right thing. Let me get dressed and we’ll go see the cops.”

Grass Valley, California

Detective Gil Morris had been asleep for just two hours when the phone rang at a little past one.

“What now?”

“You’re needed,” said Frieda Lawson, Grass Valley’s night watch desk sergeant. Regardless of rank, nobody argued with Sergeant Lawson. It simply wasn’t done.

“Great,” Gil muttered. “Is somebody else dead?”

“That remains to be seen,” Frieda said. “I’ve got somebody here who’s asking to speak to the detective in charge of the Lowensdale case.”

“That would be me, then,” Gil said. “I’ll be right there.”

Despite the seeming urgency, he needed to clear his head. He took the time to grab a shower, wishing that he had more than just one ragged towel. He would have to do something about that very soon. He either had to buy more towels or go to the laundromat, one or the other.

He stopped off in the kitchen long enough to reload ink into his pen and to grab an additional supply of three-by-five cards. Then he drove back to the department, watching for black ice as he went.

In the waiting room, Sergeant Lawson sat at her desk behind a glass partition. Two people rose from chairs as Gil walked into the room. Gil recognized the older man as Will Connor, the foreman at the local Discount Tire franchise. Beside him, looking miserable, stood a young man Gil also recognized. John Connor, Will’s son, had been a tight end on the Grass Valley High football team and was currently a point guard on the varsity basketball team.

Will Connor stepped over to Gil and greeted him with a firm handshake. “Sorry to drag you out of bed like this,” he said, “but I didn’t think it should wait until morning. This is my son, John.”

John stepped forward too. He held out his hand, but he averted his eyes. On the floor next to the boy’s feet sat a purse, a big yellow leather purse. On the chair beside him was a paper bag.

“Do you want to come on back?” Gil asked, thinking he’d talk to them in one of the interview rooms and gesturing toward the security door that opened into the rest of the department.

“I think we’d better off doing this outside,” Will Connor said.

“Why?” Gil asked. “What’s going on?”

“My son found this purse earlier tonight up near the Scotts Flat Reservoir,” Will said. “The purse and the shoes. I haven’t looked inside the purse, but he tells me there’s a finger inside there-a bloody finger. It’s pretty rank.”

“Crap,” Gil said, reaching for his latex gloves. “Let’s go outside and take a look.”

Once outside, Gil offered Will and John Connor some Vicks VaporRub to put under their noses and gave himself a dose of it as well. Then he opened the purse and spilled the stinking contents into a Bankers Box he had brought outside for the purpose. He used a hemostat to gather up the bloodied finger and dropped it into an evidence bag, which he quickly closed, but isolating the finger did little to diminish the odor. It had bonded onto the leather itself, leaving the gagging stench to cloud the air. Gil zipped the purse closed. That helped some too.

At that point, John reached into his pocket and extracted a cell phone. “This was in the purse,” he said. “I heard it ringing. When I tried to answer it, I found. . that. .” He nodded in the direction of the evidence bag.

“I called the number later on my own phone and talked to an old woman named Camilla Gastellum who lives in Sacramento. She said the purse probably belonged to her daughter and that I should bring it here and talk to you. She said her daughter’s name was Brenda. Brenda Riley.”

When it comes to solving homicides, Gil told himself, I’m three for three.

He put the lid on the Bankers Box. He would inventory all this later and then he would send it to the crime lab.

“There’s a pair of shoes too,” John said quickly, handing over a paper grocery bag. “Tennis shoes. I found them at the same time. They were with the purse.”

“Where did you find all this treasure?” Gil asked.

Will Connor answered before his son had a chance to reply. “John and some friends were up by Scotts Flat Reservoir earlier tonight. That’s where they found them. He and his buddies were just hanging out. .”

Will was talking quickly, trying to gloss over the where, when, and why. And Gil got it. He understood. He recognized John Connor because he had seen his photo before in the sports section of the Daily Dispatch . The kid had a great record, and a whole lot of his future would be riding on what happened tonight.

Gil remembered how, as a kid, he had walked on the wild side-gone to wild keggers and hung out with the wrong crowd. For a while during his senior year, it looked like he wasn’t going to graduate with his class, but he managed to pull his GPA out of the fire at the last minute. Gil knew that no one would have been more surprised than his high school principal, Mr. Dortman, to learn that Gilbert Morris had grown up to be not only a cop but a well-respected homicide detective.

So Gil didn’t need to ask what John Connor and his pals had been doing on a Sunday afternoon and evening at the Scotts Flat Reservoir in the middle of the winter. He already knew. They had definitely been up to no good, probably with booze or girls or both.

“Who else was there?” Gil asked.

John sighed. “Me and Tony Alvarez, Pete Bishop, and Jack Whitney.”

Gil recognized those names as well. All four of the kids were starters on the Grass Valley varsity basketball team. If they got booted off the team, it was the end of what was starting to look like a championship season. Even so-even with all that at risk-John Connor had nonetheless done the right thing. He had picked up the purse and the shoes and had brought them to Gil.

“Tell me about the shoes,” Gil said. He held them up to the outside light. They were Keds, white Keds. Considering what had gone on at Richard Lowensdale’s house, they should have been speckled with blood. They weren’t, and they weren’t especially dirty either.

That struck Gil as odd. If someone had been out tramping around in the woods in them, they should have been a lot dirtier.

“They were right there on the edge of the lake,” John Connor was saying. “Like somebody walked up to the water, kicked off their shoes, and went for a swim. I looked around. It’s real sandy there. There could have been footprints coming and going, but I couldn’t see them in the dark.”

“Any sign of a struggle?”

John shook his head. “It was like she just took off her shoes and walked into the water on her own.”