answer. He may be sick or hurt.”
This was going to end up being a judgment call on Phyllis’s part. If the woman was talking about somebody who was elderly and frail or if it was a kid, it was a different story, but at first blush this sounded like this guy had missed making a phone call by a little over twelve hours. Something that trivial was hardly the end of the world. Twelve hours wasn’t nearly long enough for most police departments to be willing to take a missing persons report, but maybe a routine “welfare check” was in order.
“What’s his name?” Phyllis asked. “Where does your fiance live?”
The woman blurted out the name Richard Lydecker and a street address on Jan Road in Grass Valley.
“Your name?” Phyllis asked.
“My name is Janet,” the woman said. “Janet Silvie.”
“And where are you located?”
“I’m at home,” Janet said. “In Buffalo. Buffalo, New York. I don’t know what I’ll do if something has happened to him. What if Richard’s dead? I know he has an ex-girlfriend who’s been stalking him. She’s evidently dangerous and very unstable. What if she did something to him?”
Janet Silvie’s voice was rising in volume. Phyllis could tell the woman was close to losing it. A lot of callers did that. They worked themselves into such a frenzy before making the first call that they fell apart on the phone. Often it was virtually impossible to retrieve any usable information from someone who was hysterical. Still, the idea that a threat had been made upped the ante and Phyllis needed to learn what she could.
“Please calm down,” Phyllis said. “You’ll be better able to help us help Mr. Lydecker if you stay calm. Does this woman who threatened him have a name?”
“Brenda something,” Janet said. “Something Irish, maybe. O’Reilly or maybe just plain Riley. I don’t remember her name. She even called me once, trying to feed me some line about Richard cheating on me. When I told Richard about it, that’s when he warned me that she’s some kind of nut, like on drugs or something. I don’t blame him for being scared of her.”
“You actually spoke to this woman?”
“There was no speaking. It was more like she was talking-yelling really-and all I could do was listen.”
“Does she live at the address you gave me?”
“No. They’re not married. I already told you Richard is
Phyllis tried not to roll her eyes. TMI-too much information-and none of it was the information she actually needed. In the meantime, Phyllis did a quick check of the records available to her. According to the county assessor’s office, the property on Jan Road belonged to Richard Stephen Lowensdale. There was no Grass Valley listing of any kind for someone named Richard Lydecker.
“Tell me about Brenda. Do you know if she’s armed?” Phyllis asked her questions calmly. That was the secret to working as a 911 operator. You had to remain calm no matter what. “Is she dangerous?”
“Maybe she is or maybe she isn’t,” Janet replied. “How would I know? I’ve never met the woman. I’ve never even seen her. After all, I’m a whole continent away. You’re right there in Grass Valley. Isn’t there something you can do?”
Phyllis’s desk in the Nevada County Communications Center was actually located in Nevada City rather than Grass Valley, but she didn’t quibble.
“Yes, ma’am,” Phyllis told her caller. “I’m dispatching officers right now to do a welfare check.”
“And you’ll get back to me if you find out that something’s wrong?” Janet Silvie asked.
“I’m only an emergency operator,” Phyllis told her. “I won’t be the one getting back to you. The address you gave me is inside the Grass Valley city limits. Once I pass this information on to them, the Grass Valley Police Department will be handling the response. Maybe one of their uniformed officers will call you back. Or else Mr. Lydecker himself. I’m sure the officers on the scene will let him know that you’re concerned.”
“Thank you,” Janet Silvie said gratefully, then she blew her nose loudly into the mouthpiece.
Phyllis Williams wasn’t offended. She was used to it. In her line of work, nose blowing was actually a good sign. It beat hyperventilating. Or screaming. Or the devastating sound of gunshots when a simple domestic violence call suddenly spiraled out of control and into a homicide situation.
That had happened to Phyllis on more than one occasion. Once she heard the sound of gunfire, she knew there was nothing to be done. Nothing at all. It was over. People were already dead or dying. All Phyllis could do then was send officers to the scene even though she knew their arrival would be too little, too late.
Nose blowing, on the other hand, meant that the people on the other side of the telephone conversation were still alive. They were trying to pull themselves together and regain control. Their grip on self-control might be tenuous but it counted big in Phyllis’s book.
“Try not to worry,” Phyllis said reassuringly. “As I said, officers are currently on their way to that address.”
That was a small white lie because the officers weren’t on their way right that very minute. They wouldn’t get word until Phyllis notified Dispatch at the Grass Valley Police Department. Phyllis did that immediately, but she still felt that there was no real urgency to the matter. After all, it was a simple welfare check. No big hurry. No need for lights or sirens. The officers would get there when they got there, probably after taking their morning coffee break rather than before.
Phyllis then glanced at the clock on the wall across the room. It was almost time for her coffee break. Wanda Harkness, the operator at the next desk, had just come back from her break, and she was now involved in taking a call that sounded no more critical than the one Phyllis had just handled.
For the remainder of that Sunday morning, Phyllis and Wanda handled calls most of which shouldn’t have been 911 calls in the first place. One woman was frantic because her declawed house cat had escaped through an open door and taken off for parts unknown. What if a coyote caught it and ate it? Couldn’t they please do something to help? Someone else had crashed into an empty plastic garbage can hard enough to split it wide open. The car was most likely damaged, but apparently no people were. And one woman, an almost weekly caller, begged them to do something about the noise of those church bells: did they have to ring that loud every single Sunday morning?
Time dragged. Between calls, Phyllis sipped her coffee, worked the
At eleven thirty-eight, Phyllis’s phone lit up. “Nine-one-one,” she said. “What are you reporting?”
“I want to report a missing person,” a woman said, sounding reasonably controlled. This one wasn’t panicky. She wasn’t yelling.
Caller ID said that the call had originated in area code 541. Phyllis recognized that as being somewhere in Oregon. Phyllis’s sister and brother-in-law lived in Roseburg.
“Is the missing person a child or an adult?” Phyllis asked.
“An adult. He’s fifty-three.”
“He’s a relative of yours?”
“Well, sort of. We’re engaged. At least we’re going to be. We had this little disagreement on Thursday. He sent me a link to an engagement ring he was thinking about getting me for Valentine’s Day. The problem is, I didn’t like the one he picked out, and I told him so, but I can’t imagine he’s still mad about that. We talked briefly on Friday morning. He was still upset, but he thought we’d be alright.”
“All right, then,” Phyllis said. “Let me get some information. What’s your name?”
“Dawn,” the woman said. “Dawn Carras from Eugene, Oregon.”
“And your missing fiance’s name?”
“Richard,” Dawn said. “Richard Loomis.”
“Do you have an address?”
“Yes. It’s nine sixteen Jan Road.”
Phyllis managed to keep her voice even and businesslike as she checked Grass Valley records for any listing for Richard Loomis. She found nothing, just as earlier she had found no listing for Janet Silvie’s Richard Lydecker.
This seemed like more than a mere coincidence. Two women had called from opposite ends of the country on
