Fatal Error

got some kind of help. He sure needed it. He wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world.”

That, Gil thought, is an outrageous understatement!

“Thanks, Mr. Frost,” he said aloud. “You’ve been most helpful.”

Gil closed his phone, marched back into the house. He stopped by the entryway closet and opened the door. Inside was the old Kirby vacuum cleaner. He left the door open and walked into the living room. By then the body had been zipped into a body bag. Once the body was gone, Gil stopped to chat with the CSI techs who were busily collecting and cataloging computer equipment.

“Found several fingerprints for you,” Cindra said. “Including a real clear one on the tape on the victim’s mouth. Could be the victim’s, could be the killer’s. We’ll run them through AFIS as soon as we can.”

“Good,” Gil said. “The sooner the better. While you’re at it, be sure to pick up the vacuum cleaner in the entryway closet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something useful inside the bag, like a missing finger, for instance. Oh, and dust it for fingerprints as well.”

28

Salton City, California

Lola Cunningham had been a good cook, an excellent cook, actually, and she had been thrilled to pass those skills along to her adopted daughter. And in an effort to make Mina feel at home, Lola had tracked down a traditional Croatian recipe for punjene paprike, stuffed green peppers, and made it her own.

There was a lot about her adopted family and being in the Cunningham house that was repugnant for Mina, but she had loved being in the kitchen with Mama Lola, as her mother liked to be called. They would stand in the kitchen together, side by side, talking and laughing as they diced and sliced, chopped and cooked. Had Lola not died of an undiagnosed heart attack the year Mina turned sixteen, everything might have been different. Mina might have been different, but Lola’s unexpected death had changed everything.

Today though, once Mark finished burying the ashes from the Weber grill, he’d probably return to the couch. Morosely silent, he’d sit there, drinking and watching some inconsequential golf tournament while Mina bustled around the kitchen. She prepared the stuffed peppers the same way Mama Lola had done-well, almost the same way-making two separate batches, one for Mark and one for Mina.

Working in the kitchen always made Mina happy. She hummed a little tune as she ground up the necessary ingredients-the beef and the pork and the onions-that would go into the green peppers she had brought home with her from San Diego for this very purpose. Finding decent green peppers or decent anything else in the godforsaken little grocery store in Salton City was pretty much impossible. She estimated that the extra doses of seasonings she added to the mix should be enough to conceal a few other things.

As she hacked the tops off peppers, Mina found herself thinking fondly of Richard. He had surprised her and proved to be far more of a man than she ever would have expected. She was sorry not to have the money back, but even so, Richard had won a measure of respect from his killer that he probably would have appreciated if he had lived long enough to know about it.

As for Mark? He was useless, spineless, and boring. His money had been a major part of his appeal. Now that the money was gone, so was the attraction. She enjoyed the prospect of torturing him with the idea that she expected him to take care of Brenda single-handedly and that she wanted him to do it tonight. It would be immensely entertaining to see him sitting there stone-faced while he struggled to come to terms with the very idea. She didn’t doubt that he’d need to fill himself with some kind of liquid courage-gin most likely, gin on the rocks with a twist of lime.

Just to keep him off balance, she would pretend that everything was fine and that she believed that he’d do what she wanted. Wasn’t that why she was hustling around in this grim little kitchen fixing him a sumptuous dinner?

Whenever Mina noticed that Mark’s drink needed refilling, she would pick up his glass without being asked. And later, along with the brimming glasses, she would hand him one of his little blue pills. After all, Mark was an older man with a drinking problem and a much younger wife. In the shorthand of their marriage, the proffered drink was a peace offering. The little blue pill would be a bribe.

San Diego, California

Brenda awakened in the dark. She was stiff, hungry, and agonizingly thirsty. While she had been asleep, she had evidently shifted positions. The weight of her body had been resting on her imprisoned hands. As circulation returned to her hands and fingers, so did a storm of needles and pins.

“I’m going to die,” she said aloud. Her voice was an unnatural croak. “I’m going to die here and alone and in the dark.”

She would have wept then, but she didn’t want to risk losing whatever moisture might be in her tears.

Her aching shoulder reminded her of her uncle Joe. She hadn’t thought about her father’s brother in years. Uncle Joe had come home after five years of being a POW of the Vietcong. His teeth were gone-broken out-and his broken limbs never healed properly. He had ended up in a wheelchair, but he had never complained. Brenda had asked him about his experiences once when she’d been putting together a Veteran’s Day piece for the news.

“Yes, it was hard,” he said, “but all I had to do each day was choose to live.”

Returning to the States, he had refused to accept the idea that his life was over. He had gone back to school and married his high school sweetheart. He had gone on to become a teacher and a winning football coach who had taken his team to championship games year after year. He had also been the kindest and most amazingly positive man Brenda had ever met. Could she be like him?

Lying there alone, Brenda couldn’t help thinking about how far she had fallen short in that regard, and she had no one to blame but herself. Losing her job and her marriage and being betrayed by Richard Lowensdale were nothing when compared to what Uncle Joe and his fellow wartime captives had endured. Unlike Uncle Joe, Brenda had capitulated. And now, when she was finally sober and getting back on her feet, this happened.

But what is this? she wondered.

Did it have something to do with Richard or with the book she was writing about him? The days before waking up in this place seemed shrouded in fog. Maybe one of the women she had interviewed had gone back to Richard and told him about Too Good to Be True, the book Brenda was writing. But this wasn’t Richard’s house. It couldn’t be. This cold, hard floor was too clean.

Thinking about the unfinished book brought Brenda back to her mother. Even if she didn’t let on to her sister, Brenda knew that she should have told her mother about the sale. It had been easier to keep quiet. She had kept everything about the book-her research materials, the signed contract for Too Good to Be True, and her laptop under lock and key in what had once been her mother’s hope chest. She had carried the key with her, in her purse, because she had worried that someone-one of her mother’s caregivers or even her sister-might go prying. But now her purse was gone and the key was gone. The only way anyone would be able to gain access to the chest would be to break the lock.

Brenda understood the huge debt she owed to her mother-financially and emotionally-and she fully intended to pay it all back. But not just yet. Brenda had known instinctively that with her still very fragile hold on sobriety, living on her own might well have been too much.

And so for whatever reason-whatever excuse-Brenda had kept a lid on news about the sale. Now, though, since she was probably going to sit in this chair until she died, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

After all, Brenda had disappointed her mother more times than she could count. If Camilla didn’t know about the book, she wouldn’t have any unreasonable expectations. It was a blessing for Brenda to know that her mother wouldn’t be disappointed.

Again.

In the darkness, Brenda drifted into something that wasn’t exactly sleeping or waking. She was a girl again, maybe ten or eleven. It was a Sunday afternoon. She and her older sister were out in the driveway of her parents’ house on P Street, shooting hoops at the basket that hung over the garage door.

Aunt Amy and Uncle Joe had come for dinner. As they were getting ready to go home, Uncle Joe had