bed?”
They went to bed early but not necessarily to sleep. When Ali woke up the next morning, B. was sitting in the love seat, shuffling through a set of papers. A tray with a pot of coffee and two cups sat on the side table.
Ali scrambled out of bed, pulled on a robe, and poured herself a cup of coffee. She would have sat down on the love seat, but the spot next to B. was already occupied by Sam. Rather than move Samantha, Ali went back and perched on the end of the bed.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The background check you ordered,” B. replied.
“It’s already here?”
“Stu’s been a busy little bee. And he gets things done. He must have dropped it off last night. Leland found it just inside the gate when he went down this morning to collect the newspaper. From the looks of this, your friend’s ex-boyfriend is a pretty interesting character.”
With that, B. handed Ali the first of several pages.
“But wait,” Ali said as soon as she read the top line of the header. “This is about somebody named Richard Lowensdale. I’m sure Brenda told me Richard’s last name was Lattimer.”
“That may be what he
Continuing to read the report, Ali was appalled. “It looks like everything Richard Lowensdale told Brenda is a lie.”
“Pretty much,” B. agreed.
Yes, Richard had worked for a defense contractor, but as a minor player, not a big one. It turned out that Rutherford International was a small, minority-owned company with a niche market that supplied drone controllers. Lowensdale had a degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, but his career wasn’t exactly stellar. For one thing, he had spent time bouncing from one employer to another. For another, Stuart Ramey’s search of various databases revealed no patents issued in his name and no scientific papers listing him as author. His only listed hobby included a lifelong interest in model airplanes-remote-control model airplanes.
“Model planes,” B commented. “That fits.”
“What fits?” asked Ali.
“He’s worked on drones. UAVs. Unmanned aerial vehicles-like the ones our troops are using in the Middle East.”
“Aren’t those a lot bigger?” Ali asked. “Like Piper Cubs?”
“Some are,” B. agreed. “The ones they’re using in Afghanistan, the Predators that fire the big missiles, are about that big, but the ones Rutherford was working on are much smaller. The most they could possibly carry would be a forty-pound payload, and some not even that much.”
“So what’s the big deal then?” Ali asked.
“There’s an even smaller variety that’s about the size of those remote-control helicopters that were such a hit at Christmas a couple of years ago. They can look in a window of a building and take out a single target sitting in the room without damaging anyone else.”
“So there’s less chance of collateral damage,” Ali said.
“Exactly,” B. agreed. “They cost a lot less because of size. They can go places where it would be too dangerous to have a piloted aircraft. Regardless of size, drones are relatively silent. They fly low enough to avoid radar detection. They can do precision targeting, and if you release enough of them at once, you can create a swarm.
“Think about it. If you have a single offensive weapon flying at any given target, chances are you’ve got a missile defense of some sort that has a good chance of taking that one missile transport device down. If you’ve got several hundred tiny drones heading in all at the same time, defenders can probably take out some, but not all of them.”
“Like trying to chase off a swarm of killer bees with a fly swatter.”
“Exactly.”
“So Lowensdale worked for Rutherford and then he stopped,” Ali said. “How come?”
“Because the bottom dropped out of the drone market,” B. explained. “For a long time it looked like Rutherford was going to snag one of the big cushy military contracts. When that didn’t happen, when those opportunities went away, so did most of Rutherford’s employees, including Richard. The only people left working there are the owner and her husband, Ermina and Mark Blaylock and maybe a secretary. Definitely a skeleton crew.”
“Richard Lattimer or Lowensdale or whoever he is told Brenda that he was an integral part of the design team. Was he?”
“I think it’s more likely that he was just a cog in the wheel. When the layoffs hit, Lowensdale was let go right along with everyone else.”
Ali studied a line in the report. “It says here that he was laid off in February of last year.”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s over a year before Brenda had any inkling he was no longer working in San Diego. Every time she made plans to go down there to see him, he came up with some phony excuse or another as to why she shouldn’t come to visit. They were in this supposedly serious relationship without ever laying eyes on one another. How on earth could he deceive her like that for so long?”
“You tell me,” B. said with a smile. “On paper, at least, he’s nothing special. He has two degrees to his credit-a BS from UCLA and an MBA from Phoenix University. He also routinely signed documents with the PE designation, even though there’s no record of his ever having earned it.”
“Physical education?” Ali asked.
“Professional engineer. Requirements vary from state to state, but you have to take and pass exams that demonstrate an understanding of all kinds of engineering principles with an emphasis on your own specialty. I suspect he’s an adequate kind of guy.”
“Adequate but not brilliant,” Ali said.
“And with a real tendency to inflate his accomplishments. I’m thinking his BS was totally appropriate.”
Ali agreed and went back to reading. After being laid off in San Diego, Lowensdale had moved back to Grass Valley. His parents-his mother and stepfather-had died in a car crash more than two years earlier, leaving Richard as their sole heir. For a while he had renters living in the house, but after he lost his job and needed a less expensive place to live, he got rid of the renters-evicted them, actually-and then had moved back to Grass Valley in July.
“What a creep,” Ali said. “He’s spent the past year living forty miles or so from Brenda, all the while claiming he was still in San Diego.”
“Right. Since he was no longer there, no wonder he needed to find one excuse after another to explain why Brenda shouldn’t go to San Diego to visit him.”
“What’s this house in Grass Valley like?” Ali asked.
After shuffling through some extra papers, B. plucked a single sheet out of the bunch.
“According to his Zillow report, Lowensdale’s place on Jan Road is valued at two hundred eighty-five thousand.”
“That’s pretty reasonable,” Ali said. “Especially for California real estate. Must be fairly modest, but still, if he hasn’t worked in more than a year, what does he do for money?”
“He doesn’t appear to need much,” B. said. “He was on unemployment for a while, but there was also some kind of insurance settlement-with an undisclosed amount-that came as a result of the drunk-driving incident that killed his mother and stepfather. His ride is a ten-year-old Cadillac, which, like the house, he inherited from his mother. He apparently orders online and has everything delivered-food, clothing, books, electronics, you name it. His medications come from an online pharmacy in Canada. Oh, and as far as Stu can tell, he doesn’t have garbage service, or at least he doesn’t pay for it.”
“What about his father?” Ali asked.
B. gave Ali a puzzled look. “Did his father have garbage service?”
