Two years later, some legal maneuverings continued, but with Ermina sentenced to life without parole in two different states, Brenda Riley, now married to the retired detective Morris, was free to publish the whole story. Scene of the Crime, a new televised true-crime weekly magazine, was prepared to give the story full-court-press treatment for its premiere show, and Ali had agreed to go on camera to tell her part of the story.
It wasn’t until she arrived at the television studio in Phoenix that Ali discovered one of Richard Lowensdale’s cyberstalking victims, Lynn Martinson, formerly of Iowa City, Iowa, was now living in the Phoenix area and would be filming her segment with the same crew in the course of the afternoon.
Lynn-in her mid-forties, at least, a bit on the frumpy side, and incredibly nervous-was already in the greenroom when Ali arrived. A receptionist had just given her the unwelcome news that the film crew and host were delayed, having missed a flight connection. If Ali had known about the delay earlier, she could have stayed for part of the luncheon meeting and driven to Phoenix immediately afterward. Now that she was here, there was nothing to do but wait. She went into the greenroom powder room to reapply her makeup, then settled in to wait.
Lynn, on the other hand, paced the floor and agonized over her hair, makeup, and clothing. “Your makeup is perfect,” she said, examining Ali. “Do I look all right?”
Ali had spent years in front of a camera, and she was an expert in what to do and what not to do. She didn’t have the heart to tell the poor woman the truth.
“You’re fine,” Ali assured her. “The crew will probably have someone along who can doctor your makeup should they decide it needs fixing. Sit down. Relax. It’ll be okay.”
With a resigned sigh, Lynn sank down on one of the room’s several uncomfortable chairs. “I take it you’re one of Richard’s victims, too?” she asked.
“No,” Ali said. “I’m from Sedona. Originally, I was a friend of Brenda’s. I’m the one who ran the background check that started the whole unmasking of Richard Lowensdale.”
“Oh,” Lynn said. “You’re the detective, the one who figured it all out, you and that guy from Grass Valley.”
“Gil Morris is the detective,” Ali said. “I was a concerned bystander.”
“Luckily for Brenda,” Lynn said. “I’m glad you’re not one of us. Because of Richard, I ended up losing everything-my job; my self-respect. And then my son committed suicide. .”
“I’m so sorry,” Ali murmured.
Those three words of sympathy were enough to launch Lynn on a long, sad monologue, leaving Ali no choice but to listen.
“Thank you,” Lynn said. “Lucas died just after I learned the truth about Richard. That’s where I met him, by the way-in a tough-love chat room shortly after Lucas was picked up on drug charges. Here I was, the superintendent of schools, and my kid was in jail for dealing drugs. You can imagine how that went over in a place like Iowa City.
“When Lucas was arrested, my ex refused to take any responsibility. He blamed the whole thing on me, and that’s why I fell so hard for Richard. He told me his name was Richard Lewis. It’s no wonder I fell in love with the guy. Here was a caring man who was willing to listen to my troubles and who really seemed to understand what I was going through because he had a similar story. Richard claimed he had a daughter who had gone down the same druggie path Lucas was on-including spending time in juvie. Fortunately, his daughter had come out all right on the other side.
“Hearing that gave me a glimmer of hope that maybe someday Lucas would be all right, too. Then I found out Richard was a complete fraud, that everything he had told me was a lie-he didn’t even have a daughter. That’s when everything caught up with me, and I went to pieces. I couldn’t go to work. Couldn’t get out of bed some days. It was then, while I was lying around feeling sorry for myself, that Lucas committed suicide. He left a note saying he was sorry but he couldn’t live in prison and he’d rather be dead. That’s my fault, too. If I had been there for him, maybe I could have saved him.”
Listening and nodding, Ali didn’t bother saying what she knew to be true-that kids from even the most loving of families could fall victim to suicide. Survivors were always too ready to accept blame and assume that something they might have done or said, or might not have done or said, would have made a difference.
“I’m sorry,” Ali said again.
Lynn nodded and continued. “With Lucas gone, I just gave up. I ended up quitting my job. I also lost my house. My parents had retired and moved to Surprise. By then my father’s Alzheimer’s was getting worse and worse, so I came here to help my mom look after him. That’s one good thing. Once I was without a job, I was able to lend a hand. I think the stress of looking after a man who was essentially an eighty-year-old toddler would have killed my mother without my help. Alzheimer’s is hell,” she added.
Ali nodded again. Lynn’s tale of woe was appalling. “How’s your dad doing?” Ali asked.
“He passed away a few months ago,” Lynn replied. “I’m sorry he’s gone, but he was gone a long time before he died. It’s not easy, but my mother and I are starting to recover. It’s hard not to feel guilty about feeling relieved. Not everyone gets that. You need to have lived it to really understand. My mother has started reconnecting with her bridge-playing friends, and she’s taken up golf again. As for me? There’s a wonderful new man in my life. A real one this time,” she added with a shy laugh. “Without my coming out here to help my mom, I never would have met Chip.”
The sudden glow on Lynn’s face had nothing to do with makeup, and Ali found herself hoping that Chip was as nice a person as Lynn seemed to think he was.
Ali’s phone rang. The readout showed her mother’s number. A glance at the clock told her the luncheon was most likely over. “Sorry,” she said to Lynn. “I need to take this.” Into the phone, she added, “Hey, Mom, how did it go?”
“Harlan Masters is full of himself,” Edie muttered.
Ali laughed. “That’s hardly news,” she said. “Tell me something we didn’t already know.”
Ali’s longtime boyfriend, B. Simpson, owned High Noon Enterprises, now an internationally respected Internet security company, though the company still did what once was High Noon’s bread-and-butter business-security checks. The one they’d done on Harlan Masters revealed that he was a trust-fund baby. He had moved to Sedona from Southern California some five years earlier and had set out to bring Sedona up to what he regarded as an acceptable level of Southern California sophistication by running for mayor. During his first four-year term, he set out on a program to transform Sedona as far as rules and regulations were concerned. Having never gotten his hands dirty in the world of business, he did so without giving much thought to how much it would cost local businesses to implement some of his bright ideas.
The one that had galvanized Edie into running for office was a city-imposed requirement that restaurants inside the city limits post the calorie and fat content of each item on a menu. That might not have been much of a hardship for chain-type operations, but for struggling independents like the Sugarloaf Cafe, redoing the menus not once but twice-first for the calorie count and later for the fat content-had been a costly process. Naturally, Edie’s signature sweet rolls had been off the charts in both categories.
Emboldened by passing his restaurant regulations through a city council that was completely in the mayor’s pocket, Masters had set off on a campaign to outlaw contrails inside the city limits, thus forcing commercial airline traffic to detour around Sedona’s airspace. Edie thought the whole contrail controversy was nothing short of ridiculous.
“How did the meeting go?” Ali asked.
“He must have worked the word ‘old’ into every other sentence,” Edie grumbled. “As in ‘Now is no time to return to old, timeworn ideas.’ Or ‘Let’s not settle for old-fashioned thinking when what’s needed are progressive youthful ideas to carry us forward in the twenty-first century.’ Everything he said implied that I was old and decrepit, and it took every bit of restraint I could muster to keep from calling that little jerk a young whippersnapper.”