A Sense of Justice

by Jack Davis

  Descending into the gloom, Alice slipped in a viscous liquid at the bottom of the stairs. Cursing, she struggled to stand and find the light switch.

  What passed through the young realtor’s eyes that pleasant summer morning etched itself into her psyche. Two bloated human forms, taped hand and foot to chairs bolted to the floor, faced each other at a distance of ten feet. The remains appeared to be a man and a woman.

  The victims sat motionless, mouths agape in noiseless tortured screams. Both corpses had vacant eye sockets; the woman’s eyes still attached by optic nerves and sinew, hanging on either side of her face just below her chin. The man, eyes severed from the dangling entrails, had one clutched in each hand.

  Mercifully regurgitation stopped her inspection of the eviscerations. Through the gore, now mixed with vomit, Alice clambered up the stairs and out of the house. Regrettably for the realtor, emotionally she never would make it out of that dimly lit, blood-drenched basement.

  2 | ‘For the Children’

  Northern Virginia, 07/20-21/01

  The Leesburg, VA, Police Department hadn’t had to investigate a murder for four years when the frantic 911 call came in from a traumatized realtor. More significantly, it had been fifteen years since they’d actually had to develop a suspect other than a spouse. They were going into the investigation without a lot of game-time experience in this type of case.

  The two mutilated corpses fit the general description of a couple reported missing from Warrenton three days prior. It was obvious, even to officers who hadn’t witnessed a crime scene this grisly before, that both victims had been horribly tortured before they died.

  Contact with the Warrenton PD indicated the missing couple had been white, suburban, and middle class. The wife’s sister had reported them missing two days earlier.

  By nine p.m. the night of the disappearance, WPD had been at the Daltons’ house asking questions and doing some preliminaries. Although there were no obvious signs of foul play, when they were able to speak with Mr. Dalton’s employer and determine he had called in sick, the police put out a BOLO for the Daltons’ cars. Procedurally, WPD would have to wait another twelve hours before the incident could officially be classified as a missing persons investigation, but because of the Daltons’ children, the police were doing everything they would have anyway.

  The detectives asked the relatives the standard questions: marriage, finances, and drugs, but didn’t come up with anything out of the ordinary.

  It wasn’t until the next day that eyebrows started to rise.

  Detective Steve Price made the mistake of arriving at the Daltons’ house shortly before his partner. He was greeted by a frumpy middle-aged woman with thick glasses and thinning hair. Worse yet, she had a clipboard.

  “Good morning, detective, my name is Mindy Nichols. I am the president and treasurer of the Sideburn Run Neighborhood Watch.”

  Why would the neighborhood watch need a treasurer? was the question that blotted out the rotund little woman’s next sentence. Price hoped it wasn’t important and tried to recover. “Hi, I’m Detective Steve Price.” He smiled, but before he could say another word, the woman was off again.

  “While I was making my twenty-two-hundred-hour perimeter sweep with Thor last night, I observed that there was a police car in front of the Daltons’ house. I hurried home to put Thor in the house, and by the time I got back the officers were gone.”

  Price swallowed hard, realizing from the length and nature of the preamble, not to mention the clipboard, that he was in for a lengthy talk. He pulled out a notepad and pen.

  “Ma’am, can you repeat your name and provide me with some contact information?”

  As Price prepared to write, she handed him glossy business card. Pretty expensive card…hence the need for a treasurer.

  “Now as I was saying…”

  For the next five minutes Price listened as Nichols droned on about every superfluous problem involving the Daltons, from the way they let their daughter dress, to the fact they shot off illegal fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  Price was just about to feign a call, when Mrs. Nichols, in a, one-professional-to-another manner, explained that, “As a board member of the neighborhood watch, I’ve taken down the license plate numbers of cars outside the Daltons’ house during their problematic behavior.” She handed Price four pieces of loose-leaf paper from her clipboard. On it were columns with the headings DATE, TIME, PLATE, DESCRIPTION, etc.

  Price immediately visualized Nichols with binoculars peering out her kitchen window, straining to make out license plate numbers and scribbling them down. In his mind she was wearing a camouflage housecoat.

  “This is very thorough. It’ll be helpful.”

  Mindy Nichols gave the self-contented smile of someone who just knew that someday all her hard work would pay off. With renewed vigor, she continued her discourse.

  For six more interminable minutes, Price was bombarded with more minutia, most of which focused on the fact the Daltons had put up a shed in their back yard without permission from the HOA. He was about to send her on her way and connect with his partner, who had sidestepped the two and gone in the house, when Nichols finally said something else he thought might be of interest.

  “If it weren’t during the week, I would’ve thought they were away on one of their weekend rendezvous.”

  “Weekend rendezvous, ma’am?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but I will, for the kids’ sake. The Daltons run an internet porn website.” Nichols slowly shook her head and pursed her lips.

  Price noticed how Mrs. Nichols pushed her reservations of saying anything bad aside.

  “I haven’t seen it of course, but Kimberly Chalmers who lives up the street at 4301 confirmed it after she found out her husband Walt had gone there. I honestly don’t know if they’ll be able to keep their marriage together if he doesn’t do something about that vile habit. Kimmy says she’s caught him four times this year, and it’s only July. I told her—”

  “Ma’am, can we get back to the Daltons, please?”

  “Oh yes, like I said, Kimmy told me she’d gone to the site just to confirm it, so she wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true, that would be gossip, and a sin. Sure enough there was a picture of Sandy in her underwear, and not much of that either. I guess if you keep clicking, you get to see all of her,” Nichols stopped, as if to clarify the source of the information again. “From what Kimmy said, that was about the time she decided not to let her kids play with the Dalton children. I don’t blame her; if my kids were that age, I wouldn’t let them be around that type of trash.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do you happen to know the name of the site or anything else about it?”

  “Kimmy said it’s called Swing with Sandy. From what she said, it’s a swingers site. I had no idea what that was, being a good Christian, but Kimmy said it’s a site where,” and Mindy leaned in toward the detective and whispered, “the husband and wife exchange partners…for sex. From what Kimmy says, that’s where the Daltons go, when they go away for weekends. They go meet other perverts and spend the weekend doing, those horrid things. They make videos of themselves so they can put it on their website. The vile things you can find on the internet. I have my computer in my kitchen, so I know what my family is looking at all the time. I…”

  Price listened to ten more minutes of Nichols running down her other neighbors and occasionally get back to the topic of the Daltons before he was reasonably sure there were no more nuggets in the pan. He disengaged by telling her he needed to start to follow-up on the information she had provided.

  He watched as a thoroughly pleased Mindy Nichols walked away, sure she’d done her civic duty as a good neighbor, a good citizen, and most importantly, the president of the neighborhood watch!

  Once inside the Daltons’ house, Price slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and ran his hands through his hair. His partner came in smiling.

  “I saw you talking with the sec
ret police out there. I thought about trying to save you but it’s dangerous to try and rescue a drowning man. Most of the time, you get dragged down and drown with ‘em.”

  “Coward,” Price said as he let his head fall backwards.

  After Price had sufficient time to decompress from close to twenty-five minutes of feigned interest, he explained what Nichols had told him. Both men agreed they needed to check into the license plates, and the secret side of the Daltons’ lives. They also agreed if they had to view some pornography to crack the case, well, it came with the territory.

  3 | Shifting Resources

  Leesburg, Virginia, 07-09/2001

  The brutality of the killings brought a level of scrutiny to the investigation that added thoroughness. Although spearheaded by Detective Price, other aspects were farmed out to jurisdictions based on their expertise in a specific discipline. In this way, blood splatter experts were brought in from the Washington Metropolitan PD. The coroner from Fairfax County was engaged to “assist” the local medical examiner on the autopsies. The Virginia State Police were requested to conduct analysis of the tire prints around the Stratos hangar and murder scene.

  Through this process of partnership with the experts, the Secret Service was selected to analyze the vast amounts of electronic media. Agents from the Washington Field Office Electronic Crimes Task Force were in Warrenton within two hours of receiving the call.

  Detective Price’s immediate focus for the ECTF was a complete identification of the Daltons’ customer database, the goal being to put names to the email addresses. It was painstaking work, but through sixteen-hour days, the agents were able to associate real people to all of the accounts.

  After the initial rush to identify the account holders, Price tasked the agents with the more mundane chore of examining all the data that had been seized.

  The agents spent weeks methodically reviewing terabytes of information from multiple servers, six random hard drives, two desktop computers along with three laptop, dozens of thumb drives, and hundreds of discs.

  To assist on some of the more esoteric aspects of the analysis, the agents relied on their partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. The CMU SEI had National Security Agency capabilities but without the classified restrictions.

  The Service sent their SEI colleagues in Pittsburgh everything, and in the interest of time, instructed that the results be sent back directly to the Leesburg PD.

  CMU SEI completed the analysis the first week in September and forwarded the information to LPD the following Monday morning. The synopsis of the report indicated that no information of unusual interest was found in any of the media.

  Buried on page thirty-one of the report, in the section entitled Code Analysis, was an exhaustive dissection of a hacking code found on the system. It was deemed to be unique and original in nature, not just a rehash of a common hacking program available on the web.

  The author of the code was described as “a classically-trained programmer with considerable skill. He/She signs work MichaelTAA. All attempts to identify author within/outside indices/databases at CMU SEI have been negative.”

  The final paragraph of the analysis, while accurate, was misleading. It read, “No evidence exists to indicate MichaelTAA accessed the credit card database or stole any other PII from victim’s commercial site.”

  In an afternoon telephone call set up to answer any questions the detectives had, a borderline-genius SEI analyst, unintentionally buried the issue of the hack with, “It’s probably just some hacker who wants free porn. We’ve all—”

  “Seen this done before. We’ve all seen this kinda thing before,” said the analyst’s supervisor, nano-seconds before the young man inadvertently confessed to a felony on a phone call with four cops and two Secret Service agents. The humor of the situation, coupled with the certitude of the analyst, pushed the group past the topic of the hacker.

  When the call ended, Detective Price mentally moved on from the electronic portion of the evidence. He decided to take the weekend off, and start double-checking the physical evidence and re-interviewing all the clients the following Monday.

  The events of September 11th, 2001 made the Dalton case, along with almost everything else not terrorism-related, of secondary importance. The double murder had been the priority investigation for multiple law enforcement jurisdictions for three months. Hundreds of leads were tracked down, every conceivable database was accessed, and every informant known to the investigators was pushed for information. Everything that could have been done had been. There was nothing. Now, with America under attack, all jurisdictions justifiably refocused their resources.

  Part Two

  4 | ‘Not a Good Idea’

  Brooklyn, New York, 09/21/09, 1148 hours

  Patrick, “PJ,” Morley, stood on the steps to the building housing the New York Field Office of the Secret Service. The Electronic Crimes Task Force supervisor peered over the top of his sunglasses staring intently at the traffic as his phone rang. He recognized the number; it wasn’t the woman he was expecting.

  “Hi,” said PJ, not trying to hide his surprise, “aren’t you at the UN?” Listening to the response he nodded reflexively before his next question. “Is the afternoon shift gonna push you there?…That’s not horrible; you’ll be back at the R O N by fourteen-thirty at the latest.”

  He knew the answer to the next question but asked it anyway, “You gonna run in the park this afternoon?”

  He pushed his sunglasses back into place and smiled before continuing, “Me? I’m outside the office waiting for my mom…I’m serious. She called this morning in a panic. Said she had to talk to me in person about something urgent…No, she said Sean was fine…No idea. She wouldn’t talk about it on the phone. She’s nervous about something, really nervous…I offered, but she was adamant about meeting me here. That’s why I’m standing outside. If I don’t catch her on the first pass, she’ll spend the next two days driving around the block.” PJ took a few steps to his left to avoid the glare of the sun from windows across the street.

  “Nah, I got a minute, but if I see her, I’ll have to go. What’s up?” Listening, PJ slowly shook his head and sighed heavily. “That’s not a good idea.” His features softened. “You want the reasons alphabetically or in order of importance?”

  The reply deepened PJ’s smile. “Do I need to remind you what happened the last time we got together to talk about, us? I’m still stunned we didn’t get caught…I’m not blaming you,” he said defensively, “I’m just trying to avoid a repeat of my last epic failure at this.” He smiled at his lover’s response.

  “Let’s meet someplace out of the way, so we don’t run into anyone else…You choose…Eighteen-hundred work for you?”

  PJ saw a familiar blue Toyota Camry puttering slowly up the street, backing up traffic for a full block.

  “Hey, I gotta go. Call me and let me know where to meet you.” He hit end call and headed for the street.

  In what PJ considered a minor victory, he was able to get his mother pulled over to the curb before the people behind her started laying on their horns.

  He leaned in the passenger window. “Why don’t I drive?”

  “That’s probably best,” agreed Margaret Morley. “I’ll put the address into the map thing.”

  “It’s called a GP…” PJ realized the futility of what he was trying to do and moved on. “You mind telling me the big secret and where we’re going?”

  “Just go toward Long Island. I’ll put the address in as we go.”

  “Mom, the car won’t allow you to do that. It has to be stopped to enter the address; for safety.”

  After sixty agonizing seconds of watching his mother try to use the GPS, PJ gently interrupted. “You want me to do that?” His mother gave a knowing look and handed her son a yellow Post-it note with a Port Washington, Long Island address. In a few seconds he hit enter and started driving.

  “Okay, now can you tell m
e what we’re doing?”

  “I need you to talk to someone and set him straight.”

  PJ smiled involuntarily. “Mom, you know I’d do anything for you. But set someone straight? That’s pretty vague. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  Margaret stared out the passenger window as she answered, but her voice was unusually clear, “I would really like you to castrate someone, but that’s too much to ask.”

  “What?” PJ’s question came out as half laugh, half question.

  “You heard me. Don’t make me say that word again.”

  PJ looked at his mother in amused disbelief. “Mom, that’s the kind of,” he paused momentarily, “thing I could hear Dad saying, not you.”

  “Patrick John Morley,” the Irish brogue in Margaret’s voice became more evident as she used her son’s full name, “don’t talk about your father like that! God rest his soul.”

  PJ found a spot and pulled over.

  “Mom, this could adversely affect your canonization, not to mention my career as a Secret Service agent.”

  Seeing tears on his mother’s cheeks, PJ knew his attempt at humor had missed the mark. The frustration and anxiety combined to overcome his mother and she started to sob. PJ leaned over and hugged her. “Mom, it’ll be okay. What’s got you so upset? We can take care of it; just tell me what’s wrong.” PJ opened the windows to get fresh air.

  The breeze seemed to help. In a minute Margaret composed herself enough to talk through the sniffles. “Do you remember the first school Sean attended? The school with the special-needs program outside Newark?”

  “St. Teresa’s?”

  “Yes. Do you remember his first friend there, a little blond-haired girl, Mary Lingram?”

  “Yeah, they were inseparable until she moved away. Sweet little girl, hair always in pigtails, big brown eyes. Sean talked about her every day.”

  “Yes, that’s Mary. Her family moved to Long Island about the time you got out of the Marines. Esther, Mary’s mom, and I have kept in touch over the years. Yesterday she called me crying hysterically.”