by Alec Peche
“Yeah, we are close to being able to sell some of the inventions created in the warehouse. What’s your not quite cold case?”
“It’s a child abduction, the girl vanished without a trace five years ago. So the police wanted some fresh eyes and assigned it to me. It wasn't in their cold case files, but it's been a while since they have come up with anything new.”
Damien’s heart began pounding and he wondered what he would say to Natalie when she said they were looking for a child by the name of Hannah Sherwood.
Chapter 2
“The child’s name is Olivia Roth and she would be nine or ten-years-old by now. She was in a park close to dusk with her mother five years ago. The file says that the mother glanced down at an email and when she glanced back up seconds later expecting to find her daughter on the gym slide, she was gone. She spent a few moments calling for her daughter and running around the playground searching, and then dialed 9–1–1. That story is for the most part verified by her cell phone records.”
Damien’s sense of relief was so acute when he heard the child’s name that he missed the subsequent words from Natalie. He should have known not to panic as Hermione's home was not in Natalie's San Jose Police Department jurisdiction. He quickly resumed listening to what Natalie was describing.
“The file is pretty thick with investigative reports so if you have time tomorrow, I’d like to meet with you and go over the file to see what ideas you have from a technology perspective. Are you available?”
Damian thought about the search he was doing on Hermione’s poster and the work he’d neglected that day in his warehouse and knew he wouldn’t have time. But he thought of the parents of that child and knew he needed to find the time for Natalie.
“I’m swamped at the moment, so if you could come to the warehouse in Richmond tomorrow, I’ll have sub-sandwiches waiting for you, and we'll take lunch to go over the file. Would that work?”
“Yes, that’s fine, It will give me a chance to try and understand what’s Haley’s working on if you don’t mind me distracting her for a few minutes.”
“I would never stand between a mother and her daughter-in-law. Spend all the time you want with Haley.”
“Thanks Damian, she’s lucky to be working for you. She always raves about how much she loves her job. Sometimes, I think she makes Trevor wistful as he loves his job, but not nearly to the degree that she does. She also really enjoys her co-workers.”
“That’s good to hear and tell Trevor he has nothing to worry about as far as his standing in her life. She raves about him here so much that her co-workers are rolling their eyes sometimes in front of her. It’s all good. We have a good crew here.”
Damian heard Natalie laugh and they soon ended the call after confirming a time for lunch. Damian made a calendar entry to remind himself to order lunch the next day. He had corporate accounts in restaurants locally and his staff took turns ordering lunch every day. He would take over the ordering the next day.
He returned to Hermione’s mystery and his fingerprint analysis. He lifted six prints off the poster including his own. The computer had matched himself to three of the prints which was no surprise as he’d touched the page multiple time getting it off the bulletin board and folding into his jacket. Two other names popped up - a couple he determined might be neighbors of the Sherwoods as they had the same street name in their address. He’d bet they called the number on the poster. The computer was still searching for one print, and the other identified as an employee of Pete’s that he recognized the name of.
Damian moved on to the telephone number listed, but soon found it was a random cell phone number; the kind you bought at Walmart and activated without identifying yourself. What else could he do?
Then an idea came to him, he could at least track the location of the cell phone number even if he had no idea of who owned it. He just needed to identify the telephone carrier that the number belonged to. Telephones of all kinds sent out location signals trying to find cellular towers. It was a great feature if you were lost and needed someone to find you, but those same telephone carriers sold your data for profit since they collected it. He’d purchase access to those lists a few years ago and so began the search for the telephone’s location.
When he landed on the right carrier’s list, he was startled at what he found.
“Oh my God,” he said to his empty laboratory.
‘What does the U.S. Court System want with Hermione?’ Damian thought.
He rechecked the address, and it was indeed the address of the U.S. Courtroom on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco. What did a judge want with Hermione?
He decided he needed to know what all was included in that building. Were Hermione’s parents being held there? Were the three of them wanted for the kidnapping they had done of a Malaysian national? What services were in that building that might possibly want Hermione and why had the search for her been undertaken in such an odd manner. Damian did a reverse look-up to see what services were located in the courthouse.
It was a surprisingly lengthy list of occupants besides the courts. The agencies included the IRS, the FBI, the US Attorney, Homeland Security, a collection of different courts and the U.S. Marshals Service. Better that it was the FBI or the IRS after Hermione than a judge. He thought the FBI would protect her, and the IRS would leave her alone as she was too young to pay taxes. Also, he’d been monitoring her family home and knew the property taxes were paid on it, so she wasn’t at risk of losing her heritage.
He glanced at the time and noted he needed to leave soon to head across the bay to Ariana’s house in Belvedere. He wrote a program to crunch the data on the phone’s movements based on it pinging cell phone towers. That might give him some clues as to had the phone in their possession. He fed the cats and then left in his speedy two-seater boat to travel the eight or so nautical miles to Ariana’s dock.
He walked up to her house from the dock greeting Miguel, her Portuguese Water Dog along the way. They had time a for a ten-minute chat to strategize the poster and the upcoming conversation with Hermione. Damian left the original poster in his lab and brought a copy with him. After the soccer try-outs, they planned to have dinner at a pizza parlor which was Hermione’s favorite place, and she’d likely be hungry after all the running of the try-out.
Ariana grabbed her stadium seats as they would sit in the bleachers on the football field and watch. They knew that Hermione would be tested on her speed, dribbling the ball in and out of cones, and accuracy kicks in the net. She would also get a few attempts to take the ball away from other players. As opposed to swimming and water polo, they both worried about ‘headers’ in soccer causing concussions, but they settled in with the hope that she’d make the team as it was her decision to try.
Ninety minutes later they had their answers. Hermione had made the team, but not in the position they expected. Likely due to her water polo experience she exhibited the best goalkeeper skills of anyone on the team. It was a position that alternated between boredom, when the ball was at the other end of the field, and terror when a ball was flying at the net that she needed to block. It was clear from the tryouts that she had the best hands to grab the ball out of the air.
“I’m thrilled that’s her position. She’ll have far less opportunity to do headers in that position,” Ariana observed.
“She’s cool under pressure, so she’ll handle that part of the game well.”
Hermione came over to the bleachers, sweaty and dirty from making a few leaps to the turf to block balls and said, “Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll meet you at the car.”
Then she stopped and looked at the two of them and said, “What’s up? You don’t look like yourselves.”
They should have expected her astuteness, she was fabulous at reading people. She'd make a great goalkeeper as she would read the opposing players well and guess with accuracy where they were going to kick the ball into the net.
“It’s nothing major. We�
��ll talk about it after you’ve had time to shower. We’ll see you at the car,” Ariana reassured her and after staring at her substitute parents for a few seconds Hermione turned and ran into the gym.
“That kid is too smart, sensitive, and athletic. I couldn’t be prouder of her,” Ariana said her voice wobbling.
“Yeah, she is special. She seems so normal and well adjusted given what she went through with her parents and seems able to trust us to always do the best for her. Before we both descend into crying talking about how super she is and embarrass ourselves and her in front of the other parents, let’s retreat to the car.”
Ten minutes later, her short dark hair wet, Hermione joined them at the car.
“Hey sweetie, I forgot to ask - how do you like playing the goalkeeper?” Ariana asked.
“I’m excited that I made the team and I had my heart set on being a forward. But during the try out I could see that I had the best skills to be the goalkeeper. It’s not that I can jump higher than the others, I’m best at reading their minds and guessing which corner of the net they were aiming for which allowed me to get into position to block it. The more I’ve thought about the position, the more I like it. What happened today that has you two worried?” Hermione asked launching immediately into the problem.
Whoa, was Damian and Ariana’s internal response, the kid sure could change directions quickly.
“I went to Pete’s Bar for lunch today craving one of his cheeseburgers,” Damian started to explain.
He saw Hermione relax slightly as she responded, “He does have the best cheeseburgers. I get that.”
“I went back to his office with him to look at some pictures that he’d taken, and I saw this poster on his bulletin board,” Damian said handing the poster to Hermione in the back seat. “That’s a copy. The original is in my laboratory.”
There was silence in the car as Hermione studied the poster and the two adults waited for her next question.
“That’s a dated picture of me from two years ago that I had taken for school.”
“Yes I figure that’s where the picture came from. Interestingly Pete walked by the poster I don’t know how many times and didn’t recognize you.”
“I’ve lost a little of the kid fat from my face, and my hair color and shorter style have disguised me which is good. So what else do you know about this poster Damian?”
Kudos to the kid for knowing that Damian would go to work immediately researching anything he could about the poster.
“I copied fingerprints off the poster, and one pair belongs to what I suspect are old neighbors of yours since they lived on the same street as you - the Stevensons?”
“Yes, they were our next-door neighbors, but they didn’t have any kids my age. What else did you find?”
They had pulled up to the pizza parlor and Ariana said, “Do you want me to get take-out or do you want to finish the conversation inside?”
“It’s a noisy place, so I think we're good talking inside and the pizza is better when it’s fresh,” Damian said.
They walked in and after placing their order grabbed a booth and Damian listened to the ambient noise and then leaned in to talk with Hermione and Ariana seated across from him.
“I looked up the number on the poster and it’s one of those phones you buy at Walmart with an activation card. There’s no record of who purchased it. I used another system to find that the phone was physically located at the US Courthouse in San Francisco around 2:30 this afternoon. It could have belonged to a visitor to the courthouse or one of about ten agencies with offices inside. Oh, and there’s one fingerprint remaining to be identified that my system was still running when I left the island.”
“What are the agencies in this courthouse?” Hermione asked.
“Justice Department has several services, FBI, US Marshals, Passport Agency, and Homeland Security.”
Hermione was quiet for a few minutes as Damian and Ariana sipped their sodas and waited for her to ask questions.
“Do you think someone is doing this for my parents or do you think someone is trying to use me to bring my parents out of hiding?”
“Good questions sweetie, I don’t know,” Ariana replied.
“I’m going to watch the movement of the phone to see if that clues me into who has it.”
“You can do that?” Hermione asked doubtfully.
“Yes, the phone pings a cell tower on a regular interval looking for a connection and I have access to that data.”
“Do you think that Ariana and I are safe at home?”
That was a question he hadn’t thought of yet, and so he took a moment to answer Hermione’s question.
“Yes....I think you’re safe. I don’t think that poster was put up today. I’ll look at how long the phone has been pinging and that might give us a clue. My last trip to Pete’s was several months ago and I don’t remember if I walked down that hallway. The original paper no longer looks crisp; my guess is the poster has been on that bulletin board for weeks to months. To me that says that whoever is seeking information about you has no idea where you are so I think you’re safe.”
“Ok.”
With that, Hermione seemed ready to return to a discussion of soccer and Damian and Ariana obliged her.
Chapter 3
Damian’s computer had continued churning away overnight and he’d arrived at his warehouse knowing that it needed more time to churn the large amount of data he was asking for. Lunch had arrived at the building and Natalie arrived early for a tour with Haley as to what she was doing in the lab. Some of her co-workers had taken great pleasure in showing off their inventions as well. Once the food delivery was made, Damian joined the group to fill a plate and motioned for Natalie to do likewise and follow him into his office when she had her plate full to her satisfaction.
She was seated at a side table in his office with her lunch to the side of a rather large paper file. In between bites she told the story. A mother after a long day at work, a five-year-old happily playing in a park, mom watching and smiling with occasional glances at a cell phone. One minute she was there and the next, Olivia Roth vanished into thin air.
“The police were on the scene in less than three minutes of the girl’s disappearance. The FBI joined the case in under two hours. Despite multiple police agencies and this thick file, no clues were found to the girl’s location. Fortunately, there have been no unidentified young females that have turned up dead in this region since her disappearance. So the best guess of law enforcement is she’s still alive. I’m developing such a reputation for solving cold cases thanks to you, that the department asked me to look into this abduction to see if we could solve it. It’s not a cold case, rather it’s a case that everyone feels bad about and perhaps your data brain can come up with some new angles to search.”
Damian looked at the binder and knew he needed to read some of it so he didn’t waste his time going over already searched parameters. Still, he looked at the data like it was bomb filled with parental emotions that would spill all over him and he didn’t want to see into that Pandora’s box. He wasn’t sure how the police organized their files in a case like this.
“I assume the parents were cleared as far as having a role in the abduction?”
“Yes, other than being hard working, they were by the department’s assessment, great parents devastated by the disappearance of their only child.”
“Only child?”
“Yes.”
“Did their marriage survive the strain?”
“No. How did you guess?”
“I can think of only one thing worse than having your child abducted as a parent. I could see it easily destroying a marriage.”
Damian had experienced that one worse thing - his two girls were murdered and he also lost his wife from the same gunman. She wondered if he had thought about what if his wife had survived or what if his wife died, but he still had the girls. It was a question Natalie would never ask.
“Is
there a part of that thick file that contains a summary of the leads that all law enforcement chased? I don’t need to read all the interviews except the one with the mother.”
“This is a copy of the original file, so I can just pull those pieces out and hand them to you.”
“What’s your impression of the case from what you’ve read so far? I assume you’ve read that entire file.”
“Yeah, I did. You can read the parental panic and devastation. There are lots of photos. There were no prints taken as it’s a public park.”
“Did the parents ever register the child with the SJPD wherein they collect fingerprints? I remember when my girls were young we did something like that. Do they still have those programs?” Damian asked.
“I don’t recall reading about that, just a moment and I’ll look it up. If there are prints on records, they should be on a certain sheet in this file,” Natalie said as she searched for the specific sheet.
There was silence as Natalie searched, then the crunching of paper as she sought to open the file wider.
“Hmm this is weird. The family did have Olivia fingerprinted and there’s a record that the SJPD provided that service to her elementary school, but the detectives could find no record of the prints.”
“Did they give a copy of the prints to the parents at the time they did them?”
“I don’t know, I’ll ask the detective who researched that question,” Natalie said as she wrote the question down. Typically, she got any law enforcement questions answered for Damian.
“Can we make an appointment later this week to visit the scene of the abduction? Sometimes seeing the location inspires questions for me,” Damian requested.
“Sure, what day works for you?”
Damian consulted his calendar and offered, “How about Friday about ten? I don’t have any reason to go to San Jose, so I’ll take a boat to that marina in Redwood City, and you can meet me there,” knowing that Natalie’s house was about twenty miles from the marina. It wouldn’t save him time, but it would save him the aggravation of traffic. Out on the bay in a boat was a far less congested way to travel.