by Alec Peche
“Yes, and I have some questions for you. Has the approach by police to process a case changed substantially recently?”
“Hmmm that’s a good question, let me think.” And there was silence over the phone line. Damian could hear road noise as she was clearly driving south to home. Then finally Natalie came back on the line and said, “Yes I think so. The 1990’s were a time of police innovation. With computers and DNA, we did more objective investigation. Prior to that, a suspect caught your eye or you had a hunch, or you saw the crime committed in front of you, then you had your suspect, case closed. It wasn’t exactly a time of innocent until proven guilty. When I was a new cop on the force, it was always interesting talking to the guys that were about to retire. They had practiced policing before the Supreme Court decision on Miranda rights so you could almost go about framing someone for a crime or at least intimidate them into a confession. Now if we find you guilty, then you’re really guilty.”
“So in regards to the older cold cases, there is no DNA but there might be new evidence or a new way of looking at the same crime scene to develop a suspect. Do I have that right?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Natalie replied.
“So the easiest cases to solve are those that DNA evidence was collected on and the hardest will be a case going back forty years with no new evidence since the initial crime.”
“Correct.”
“Okay, I have some ideas and I’ll get back to you later today.”
Natalie was the closest thing to an older sister he’d ever have. She kept tabs on him and did her best to keep him connected to the real world. He knew she was married with adult children. She’d been a hard-working detective and now she was a hard-working private investigator. Glancing at his watch, he decided it was time for lunch. The time he put into assembling his lunch would be used to think about different angles to analyze data and so he returned upstairs.
Chapter Three
Given the stressfulness of the day he was surprised he had any appetite. He thought that with each passing year he was slightly less sad on the anniversary of his family’s murder. Maybe that was why he had an appetite. He made a lot of items from scratch as it was far easier to import a single fifty pound bag of flour than a loaf of bread every week. He was planning to eat a multigrain wheat bread sandwich consisting of turkey, cheese, and avocado. In the scheme of things, avocados were easier to transport and stayed ripe longer than lettuce so he had taken to dressing up his sandwiches with the fruit. As he worked at his kitchen counter, he was distracted with thoughts of the greenhouse. He’d like to have more fruits and vegetables on the island but the soil was incompatible with growing his own food. He could work with the architect that had designed his house to build a hundred square-foot greenhouse which according to his calculations would be sufficient for his needs. His problem was he’d really had no one out to the island to do any work in over five years and frankly he didn’t want anyone on his island other than Natalie. He tuned back in and looked down at the sandwich he was making, adding pickles, mustard, and mayonnaise and topping with alfalfa sprouts. He sat down at his table with his sandwich and some water and thought about the over two hundred families that never had their crime solved. Given the age of some of the cases, he would’ve thought that the immediate family was long dead. As much as he wanted justice for some of the older cases, he knew Natalie would get the best case solve rate if he concentrated on the more recent cold cases.
The State of California and nearly every other state was behind in processing DNA tests, and so he’d take a side trip to DNA testing to see if there was any way he could speed it up or otherwise automate it. Perhaps if he could develop a process that would make the DNA testing say, seventy percent correct, than he could move forward and submit fewer samples for the more refined DNA test. He visited a few websites and read about the process. While he thought he could shave perhaps 10-20% of the time off of processing, he really could see how a specimen needed to be as carefully analyzed as it was. One website he visited, suggested fifty-four hours from receipt of some item of clothing or sample containing DNA to its resolution. The trouble with handling and analyzing DNA was it was so easy to contaminate because there was DNA everywhere.
‘Okay’ he thought; he wasn’t going to come up with some genius solution to DNA testing today.
He then did a search on some recently solved cold cases to see what they had in common, and it was back to DNA. From an engineering point of view, DNA testing was the crimp in the pipeline of an otherwise smooth flow of evidence. He was back to the theory of how to speed up the DNA analysis and it wasn’t just the two hundred plus cases of the SJPD, it was the nationwide processing of DNA specimens. Perhaps some of the crimes under the jurisdiction of SJPD were committed by someone whose DNA was collected in Arkansas. The whole matching of DNA to potential cold cases would only move as fast as the state crime labs were at processing samples currently within their possession. He needed an analyzer that wasn't invented yet; that would be much quicker at processing DNA. Okay he’d leave that for another day as he put the concept on the to-do list.
Maybe he would do a computer run and collect any name of a person interviewed during one of those cold cases who had since interacted with the criminal justice system. It might be coincidence and it might have an impact on a cold case. It was a starting point and so he wrote the program to do the analysis.
Then he couldn’t resist so he took high powered binoculars and rushed outside to see if he could catch a glimpse of the floating wreaths. Each anniversary he promised himself he wouldn’t go looking for the wreaths and each year he did. It was as though by seeing them floating, it meant his family wasn’t gone for the briefest of moments. Of course they were gone, but as long as he could see the wreaths in the distance, it was like they were waving to his soul. He searched for maybe fifteen minutes and then gave up; there was no sign of them. He knew the flowers would eventually sink as there was no Styrofoam in the wreath or anything else that would harm the bay or it inhabitants. There was an incoming rainstorm creating higher waves, which usually caused the wreaths to sink quicker. He knew because he had conducted experiments about the sinking of wreaths in his lab. He sighed and said another prayer for his departed family and turned to go back inside, wondering what his family would have thought of his little ceremony and his life since their deaths.
His phone dinged with an email and he saw it had arrived from Trevor, Natalie’s son. He’d met the boy at the funeral of his family. Natalie had seen something in Damian that matched something in Trevor. They were both probably geniuses, but Trevor was just starting out as an assistant district attorney. He had sailed through law school at Berkeley and passed the California Bar having missed just one question, a record among test takers. The death of Damian’s family influenced Trevor to put the bad guys behind bars.
Trevor was more outgoing than Damian, but then he hadn’t lost his family. The two men occasionally took in a Giants baseball game or a Warriors basketball game. There they would argue statistics of the various players. Despite his affection for the other man, Damian had never invited him to his home, nor had he been to Trevor’s condo in San Jose. Trevor loved to hear about Damian’s latest engineering inventions; though his genius was for the law rather than engineering, he understood enough to bounce ideas off. He’d also reviewed any patent issues or sales contracts for Damian’s inventions.
‘I’ve got two tickets for the Warriors game tonight. Do you want to grab a hamburger and beer at our favorite pub and then move on to the game?’
Damian had two emotions warring within him. On one hand he wanted to take his mind off the anniversary and on the other it was sacrilege to attend something fun. In the end he thought that his family would want him to move on; certainly if he’d been the one murdered, he would have wanted his wife to remarry and for his kids to have a supportive stepfather. Perhaps it was time to start living again and see where it took him. He wondered why he was fee
ling this way? Had the cold cases caused this yearning for more meaning in his life somehow? He decided to act on this new feeling and start by attending the game tonight.
He typed back, ‘Sounds like a brilliant plan. Meet you at six at our pub.’
The game tip-off was at 7:30pm so that gave them enough time to eat and drink a few beers before walking over to the arena. He’d take a boat to the marina closest to the arena, while Trevor would likely take a BART train. They’d found on a prior game night, a pub that was a mile away from the arena, small and quiet, with a great selection of Belgian beers and the best cheeseburgers that they’d ever tasted. There was no glitz or glamour about the place, and they’d both gotten to know the owner over the years and helped him in different ways.
One night Damian had come in by himself sick of his own company, depressed, and craving one of Pete’s cheeseburgers. Pete was depressed himself as he’d just fired another bartender for stealing alcohol from the bar. He’d really liked this person and bemoaned that if only he could design a foolproof system that would measure and dispense alcohol, he could stop firing bartenders that were wonderful with his customers. Sure there were fancy systems he could purchase for thirty thousand dollars, but he would be a long time getting a return of investment. Damian took up the challenge and within the month had designed a system made from sprinkler system parts, and a few valves and sensors he purchased. He then developed the software that required a bartender to enter a code to get anything dispensed. The system worked so well that Pete had called back the last likable bartender he fired, and rehired her since he knew she couldn’t cheat him anymore. It also earned Damian free cheeseburgers for life and another patent which he sold to someone that would commercialize his concept, but not bankrupt small bar owners like Pete. With the plans in motion to perhaps change his life, he returned to Natalie’s cold cases.
Chapter Four
He thought he’d focus on two groups of victims – those cases where a family member disappeared or those cases in which a body was discovered; be it in hours, days or years, but they started out as missing persons. At least there was a little evidence. There were, of course, people listed as Jane or John Doe who were never identified, but ended up as homicides based on evidence found in the remains. It would be hard to work on cold cases that were simply about establishing an identity for the remains.
He sorted the thirty-five cases that his first analysis had kicked out and added these new parameters which knocked the case total down to twenty-nine. Still a lot of cases to focus on, so next he tried doing a run to see if any of the cases were connected; common location, common method of a crime, any commonalities at all. That knocked it down to five cases. Perfect, he thought that was a manageable number. He explained his reasoning to Natalie and sent her the list. Later he’d take a look at the cases to see if there was anything else he could do computer wise, but he needed to do his own work. He checked in with his correctional system software and all was calm and correct, no heinous murderer was about to be released. So he entered his lab to work on his new invention which was a wave powered energy cell. He’d been experimenting with different devices in his lab to collect the energy of a wave crashing against it. He thought it might solve the energy needs of some poorer island countries like Tonga or Haiti.
He blinked when his alarm system went off. It might be a sea lion or a salmon or a human. In his seven years of living on the island, the perimeter alarm had rarely been triggered. It was about fifteen yards out from the shore in a circle around the island buried in the bay’s dirt and rock layer. Boats didn't trigger the alarm; rather it was something large and about seven feet below the surface, which was lower than a boat hull. He checked the object’s location on his system and went upstairs and outside to check. He thought about putting cameras with the sensors, but they would be big, subject to frequent replacement, and it was murky. He walked toward the cliff edge nearest the alarm, his island’s closest point to San Quentin prison ironically. He couldn’t imagine a convict escaping by putting on a wetsuit and snorkel apparatus.
He stood looking down, weapons in hand; he had a slingshot and a high powered water gun. The water gun, another invention of his, contained a liquid form of pepper spray. Enough to turn back a human, but not ecologically hurt the bay. In the slingshot, he had pellets of a fishy substance that wildly attracted birds. He tested both out in terms of aim and function. When he fired the slingshot pellet, birds had seemingly come out of nowhere to bomb the pellet. He also knew his pepper spray was harmful to eyes and he practiced aiming the gun to ensure he was adept with the weapon. Glancing over the edge in the general direction of the tripped sensors, he saw bubbles floating to the surface.
‘Interesting,’ he thought, his first human intruder. He moved back from the edge and lay down on his belly so he could see what the person was up to. Soon enough, he saw a scuba diver rise from the rocks, walk over to a boulder and sit upon it. The diver pushed a mask off taking a few strong breaths. That was when Damian noticed that it was a mermaid that had landed upon his rock, confirmed when she pushed the wetsuit hood off and shook her hair out in a most feminine way. He was curious to see what she did next.
She took out a cell phone and tried to call, but he knew it wouldn’t work as he’d installed a jamming feature to prevent any cell phone from working on and within about twenty feet of his island, but his own. The Federal Communications Commission had no knowledge of his technology and he aimed to keep it that way. He heard her mutter a few curse words as she re-examined her gas tank gauge. Then she looked toward San Quentin and then Richmond, sighed and prepared to go back into the water. Damian guessed she was having problems with her scuba equipment and was judging which shore was easiest to swim to. There was no happy answer to that question as a swimmer could get side-swiped by a boat that would be unable to see a lone swimmer in a dark wetsuit against the dark waves. Damn he’d have to offer his help; he wouldn’t want her death on his conscious.
“Do you need some help?” He called out from his now standing position, his weapons well out of sight.
She startled and slipped off the rock into the water and came up sputtering. Once she had herself under control in the rocking of the waves, she called out, “Maybe. Who are you?”
“I live here; you’ve beached yourself on my island.”
“Your island? I thought the government owned all of the islands in the bay. Is there a house up there or a working cell phone?”
“Yes to both questions. What’s the problem with your gear?” Damian asked pointing to her scuba tank and regulator.
“I was exploring the floor of the bay when I discovered my tank was leaking air. It’s completely drained and I was debating which direction to swim ashore. Do you have a boat that will get me across the water?”
“No, but I could probably repair your scuba gear. I’ll go fetch my drone to pick up your equipment. Why don’t you find a comfortable seat down there and give me a few minutes. Do you want something to drink?”
Damian had scuba dived and had memories of how dry his mouth felt after using the apparatus.
“Yes to the drink, I’d love something hot, like tea or coffee.”
He nodded and walked out of her sight. He was back in less than five minutes with a thermos filled with ginger tea for her, attached to his drone. The drone gently brought the thermos to her and it sat patiently in the air while she loaded the tank and regulator on its legs which served as hooks. Damian had her equipment in no time and he checked it over. Then he yelled down to her, “Was there a leak or did you lose track of time and just run the tank dry?”
“Could have been either, what time is it now?”
Damian just shook his head at her cavalierly ignoring the time. That was scuba 101.
“Who gave you your certification to scuba dive?”
“Why?” She asked him suspiciously.
“Scuba 101, you never ever lose track of time. Speaking of which, enjoy your tea while I go re
charge your tank.”
Damian left her there knowing that other perimeter alarms would alert him if she tried to climb the wall of his island. He hoped she wouldn’t try.
He was back in ten minutes directing the drone down to her with her gear. She looked at the regulator and tested the manifold and judged everything to be fine. She could return to the shore by staying well below any boat hull levels and make it back safely.
“Thanks, whoever you are. Can you send your drone back here for the mug?”
He did just that and after she loaded the thermos, she slipped her hood on and was shortly underway, swimming toward Tiburon. Even with fins she had perhaps a thirty minute swim in front of her. Oh well, the little mermaid had entertained him for half an hour. He walked back into his house and moved to put the thermos in his dishwasher when he discovered she left behind a business card inside.
It read, ‘Ariana Knowles’, with an email address and phone number in Belvedere, a very posh city next to Tiburon. No occupation listed. ‘Weird’, he thought.
Oh well, back to his lab, though he felt pretty good for assisting the woman, while managing to protect his own privacy. He was going to check her out, but then he noticed another email from Natalie.