by Alec Peche
As he was tooling along he marveled over how different his schedule had been over the last two weeks compared to the past seven years. He’d doubled the people close to him in one week. Likely the only two people that tracked him to care if he was dead or alive had been Natalie and Trevor, now perhaps Ariana and Hermione would search for him if he didn’t show up somewhere on schedule.
With a smile he pulled out his phone to scan his email and saw he had an update from Natalie concerning the Debbie Altman case.
The DNA was sent out for testing. Collecting trace evidence from a vehicle around for over thirty years was painful for the CSIs. So many people had touched this car. They also collected fingerprints and found matches for John Avery on the typical areas of the car - the rear view mirror, gear shift, driver side door frame, and the latch for the truck gate. It takes the FBI computers a little over two hours to match latent prints. We also got a match for both Debbie Altman and the missing Santa Cruz County woman as they had their prints on file for their driver’s licenses before their disappearances.
It would be great if the trace came back as blood and included DNA, but I’m rarely that lucky as a detective; whoops ex-detective. The trace may take 2-3 months to come back, but we have enough to require him to be interviewed by a judge and depending on what he says we may have enough to hold him pending the trace being analyzed by the FBI. Unfortunately, simply having the fingerprints is not enough to slap him with a murder charge.
Okay, this was a good news-bad news thing. They were much further along with the evidence, but it wasn’t nearly enough to get a murder charge against the man. Damian was now a man with a moral dilemma. He had the financial resources to pay for the samples to be processed through a private lab rather than waiting for the police. He felt bad for the families that had no answer for such a long time. He promised himself he would work on a new way to process DNA. At the start of assisting Natalie with these cold cases he remembered that he had looked at DNA processing times and had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t do much to shorten the length to less than sixty hours. What he hadn’t known about was the huge backlogs everywhere in the state and the nation. He needed to look again at the process and see if there was anything he could change from being performed by humans to be completed by machinery. As he recalled, the largest amount of time of the testing process was spent extracting DNA from whatever it might be sitting upon. So if he could invent an extraction device that would greatly reduce the largest piece of human processing time.
Soon he was hitting the remote for his watercraft garage and the dock was folding out toward him. He had his dinghy inside and the garage closed. He stopped at his workbench and made some notes about the DNA processing and then proceeded upstairs to his kitchen. The cats must have heard the garage open and close as they were waiting at his front door to come in. He spent some time giving each of them attention, then prepared their dinner. They scampered outside again and would come in later just as Damian was going to bed.
Grabbing a cup of tea, he leaned back on his sofa and puzzled Hermione. She knew some secrets about her parents, but years of training had her keeping her mouth shut. Perhaps that was why the man was waiting in her house to catch her. He could only hope that in time, she would learn to trust Ariana and himself. Despite moving around and being paranoid about safety, her parents had managed to raise a kind, smart and strong teenager and so he was on their side if he ever met up with them; but he didn’t even know if they were alive. He would assume they were and keep the girl safe until their return. He sighed, stood up and stretched, let the cats back in and headed for bed.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Natalie carried a folder of emails; it was the only thing she carried into San Quentin prison. Her purse, including her neat little water gun was sitting in her car in the parking lot. She’d actually never been inside San Quentin and she was the first to admit that it was intimidating. She knew that some of the most dangerous and evil men called the prison home. Before she walked inside, she took one look to the south and east, but couldn’t see Red Rock Island.
She arranged to visit Damian after her visit to the Aryan Brotherhood leader, Barry Silver. She’d interviewed some terrible murder suspects in her time as a detective, but the man she’d made the appointment with might be the decision maker behind nearly 18% of all prison murders. By her definition, that was a very bad person. If Mr. Silver refused to take her off of their hit list, which she thought was the probable outcome, she’d stop by Damian’s and watch as he released the AB’s translated email to the Black Guerillas. It would be an ugly day in the California prisons.
After multiple security checks, Natalie was shown into a visitor area filled with picnic tables and chairs. She would have to keep her voice low so that other inmates and their visitors would be unable to hear her conversation. She watched men and their wives or girlfriends talking and in some cases children were visiting their father. How depressing to spend your childhood visiting your father here or perhaps your mother in another prison.
Natalie watched a man in his fifties or sixties approach. He had on the requisite jailhouse blue denim shirt and jeans, with a wife-beater t-shirt underneath. Tattoos covered one arm in a sleeve, as well as his neck. She’d bet that if he took his shirt off, his back would be tatted up as well. As he approached, he assessed the other inmates as well as Natalie before sitting down.
The face of evil stared at her waiting for her to speak. Natalie thought ‘may as well get right to the point.’
“Hello Barry, I’m Natalie Severino and your organization has put my name into your Aryan Brotherhood kill hat and I want it taken back out.”
He tilted his head and just smirked at her, saying nothing.
Natalie waited him out a while to see if he would say something, but he just sat there trying to intimidate her.
“So, there will be consequences if you decline to remove my name.”
She got an eyebrow raise from that, but still silence.
She pulled out the first document and said, “This is an email from you to a fellow AB leader at Soledad. I have your original document as well as a translation of what you sent. Go ahead and look at it to validate the translation,” Natalie said as she held the document out to him.
He declined to hold the paper and instead quickly glanced at the document. The smirk disappeared once he finished.
“Where did you get that?”
“Doesn’t matter; I have it and more correspondence. All of it translated from the AB code into English. Are you still refusing to remove my name from your kill hat?”
He didn’t answer, just stood there glaring at her and started to turn away to leave.
She called out to him, “I haven’t told you how the Black Guerillas are involved in this discussion.”
He halted and turned around and returned to the table, looming over Natalie and said with menace, “What did you just say?”
“I thought you might need some incentive to pull my name out of your kill hat and so did some research into who your enemies are in this prison. I have five emails, that I’ll be sending to the Black Guerillas if you fail to remove my name. Have you changed your mind?”
He leaned closer still to Natalie and in a rich vocabulary filled with expletives indicated he would not. Natalie just shrugged and stood up to leave not making any other contact with the prisoner. She was out in her car shortly heading back across the bridge to Richmond. She met Mike at the marina and was soon on her way to Red Rock Island. Damian was waiting for her arrival and soon she was entering his house.
Walking over to his kitchen sink she said, “I feel like I need to wash my hands after touching things inside San Quentin.”
Damian was leaning against the counter and said, “Bad vibes huh?”
“I should be immune to it as lots of criminals I arrested over my decades long career eventually ended up at San Quentin. I guess it’s the atmosphere. In the visitor’s room there were other men me
eting with their families and by family I mean the wife and kids were there. If I felt unclean from being in that room, I wonder what those children feel like.”
“Probably half of them are scared of their fathers and the other half believe their fathers are innocent.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Think about it; how many guys are appealing their convictions? It seems to go on for decades. Occasionally, a convict is found innocent after DNA testing so they can hang their hat on that as well.”
“Anyhow, I spent less than five minutes in the presence of Barry Silver. He called me a few names that I haven’t heard in years when I mentioned sharing their emails with the Black Guerillas. So I’m here to watch you deliver on my threat.”
“Let’s go down to my laboratory and we can do just that.”
Natalie nodded feeling better. Between the wind blowing against her on the boat ride here and washing her hands, she felt she had left the gunk of the prison behind her.
She sat next to Damian as he pulled up the five emails that they planned to forward to the Black Guerrillas. They were specifically targeting that gang’s members named in the emails; whether they were leaders of the gang remained to be seen but they were sure they would be quickly notified.
“Are you ready for me to hit the send button?” Damian asked.
“I haven’t thought of any other way to handle the problem; I’m just bothered by the violence these emails are likely to incite. That goes against my law enforcement training.”
“Natalie, you warned the guy, he’s choosing to ignore your warning or maybe he doesn’t care; regardless you were upfront and honest about the consequences of ignoring your request to be taken off their hit list.”
“Yeah right, go ahead and hit send.”
Thirty minutes later, Damian was watching Mike’s boat heading back to the marina with Natalie aboard. It would be interesting to see if violence did break out. Unlike Natalie, he thought there were no innocents in San Quentin and if a few of them got hurt or killed as a result of the emails, he simply didn’t care.
Natalie got back in her car and headed back to San Jose. She was concentrating on the traffic and worrying about the impact of those emails on the guards at San Quentin. She didn’t notice a pickup truck several cars back and to be fair there were five lanes of traffic and many white trucks on the road.
Inside the truck were two men who tailed Natalie on the orders of Mr. Silver from San Quentin to the Richmond marina. Mr. Silver wanted to know who had hacked into their emails and decoded their language. He knew it wasn’t Natalie, and he figured she was heading towards her partner in these email leaks. The two men had watched her get into a boat and return about ninety minutes later. They were unable to see where the boat went. They took a picture of the boat and its driver so they could return later and ask questions. When they followed her onto her street and did a drive-by of her house, they were puzzled by the signage on the front yard with dire warnings about staying off the grass. There was another car in the area assigned to watch the house and so they turned around and headed back to the Richmond marina to find out where the retired detective had gone in the boat.
They casually questioned a few of the boat owners and soon elicited the direction the female detective went. They regrouped with other Brotherhood members to plan an attack on Red Rock Island.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Damian monitored activity in San Quentin over the next couple of days and it seemed as though a particular cell block had more fights. He was unable to tell if these were fights between the Brotherhood and the Black Guerrillas. He hoped Mr. Silver was regretting his denial of Natalie’s request. Damian and Natalie had agreed to wait seventy-two hours before releasing another blast of Brotherhood emails to the Black Guerrillas. They wanted to give the AB leadership an opportunity to reconsider Natalie’s request. Their daily fights with the Black Guerrillas were a distraction from the main activities of the gang which was managing the income they made on illicit drugs as well as protection money. The Brotherhood’s operations closely aligned with the Mafia.
Thursday he drove over to the high school hosting Hermione’s swim meet. He and Ariana cheered her on for the three races she swam in. For a kid that had been running away from some very bad people a week ago, she performed well enough to earn third-place at the meet. While she was disappointed with her third-place finish, Damian was pleased given that the kid had only had three days of swim practice prior to the meet.
Friday evening they were going to Damian’s house. He wanted to show her his plans for the addition of a guest bedroom and he had a cute little fast and lightweight watercraft to also show the two of them. The boat strictly seated two people, but he planned to take them each for a ride to show off his new toy. He had a simple meal planned of fish, potatoes, and broccoli. He had cheesecake for dessert to celebrate the one week anniversary of when she’d arrived in their lives and to congratulate her on a good first week at a new high school.
Sunset was still about two hours off, but it had been foggy all day so the daylight had seemed darker all day. The two women were inside the house preparing a salad while Damian ignited the barbecue to heat it up for the fish. He looked north and noted a boat that seemed to be on a direct course with his island. Usually, unwelcome visitors arrived in the morning with hopes of hiking the island. He’d never had a trespasser this late in the day. Something made him uneasy about the boat. The barbecue could wait and heat the extra time it would take for him to get binoculars and check out the incoming boat. He kept a pair outside in his toolshed for whenever he had the urge to look at something on the bay. He focused in on the boat, and noted three Caucasian men aboard. All heavily tattooed. He’d bet the royalties of his last invention that the men were from the Aryan Brotherhood. He put the binoculars down and hustled inside.
“Ariana and Hermione, there’s a boat that appears to be heading right for this island out on the bay. I told you about the work I’m doing with the retired detective. We did something earlier this week to purposely anger and put pressure on the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang at San Quentin. I believe the guys in the boat may represent that gang. I have security and some homemade weapons but I’ll need your help with operating a few of my weapon systems. Dinner is going to be delayed. Okay?”
The two women snapped to attention; all thoughts of food gone. Ariana said, “Tell us what we need to do to defend you and this island.”
Hermione looked pale and scared. She’d been chased by bad men two times in the past couple of weeks.
“I have equipment and cameras down in my lab for us to use. I’m going to try to get the cats inside as it looks like the men are holding automatic weapons.”
He went back to the front door and was lucky when the two cats, probably smelling the barbecue smoke came running when he called.
“I built the house with materials designed to withstand a siege. Automatic weapons will have no impact on us. One thing I never planned for was an open watercraft garage and a guest boat sitting at the dock. Your boat could sustain some damage, but whoever they are will still be unable to enter the house through that garage. I can only hope that if they stay on the present course, they’ll fail to see the dock and your boat as it’s on the opposite side of their approach, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
“How are we going to fight them, Damian?” Hermione asked.
“When their boat gets closer, I have a series of nets under the water that I can release which will hopefully clog up their propeller. I also have a small unmanned submarine I can launch that will drill a small hole in their boat. I want the boat to sink but not close to the island where they might try to swim ashore here.”
“What other weapons do you have?” Ariana asked, somewhat alarmed. The fact that men were approaching with semi-automatic weapons scared her but at the same time she’d never shot a gun herself and this wasn’t the time to find out if she could hit the side of a barn when firing a gun.
/> “I have water cannons in the cliffs of Red Rock Island; they just need to be fired at any one approaching. I have used them before when unwelcome visitors have ignored the private property signs. Those guns are filled with water. For these men that are approaching, I’m going to add concentrated pepper juice to the water so that it will hurt them when it drips down their face. There is a unit of measure called the Scoville Rating that rates the spiciness of chili peppers. The pepper spray that is used by the police is about 500,000 units of heat. I sourced the Carolina Reaper, which is considered to be the hottest pepper in the world with a heat rating of 855,000 to 2,200,000. So it will disarm and bring great pain to any human that touches it. In addition to the water cannons in the cliffs, they’re also under the sand of the two small beaches of this island. I want you two to stay inside and operate the water cannons. I’m going to hang over the cliff edge with a high powered water gun filled with pepper spray. I also have a slingshot that I’m going to use to place this messy fishy substance on their boat and that will cause birds to attack them. When I see their boat turnaround to head back to wherever it came from, that’s when I’m going to drill a small hole in their hull in hopes that the boat will sink before it reaches shore but well after the time it leaves this island.”