Tanner nodded. He was young, neatly dressed, and he exuded confidence. He had a cup of coffee and a laptop in front of him. In the middle of the table were a stack of white legal pads and a cluster of ballpoint pens.
Introductions performed, Melendez told Gantry to pick a seat, tablet, and pen.
“As you can see, one of my students transcribed everything you came up with yesterday. But we also used it to prompt a much larger commonalities search. Now the real work begins.”
Melendez pulled a small remote out of his pocket and aimed it at the far end of the room. A large movie screen descended slowly out of the ceiling, and simultaneously a projector descended from the back of the room. The lights dimmed.
“Tanner was working most of the night on your entries and all the new ones too. He is an analyst. He rarely leaves the campus except to sleep and feed his goldfish. His assignment last night was to come up with as many commonalities his advanced search applications could assemble, and to add that to your notes.”
Tanner smiled.
Melendez clicked the remote again, and a graphic chart appeared. On the screen, a multicolored graphical display, detailed the total number of common hits for each of the dead stars in question, and highlighted their many cross connections in separate cells. The visual was so complex that Gantry was having trouble taking it in.
“We’re just getting started,” Melendez said, pulling a small laser pointer from his jacket pocket. The red beam cast a precise red dot on the screen.
“Note the categories here,” Melendez said. “We have engineers, roadies, friends, managers, producers, and even drug dealers accounted for, for each of the six stars. Now, look carefully here.” Melendez used the red dot to focus on another section. We even have performances listed.”
“Amazing. Seriously,” Gantry responded.
Tanner smiled.
“We’ve even isolated those performances down to formal and informal, as best we could,” Melendez said.
“You’ll note here next to ‘Hendrix/informal/performance’ there is the word ‘bars,’ then if I double-click on that, another tab comes out with a complete listing of all the bars he performed in, or at least the ones we know about. Switching over to this side, you can see we’ve even listed doctors, psychiatrists—even a podiatrist for one of them.”
“You couldn’t have done this with just my whiteboard notes,” Gantry said. “There must be hundreds of connections here, all interlaced and in hierarchies.”
“Gantry, we are in the testing stages of an advanced-search capability that allows us to access most of the digital databases in the world, a full array of data, photographs, recorded music, contracts, pre-HIPPAA medical records, even local community papers. There is nothing like it in general use anywhere,” Melendez said.
“On top of that, we are using our own unique version of the Apache Hadoop platform, which allows us to crunch massive amounts of data. But the real secret sauce is the commonalities application that Tanner developed. It allows us to interpret that diverse information so people like you and me can make sense of it.”
Tanner smiled.
“That said, this commonality cross tabulation is still in its infancy. Tanner still has a lot of work to do, and you’re going to have to help him, because you are the key to the history of all this. You have the insider facts we cannot possibly know, even with all this sophisticated software. The technology is very smart, but it cannot ‘think’ without detailed input. The missing link obviously is your brain, your memory and your insight—those small details that only you could know. They are very, very important, and may hold the key inferences for us.
“So,” he continued. “We’ll need to beef all this up and then share it with our friends in Europe. London first.”
Tanner opened his laptop. “Go, boss,” he said.
“Okay, Tanner, let’s start with engineers.”
Tanner tapped the touch pad and instantly a pointer raced to several names which, when clicked on again, popped up names: Keith Grant, Glyn Johns, Jimmy Miller, Eddie Kramer, Owsley Stanley.
“Wow. Now that is really amazing,” Gantry said, thinking, Eddie Kramer. What a coincidence.
“Tanner, double-click on ‘friends’ and then bring that up alongside ‘drug dealers.’ I want to see a quick match here.”
A 3-D graphic that looked like a molecule with hard edges popped up in bright red, and then another came up beside it. Between the two were thin white lines interlacing the name Jean de Breteuil—a name Gantry remembered—with three of the six stars. But on the other side of the matrix was a long vertical list of what seemed to Gantry to be a random list of rock and roll names. Some of those names were not so famous, but Gantry recognized them all, and saw the little white lines immediately race from de Breteuil to ten of them as well.
Melendez loved these charts, and he loved what they could do. The next stages, which he hadn’t yet discussed with Gantry, would involve evidence from the cold-case boxes yet to be retrieved: DNA analysis, hair, fingerprints—the list was long, but it all began here, simple, logical, and very visual. Even a schoolboy could see immediate patterns at a glance.
The room was silent for a moment as Gantry made notes. The depth of connections was unbelievable—but, he thought, there are still missing pieces.
“You look disappointed,” Melendez said, as if reading Gantry’s thoughts.
“No, absolutely not. I’m impressed, but there are a few missing names, connections.
“Tanner, can you double-click on ‘friends’ again,” Gantry said.
“Sure.”
“Do you know who Jean de Breteuil is?” Gantry wanted to know how much Melendez understood about the connections his analyst had come up with.
“No. In fact, I don’t know who half these people are. That’s your job. Who is he?”
“I heard he was some kind of minor royalty who hung around backstage at Stones and Hendrix concerts, always dressed to the nines. The rumor always was that he was the drug supplier to European rock stars.”
“Do you know which ones, specifically?” Melendez asked.
“I think he was tied to the Stones and Hendrix for sure, maybe Joplin, too. And I heard through the grapevine that he hung out with Pamela Courson as well.”
“Who?”
“Morrison’s girlfriend, Pamela Courson.”
“Double-click on ‘producers,’” Melendez said to Tanner.
More options flooded the screen.
Gantry was impressed, but as he got into the details, he could see where there were lots of gaps, missing names, missing commonalities. He felt good knowing his expertise was going to be vital to piecing this puzzle together, and it was beginning to make sense to ask Alex for help as well.
“I’m going to leave you here for a while, Gantry. Tanner and I have other work to do. What you need to do is use this laptop,” he said while walking over to Tanner, picking up the Dell and putting it back down in front of Gantry, “and use it like this.” He used the touchpad to highlight and double-click on terms and names.
“You can double-click on any area to bring up deeper information, but you can’t delete anything, so don’t worry about that. Double-clicks take you to the second and third levels, and a right-click brings out the sidebars. Those will cross-reference with these white lines to any other part in the graphic where there is a connection. Simple. Got it?”
“Uh, yeah. Got it. So, I search and play with this, and you want me to fill in any gaps in my notes?”
“Precisely,” Melendez said. “See there, Tanner, you’re gonna lose your job. Gantry’s got it covered.”
Tanner smiled. Gantry may have been a writer, journalist, and rock trivia expert, but Tanner was the mastermind of analysis for the Clue Management Database, and Melendez was the veteran investigator. A good team, at least to start.
As the three men rose from their chairs, Melendez said, “By the way, when you right-click and those sidebars come up, you’ll get horiz
ontal info stacked front to back, accordion style, for peripherals on each topic or person; another Tanner idea. The front ones are the most recent.”
“Raphael, can I get some coffee? And where is the bathroom? This is going to take a while,” Gantry said, unzipping his now bulging tan valise and reaching into the folders inside.
“Bathroom’s down the hall to your right. It’s unisex, so knock. Coffee’s coming right up. Two pots okay?”
“Great.”
Gantry looked back at the screen and double-clicked on Les Perrin. Perrin had been hired by Hendrix’s management just two weeks before Hendrix died. He also noted the Stones and possible Apple connections. Then he right-clicked on a subhead in a red box titled oblique commonalities, and out popped a horizontal bar that included pharmacies, law firms, banks and record rights.
Melendez and Tanner made their way back to the Emerging Tech Lab, stopping first in a small room with a large video conferencing screen and audio set up.
“Gantry’s really going to help us with this,” Melendez said. “His memory is phenomenal. Hell, Tanner, he’s got records a lot older than you are. You probably don’t even know what most of those names stand for or what they did. Maybe after all this is done, you’ll have a new appreciation for the classics.”
Tanner just smiled. He was an under-the-radar Beatles fan, but he didn’t mention it.
“I’m going to conference London now. I want you to get on this again and come up with a more completed matrix. You have forty-eight hours. By that time Gantry should have pretty much filled out the existing chart and you can integrate it all, including what we get from London.”
“Boss, why the rush? This stuff goes back more than forty-five years.”
“A lot of moving parts have to come together very quickly, and Gantry’s worried about this messenger knowing his address and possibly planting a bug on him.”
Melendez also was looking at a personal deadline: mandatory retirement. In six months he would only be able to teach, and even that would have to be on a volunteer basis.
“I’m going to dial up the conference bridge and see if I can’t get a hold of an old friend.”
“Who’s that?”
“Robert Bruce. He works for Scotland Yard. We’ve stay in touch usually once or twice a year. He’s a senior agent and can get the ball rolling. By the time we have all the commonalities done on our side and the CODIS system is set up to share with Scotland Yard, he’ll make sure we all get on the same page.
“Oh, before I forget, get Lancy up to New York to sweep Gantry’s place for bugs. Leave whatever you find. I don’t want anyone knowing we know they’re listening. Could come in very, very handy.”
CODIS is the acronym for Combined DNA Index System. Melendez, after talking with Robert Bruce, would then apply his Virtual Crime Scene technology in the lab to speed up the preliminary assessments. VCS technology wasn’t in widespread use yet, but would be a huge help in instantly recreating and analyzing each crime scene. The first thing they needed to do was get hold of every crime scene box from each of the seven deaths, starting in London.
Melendez dialed into the conference bridge and turned on the eighty-two-inch Samsung video monitor. He was a few minutes early, but wanted to make sure there were no reception issues and that the collaboration software was operative.
He plugged his thumb drive containing the clues into a small PC next to the speaker box and smiled to himself. How odd, he thought, that after all the technological advances, state-of-the-art applications, advanced testing equipment, and sophisticated chemical analysis, the most important parts of any crime scene were labeled and placed in a cardboard box and put on a shelf. But Melendez knew from experience that there was almost always something in those old boxes that could help unlock the true story of a murder.
While he was waiting, he mentally cataloged the scenes. The greater London area was where Jones, Hendrix, and Ham died. Morrison’s death meant contacting the FBI office in Paris and then French Police Nationale. Wilson and Joplin died in L.A., and McKernan died in San Francisco. It could ultimately be a cross-country, cross-continent investigation, a complex analysis of hundreds of commonalities.
Gantry was vitally important, but he’d need to be kept on a short leash. He was at heart a reporter, and naturally, he wanted to get his story. Melendez had to make sure his superiors were not fully aware of how deeply this “side job” was going to go. He had to keep it safely under wraps until they had built a strong case and had a bead on a killer. Then he could unveil it.
He remembered the conversation he’d had with Gantry, when Gantry mentioned that his ex-wife was with forensics in San Francisco. She might come in handy for crime scene information on McKernan; like Gantry, she would have firsthand knowledge about the city’s rock culture at the time.
Eventually though, he and Bruce would need to put together a joint Homicide Evidence Assessment Team, which would consist of a physical evidence analyst, a toxicology and autopsy specialist, and maybe a corporate financial analyst to look into whatever insurance policies had been in force at the time of the deaths.
Gantry chewed on the end of his ballpoint pen. He’d made a list of the people, and pertinent information about them, that were missing from the matrix. Tanner had missed a considerable amount of detail; still, how could he know the thousand and one details one could only know if they’d been there?
As he compiled more commonalities, he kept coming back to Jean de Breteuil, the possible drug-dealer friend, Les Perrin at both the Hendrix and Jones death scenes, and record company song rights, contract, and management issues—all of them hot buttons. The corporate issues of the stars kept haunting him as he thought about a story he’d written back in 1974 about the artists and their arguments with record company management.
It all started with Peter Ham’s death and the subsequent media reports. Gantry had investigated, and then wrote the article, but nothing further came of it. He dug through his valise and pulled out the article and a copy of the newspaper report of Ham’s death…Reported as a suicide, he left no note, and there was little investigation beyond a summary autopsy. Rumor was that Ham was extremely distressed about management issues.
He even remembered the journalist’s name, Larry Williams. Gantry wondered if he was still around.
Robert Bruce’s face popped up on the monitor. It was 10:00 a.m. in Quantico and 3:00 p.m. in London. Melendez tested the Polycom. “Robert can you hear me clearly?”
Bruce appeared to be speaking, but no sound came from the speakers. Melendez pointed to his ear. Bruce nodded.
“So sorry, had it on mute, my friend,” Bruce said.
Bruce was sitting at a desk next to a window. Behind him was a large architectural rendering of the new Police building. Melendez had been to Scotland Yard several times, once during a vacation with his wife, and twice on investigations, one of them a cold case in 2001. The new building was quite stunning; designed by the same architectural firm that created the new Google headquarters in King’s Cross.
Robert Bruce was sixty-five, silver haired with a tinge of brown, and always sporting a healthy glow. He was known as a bit of a rogue. He’d been with the London Metropolitan Police for more than thirty years, most recently as head of the Specialist Crime Unit. He and Melendez had become friends while working on the Lennon murder case together and had stayed in contact ever since.
“Good morning, Raphael.”
“Good afternoon, Robert.”
“How do I look?” Melendez said, meaning the video quality.
“You look like you’ve gained a few, mate.”
“Naw, it’s just this suit jacket bunching up.”
Both men laughed.
“What brings you to London, my friend?’
“Cold case, what else?”
“Ah, of course. How is Lucia, by the way?”
“She’s good. Arthritis is bad, but she never lets on. You’d never know it. She still tries to keep up with her g
ardening and the grandkids. And you? Still single?”
“Gawd, yes, mate. Are you kidding?”
They laughed again, then got down to business.
“Right, then. What have you got for me, mate?” Bruce asked.
“Have about half an hour?”
“Certainly, for you, always.”
Melendez explained who Gantry was and how the manila envelopes were delivered to him in Manhattan. He outlined the connections between the rock stars and described what he was doing with the information, and what they hoped to find. He’d set up the call to be able to share his notes and digital photos of each of the clues using the FBI’s custom Video Collaboration software. They could see each other and the documents.
The two men read the stark initial clue on their monitors: Brian Jones was murdered. It was not an accident. There were others. Look and see.
“That was Gantry’s first message from the courier, and with that note was a slip of paper that read: ‘My Little One.’ According to Gantry, that song was a little-known number from the sixties,” Melendez explained. “Only a handful of people knew of that recording session, and another piece of paper was included, a fragment of the demo label—”
Bruce raised his hand, stopping Melendez cold. “Raphael, I only have a half hour today. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be short, but…slips of paper, forty-year-old mystery songs, demo labels? Seriously? Out of respect for our relationship, I hope this is not going to be a rock and roll history lesson.”
Melendez had half expected this—in fact, his own first take on the case had been quite similar—so he forged ahead. He adopted the persona of a prosecutor, building his case systematically.
“Robert, the point is that an obscure demo label has been taken off the original demo tape box of a rare, private recording. It’s very likely one of a kind and would have to have been retrieved by this person or someone else from the decedent’s personal belongings.
“Bear with me,” Melendez said. Bruce’s impatience showed clearly in his face. “Let’s call this someone ‘the courier,’ and let’s suspend judgment for the moment and assume that he is signaling that he had rare access to Jones. You and I both know that a common trademark of most serial killers is personal souvenirs, and that is what this could be.”
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