by Steven James
“DC,” Cheyenne replied. “So, the same city where you’ll be living this summer?”
“Um. Yes.” I didn’t want to talk about Lien-hua anymore. We were halfway down the hallway. I ventured a personal question.
“So what about you?”
“You mean a guy?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing serious, not for a long time. This may surprise you, but I’ve been told I intimidate men.”
“You’re kidding. Really?”
“Shocking, I know. Although, I should tell you, I was married once, right out of college. We were together about five years.”
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
A small pause. “Every affair begins with a smile.”
With every moment the conversation was becoming more and more intimate, and my judgment told me to stop asking follow-up questions, but I went ahead anyway. “So, were you smiling or was he?”
I’d probably stepped way over the line, but Cheyenne didn’t seem to mind. “For a while we both were,” she said. “In the end, I left the guy I was smiling at, and Cody left me.” She paused and then added, “Cody Howard was my husband.”
“Cody Howard, the DPD’s helicopter pilot?”
“One and the same.”
I didn’t see that one coming.
At least that explained why she wouldn’t fly with him.
We arrived at the dispatch office, and as she was about to press the door open, I asked her to wait a second. “Listen, I wanted to say, I’m sorry about last night.”
“About what?”
“Sorry about when you said you were thinking I was going to kiss you…”
“Yes?”
“And I didn’t.”
A small pause. She looked amused. “Yes, I do remember that, come to think of it.”
“So anyway, I wasn’t trying to blow you off. I’m just… well, I felt kind of bad about how things ended.”
“Pat,” she said, straightening my collar. “I don’t think they ended.”
And as I was searching for a reply, she pushed open the door to the EMS dispatch center and stepped inside.
79
Once inside the dispatch room, Cheyenne went to locate the on-duty supervisor while I waited by the door and gazed around the room, which was lit only by the bluish glow of computer monitors and the few remaining overhead fluorescents that weren’t burned out.
A sign on the wall to my right read:
Remember the Three Ws!
Where is the Incident?
Are there Wounds?
Are there Weapons?
Lives depennd on YOU!!
A misspelled word. Overuse of exclamation points. Unnecessary capitalization. Tessa would have gone ballistic.
Nine dispatchers were on duty in the cluttered cubicles, and most of them had at least two computers, two headset mics, and a floor pedal for transferring and receiving calls. Everyone looked wired and sleep-deprived. The room smelled like old bologna and burned coffee. Eight cubicles sat empty.
With the stress, long hours, low pay, and emotional drain, it’s not easy to find people to be EMS dispatchers. I don’t know of any major city in the U.S. where the emergency services department isn’t short staffed and constantly looking to hire. In fact, one recent Johns Hopkins University study found that being a dispatcher in a major metropolitan area is just as stressful as being an air traffic controller. Maybe that’s what accounts for the 60 percent annual turnover rate.
And here’s the irony: most high schools have more up-to-date computer systems than EMS services do, and yet, even though dispatchers potentially hold a person’s life in their hands with every call, most states don’t even require applicants to have a high school degree.
When a call comes in, a dispatcher might hear a gunshot, hear a body fall, listen as the line goes dead, and sixty to seventy seconds later he’s on the phone again with someone else. The dispatchers never find out what happened to the previous caller unless they read about it in the paper or maybe catch the story on the evening news.
But none of the dispatchers I know watch the local news or read the paper.
It’s just too painful.
Cheyenne returned with a man who identified himself as Lancaster Cowler.
He swaggered toward me like an ex-jock but looked like he hadn’t done a push-up in the last twenty years. A roll of stomach fat oozed out of the space between his shirt and his belt like the tip of a giant tongue. “Special Agent Bowers,” he said, his voice moist and thick.
I shook his hand. “Mr. Cowler, I don’t want to keep you long. I just have a couple questions about the anonymous calls reporting the double homicides on Thursday and Friday.”
“Woman who took the calls isn’t in today,” he said. “Weekends off. You know. To be with her kids.”
“Can we see if anyone else has accessed those files?”
“Sure.” He leaned his head to the side and called to a man sitting beside a pair of computer screens. “Ari, I need you to pull a couple of audio files for us.”
The guy looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “Which ones?” His eyes remained glued to the screen on the left, which contained a panel of dispatch codes and a map of Denver with digital blips representing the current GPS location of the city’s emergency vehicles.
Cowler ambled toward the man’s desk. “Double homicides.”
Ari turned to the screen on his right and quickly scrolled through the database of the week’s digitally recorded calls. “Do you know the times?” Even though Ari looked over thirty, his face was covered with acne. The only things on his desk that showed he had a life outside of this room were a Star Trooper action figure, a Semper Fi plaque for ten years of service, and a silver ceramic dragon with outstretched wings.
I watched the call times scroll down the screen. “There.” I pointed to an entry from Thursday afternoon. “And there.” I identified the second call.
Ari tapped at the keyboard and brought up the first file. Cowler studied the screen. “Nope, reference number doesn’t show anyone else accessing the files, except the medical examiner’s office. But that’s typical for them to do before an autopsy.”
“Let’s hear the first call,” I said.
As Ari played the audio, the automated live-read transcription scrolled across the screen:
EMS: “This is 911. How-”
CALLER: “I have something to tell you. I need you to listen carefully.”
EMS: “Sir, can you tell me your name?”
CALLER: “There’s a body in Bearcroft Mine, three miles south of Idaho Springs. Take Wheelan to Piney Oaks Road. After 5.3 miles, take the dirt road to the right. It ends at the mine. I want you to send-”
EMS: “Who am I speaking with?”
CALLER: “The Rocky Mountain Violent Crimes Task Force. No one enters the mine before they do, or more people will die. You won’t find Chris, so don’t waste time looking for him.”
EMS: “Sir, are you there now? Are you in any danger-”
CALLER: “Dusk is coming. I won’t stop until the story is done. Day Four ends on Wednesday.”
EMS: “Sir-” CALL TERMINATED BY CALLER.
The second audio was similarly concise but listed Taylor’s address and Cherry Creek Reservoir as the location for the bodies.
The caller’s voice was electronically disguised, and although I couldn’t be certain, it sounded like the pitch, pauses, and cadence of the speech on both tapes matched the speech patterns of the man who’d called me earlier in the day.
However, I heard background noise on both recordings. As I was considering what it might have been, Cowler asked me, “What are you hoping to find, exactly?”
Rather than sound arrogant by listing the phonetic and intonation identifiers, I simply said, “I’m trying to listen for anything distinctive, individualized. Anything that could help us match the caller to a suspect.” Then I asked Ari to play them again.
Yes, there was defini
tely something there, although it was a different sound on each tape. “Do we know what those background noises are?” I asked Cowler.
“Background sounds?”
“It sounds like murmuring on the first tape and something else-I’m not sure what-on the second.”
“All right, Ryman,” Cowler said. “Let’s hear ’em one more time.” He handed me and Cheyenne headphones, grabbed a pair for himself, plugged them into the system, and then nodded for Ari Ryman to play the audio again.
After we’d listened to the calls again, we all removed our headphones and Cowler shook his head. “It can get loud in here. It just sounds like background noise from the other dispatchers. It’s probably nothing.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s this: when someone says “it’s probably nothing,” you should never believe him.
I knew CSU had studied the tapes, but I needed to have them analyzed a little more carefully. However, before I could request a copy of them, a call came in, and the man with the Star Trooper action figure took a quick gulp from a well-worn mug filled with gray coffee and spoke into one of his two headset microphones. “911. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
We stepped away.
Apart from the ambient noise, I didn’t notice anything unusual about the audio messages.
“Well,” Cheyenne said to me on our way to the door. “What do you think?”
I tried to hide the discouragement in my voice. “The phonemes seem to match the ones used by the man who called me earlier in the day, but with the voice distortion the caller used, I doubt I’d be able to recognize the speaker’s natural voice if I heard it. I’m still wondering how the author of the online article found out the wording from the calls.”
“So am I.”
Cowler led us to the door, and I was about to hand him my card and ask him to email me a copy of the audio files and transcriptions but realized that would just take more time-something we didn’t have. So instead I asked him if I could use one of the computers for a minute.
He shrugged. “Sure, we have one set aside for DPD use. Right over here.”
He led me to one of the empty work stations at the far end of the room.
80
After I’d taken a seat, Cowler showed me how to pull up the audio files. I clicked past the hyperlinks to the Federal Digital Database’s GPS and address locators until I came to the audio archives, then I emailed a copy of both the files and transcriptions, to myself and to Angela Knight at the FBI cybercrime division.
I added a request for Angela to run the audio for the calls through a voice spectrograph. “See if you can isolate that background noise for me,” I wrote. “And as usual, I need this ASAP. -Pat.”
I thanked Cowler, and as Cheyenne and I entered the hallway, I glanced at my watch and realized I needed to get moving if I were going to have time to grab my luggage from home, say good-bye to Tessa, and then catch my flight.
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Wait,” she said. “Swing by my car first. It’ll only take a minute. There’s something I’ve been wanting to give you.”
Amy Lynn was putting another video in for Jayson to watch when a call came through on her BlackBerry. She dug it out. “Yes?”
“They came by.” It was Ari. He sounded frantic. “What did you write?”
She turned on the television and set a box of snack crackers on the floor for the boy to eat. “Who came by?” She’d lowered her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“Some detectives. You wrote something about-”
“Just calm down. OK?” She stepped away from the television.
“I just don’t want anyone to find out that we talked.”
“I know.”
“Mommy,” Jayson said. “Can I watch-”
“Shh!” she quieted him. “You should know better than to interrupt me when I’m talking on the phone.” Then she spoke to Ari again. “I’ll do some checking, make sure there’s no way to link things to you. I’ll call you later.”
She ended the call without waiting for his reply.
And she smiled.
So, her article was stirring things up. Good.
Time to start working on the second installment.
81
Three minutes after leaving the dispatch office, I was standing beside Cheyenne’s Saturn and she was handing me the St. Francis of Assisi pendant that she’d had hanging from her rearview mirror.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“St. Francis is the patron saint of the archdiocese of Denver,” she explained. “And last year I found out he’s also the patron saint against dying alone. I think that’s the worst way to die, so I keep this as a… well, it helps me remember why I do what I do. No one should have to die alone.”
She paused for a moment and then recited the words I’d read the day before from Keats’s poem about the pot of basil: “‘For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die; will die a death too lone and incomplete.’ When you read that yesterday, I thought of the pendant, but I kept forgetting to give it to you.”
“I can’t take this, it’s-”
“Please. I thought that if you had this at Basque’s trial, it wouldn’t hurt. I don’t know… I just… As a reminder. I want you to have it. I can get another one easy enough.”
Even though she’d mentioned yesterday that she’d gone to Catholic school, I could see now that she was much more devoted to her faith than I would have guessed. She must have noticed my surprise because she said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m just a little… I didn’t know you were so religious.”
“Hard to pigeonhole, remember?”
“Right.” I didn’t really believe in relics, praying to saints, or good luck charms, but the gesture meant a lot to me. “Thank you.” I slipped the pendant into my pocket.
A moment passed. “Well,” she said. “I’m going to swing over to visit Kelsey Nash, see how she’s doing; then maybe check in with the officers who are keeping an eye on Bryant.”
I realized that my feelings for Cheyenne were growing stronger and more intense by the hour, and I began to wonder how much the stress from the case might be affecting my attraction to her-maybe my heart was reaching out to her because it needed something she seemed to offer-comfort, strength, intimacy. Probably all three.
“I’ll have Tessa’s cell with me,” I said. “Keep me up to speed, OK?”
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
I gave her the number, and she programmed it into her phone. She looked like she wanted to say more.
I hated to consider the possibility that I was using her as a crutch, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was.
“I should go,” I said hastily.
“Yeah.”
Then, before the conversation could slip into anything more personal, I said a hurried good-bye and left for my car.
And I didn’t look back because I was afraid she might be watching me, and even though part of me hoped that she was, another part of me had started to wonder if it might be better for both of us if she wasn’t.
Tessa reached the entry dated November 15 of her mother’s sophomore year at the University of Minnesota-just two months before she was conceived.
And her mom was still seeing Brad.
Tessa didn’t know if he was her father, but it was appearing more and more likely that he was, and whenever she read his name she began to feel that old mixture of pain, anger, and heartache that she felt whenever she thought of her absentee dad.
Then she read:
November 29
No, no, no, no, no!
So he tells me today he likes this other girl, that he’s just “not into me anymore.” Not into me anymore??!! We’ve been going out for six months! And why did he have to tell me he likes someone else? Why couldn’t he have just said it’s over? Why did he have to mention her The entry ended abruptly, but then her mother spent the next dozen or so entries sorti
ng through her feelings about the breakup, and Tessa discovered that her mom had done pretty much the same things she did when she broke up with a guy-ranted, cried, pretended that she’d never liked him in the first place, and then found another guy a little too quickly and fell for him a little too hard.
And that’s what happened to her mother on December 20th.
This guy’s name was Paul.
Tessa felt a wisp of fear and anticipation flutter through her, and she just couldn’t wait anymore. She had to know. She scanned the pages. Raced through the next few weeks.
Into January-her mother broke up with Paul. But they’d slept together a few times. So, unless there was someone else she hadn’t written about Then February, March.
Her mom had started getting queasy, sick more and more often. Yes, it has to be him.
April.
She’d missed her last couple periods, wasn’t ready for exams, just wanted vacation to come and was trying to find a job for the summer If there was someone else, if she’d slept with someone else, she would have said so…
And then Tessa read the entry her mother had written on May 5th, and the world tipped upside down.
Dear Diary,
This morning I found out I’m pregnant. It’s Paul’s. I don’t know what to do. I can’t have a baby. I can’t! This was the worst day of my life.
And Tessa sat motionless, speechless, staring at the page.
Obviously it would be hard for a teenager to hear that she’s going to be a single mom. Obviously. Tessa knew that. But still, the words knifed through her.
“This was the worst day of my life.”
Her throat tightened so much that she could barely breathe, and her fingers were shaking as she turned the page.
But the next entry was not written by her mother.
Instead, it was a handwritten letter pasted onto the page.
A letter from Paul.
82
Christie,
I’m sorry for how things are, for how they’ve been. But please, I’m the father. Don’t do this. I’ll do whatever you want-pay the medical bills, help raise the baby, find someone to adopt it, but please don’t do this. Whatever you think of me, I’m a jerk, OK, I’m a loser, but let me do something right here. Let me help. Let me do one good thing. Please, keep our baby.