by J. A. Jance
“Kids teaching kids?” I asked. “How does that work?”
“You’d be surprised,” Meribeth said. “With kids who have a natural aversion to authority figures, peer-to-peer tutoring works surprisingly well.”
By then Todd, working in a carrel-lined study, had located the offending computer—the one that had been used to upload the film clip to one of the shelter’s cell phones.
In a matter of minutes he hit pay dirt. “Hey,” Todd said. “Come take a look at this.”
I have a bad reaction to standing beside someone’s chair and trying to look at a computer screen. I guess it reminds me too much of standing next to a teacher’s desk to have a paper corrected.
“Just tell us,” I said.
Todd looked at Meribeth. “Let me guess. This whole computer system was donated, right?”
She nodded.
“Whoever did that was interested in helping you, but they must also have had some concerns that their donated system might be put to some kind of nefarious use,” Todd explained. “There’s a hidden file in this computer that functions as a virtual logbook—an invisible virtual logbook. The same program is probably on the other computers as well. Before new users can access the system, they have to create profiles that include their names—or at least whatever aliases they employ here—as well as their user names. After that, the logbook maintains a record of each time that user logs in or out as well as which computer was used.”
This all sounded good as far as Mel and I were concerned. Meribeth Duncan was outraged. “You mean we’ve been spying on the kids’ computer usage all this time?”
Todd laughed. “You could have been, if you had known the file was there. But here’s our guy. We know the film clip was sent to Josh’s phone at one twenty-three Monday morning. And it was sent to the Janie’s House cell phone from this computer at nine thirty-five on Sunday night.”
“But how could that happen?” Meribeth asked. “The cell phone, I mean. We’re not even open at one twenty-three in the morning.”
“Janie’s House may not have been open,” Todd said, “but the Janie’s House cell phones were alive and well somewhere.”
“Can you find out where it was and who was using it?”
“Eventually,” Todd said. “Right now the logbook tells us that a guy named Hammer was online on this computer at the time the file was sent to the cell phone.”
“Who’s Hammer?” Meribeth asked.
Todd did a cross-check with the user profiles. “Hammer,” he said, “aka Greg Alexander.”
“No!” Meribeth exclaimed, shaking her head in dismay the moment she heard the name. “That can’t be. It’s not possible for him to be mixed up in something like this.”
“Why not?” Mel asked.
“Because Greg is one of our best kids—the last person I would have expected to go off the rails like this.”
That reminded me of something my mother used to say, about finding things in the very last place she looked. No doubt the answers we needed were also lurking somewhere in that wall of file cabinets, although we had no clue about the first place to look, to say nothing of the last.
“Sorry,” Todd said. “According to this, Greg is the one who was online on this computer at the time the film clip file was uploaded.”
Resigned, Meribeth nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go pull his file.”
Once she left the room, I turned back to Todd. “Is the original file there, too?” I asked.
“No, they probably used a thumb drive to load it onto this computer and then deleted it as soon as it was uploaded to the phone. But these are kids. They think that once they punch the delete button, everything goes away completely, but they’re wrong. The data may be de-indexed, but the deleted file sits there on the hard drive for a period of time, waiting to be overwritten. The file was sent out Sunday night. There hasn’t been that much activity on this computer since then.”
“You think it’s still in there?” Mel asked.
“Yes,” Todd said, “and you can bet money I’ll be able to find it.”
Meribeth returned carrying another file. Unlike Amber’s, this one had more than one sheet of paper in it. I was mildly interested in the fact that, despite all the computer power sitting around, Meribeth Duncan put her faith in paper files stacked in metal cabinets.
“Greg works part-time in the produce department at the Safeway store in Tumwater. He’s due to graduate from high school next spring. Greg’s family is a mess. Both his parents and his older brother have been in trouble with the law. They buy junk from garage sales and private parties and try to resell it to metal recyclers. That’s the business they claim to be in. Their trash heap is on the far side of Tumwater.
“Greg lives in a moldy, wrecked motor home that doesn’t even have running water. He comes here to shower and wash his clothes. When he filled out his needs assessment he said that his long-term goal is to graduate from high school and join the military. I was hoping we could help him rise above his family’s bad karma. I even helped set up a meeting for him with an Air Force recruiter.” Meribeth shook her head sadly. “He was all excited about it, but if he’s mixed up in this mess, his getting into the service probably isn’t going to happen.”
“Do you have a street address on their place?” Mel asked.
Meribeth nodded and read it off. “I don’t recommend going there, though,” she said. “I’d try finding him at the grocery store first. I took him home one night when his car broke down. Their place isn’t officially a junkyard, but it comes complete with a full assortment of junkyard dogs. They were pretty scary.”
Meribeth sounded disheartened, and I didn’t blame her. She had invested years of her life, her time, and her effort on behalf of a ragtag bunch of kids nobody else seemed to give a damn about. Now one of those investments had most likely betrayed everything the poor woman stood for or hoped to accomplish.
It was clear to me that Greg “Hammer” Alexander and his pals were using the safe haven offered by Janie’s House for a lot more than just “hanging out” and doing their laundry. It was also clear that if word got out that the shelter was under any kind of law enforcement scrutiny, the kids involved in what had happened to Josh Deeson and Rachel Camber would disappear like puffs of smoke.
“You said Greg has a vehicle of some kind?” Mel asked.
“An old Toyota, I think,” Meribeth said. “Don’t quote me on that.”
When Mel and I left a few minutes later, Meribeth was watching as Todd copied data from the computers’ hard drives so he could analyze them at his leisure. Once we were in the car, I took over the driving while Mel found the only Tumwater, Washington, Safeway store and had the GPS guide us there—to no avail. This happened to be Greg’s day off.
“That’s all right,” Mel said. “I love going to scary places that have guard dogs.”
She put the Alexanders’ home address into the GPS and we headed there next. On the way to and through Tumwater, Mel checked with Records for rap sheet details on Greg’s family. His father, Demetri; his mother, Barbara Jane; and their older son, Matthew, weren’t exactly what you could call stellar. Matthew was a twenty-one-year-old guy currently out on bail on a weapons charge. Demetri had an extensive criminal background that included drug dealing and grand theft auto. Barbara had two DUI arrests and had spent six months in Purdy on possession of stolen goods.
All that information was enough to make me glad both Mel and I were armed and wearing vests. We weren’t really expecting to be shot at, but people who end up having repeated run-ins with the law aren’t the kind of folks who make sensible decisions. Their first response to having a cop show up on their doorstep might well be a hail of gunfire.
When we arrived at the address, we could see that what might have been a legitimate auto junkyard at one time had devolved into little more than a privately owned dump. I was surprised the county hadn’t shut it down. Maybe the planning and zoning folks weren’t any fonder of guard
dogs than Mel and I were.
A closed chain-link front gate, complete with a hand-painted BEWARE OF DOG sign, barred our way. As if to prove the sign was telling the truth, a chorus of dogs let us have it from the far side of the gate, barking, snapping, and snarling. A smaller sign with an arrow said RING BELL. Taking the dogs into consideration, we rang the bell—several times.
Eventually a man emerged from a collection of moss-covered motor homes that stood to one side of a tangle of rusted-out vehicles. They were circled end to end, like a wagon train, and they must have leaked like sieves because they were all draped with tarps aimed at helping keep the no-doubt moldy interiors partially dry. Living in one of those during Washington’s cold, wet winters couldn’t be fun.
The man, presumably Greg’s father, Demetri, was broad-shouldered and heavyset. Everything about him was gray—his hair, his skin, his clothing. In all that monochromatic grime it wasn’t easy to determine his exact age. He could have been fifty; he could have been seventy. As Demetri moved toward us, he brought with him the unmistakable odor of unwashed flesh. I remembered what Meribeth had told us about Greg’s place of residence having no running water.
Demetri approached us with a newly lit cigarette in hand, but the smoke from that was just a layer of cover to disguise the reek of recently smoked weed.
“Whaddya want?” he demanded.
No gunfire was in evidence, but Demetri wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat, either.
“We’re looking for Greg Alexander,” I said, showing him my badge. “Are you his father?”
“That’s right. I’m Demetri, but Greg’s not here. Whaddya want him for?”
A 1988 Toyota with a collection of mix-and-match bodywork was parked just inside the gate. I was pretty sure that was Greg’s ride, and that meant he was most likely home.
“That’s his vehicle, isn’t it?” I asked.
The old man started giving us a song and dance, but before he got very far a young man emerged from inside a different one of the circle of wrecked motor homes, one that was much smaller than the old man’s.
“What is it, Dad?” he asked.
“Nothin’,” Demetri said. “Go back inside.”
“Are you Greg?” Mel asked.
“I am,” he said. “What’s this all about?”
“We’re police officers. We have a few questions we’d like to ask you about Janie’s House,” Mel said. “It won’t take long. Just a couple of minutes.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Greg said to this father. “I’ll handle it.”
Shaking his head in disgust, Demetri went back the way he had come. Greg, moving the pack of barking dogs to one side, made his way out through the gate to where we were standing.
I showed him my badge.
“You’re cops?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”
Despite Greg’s rudimentary living arrangements, he was neatly dressed. Thanks to the services available to him at Janie’s House, Greg was clean and so were his clothes.
“You’re Hammer, right?” Mel asked.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s your online name—your user name on the computer system at Janie’s House—Hammer?”
“Oh, that,” he said with a laugh. “Yeah. I was going to use ‘Saw’ for my user name, but that was too short. You have to have at least six letters, so I chose Hammer instead.”
There was almost no resemblance between Greg and his father. Demetri looked like an Eastern European thug. Greg looked like an all-American kid—a clean-cut nice kid—who, right at that moment, seemed to be in the process of breaking Meribeth Duncan’s heart.
“What can you tell us about Josh Deeson?”
Greg shook his head. “I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?”
“His name has been in the papers a lot the last couple of days,” Mel said.
Greg gestured back toward the Alexanders’ unsightly pile of trash. “My parents aren’t big on newspapers,” he said. “And I don’t have time to read them online.”
“What about Rachel Camber?” Mel asked.
“Who?”
“You might have known her under her other name, Amber Wilson.”
“Sure,” Greg said without a hint of hesitation. “I know Amber. I met her a couple of times at Janie’s House when she showed up there. Nice girl. We watched TV and loaded dishwashers together a few times. Why? What about her?”
His answers were open, direct, and seemingly guileless. Greg Alexander was either one hell of a liar or he was absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing.
“Where were you Sunday evening?” Mel asked. “Say, seven to ten.”
“This past Sunday? I was at work. School is out. Everybody wants to head out on vacation. I’ve been picking up extra shifts right and left.”
“So we can check with your supervisor to find out if you were at work?”
“Sure,” he said. “You can also check my time card. We have to punch a time clock every time we come on shift and every time we go off.”
“And you have coworkers who will be able to say you were there?”
“Absolutely,” he said confidently. “But you still haven’t told what this is all about? Is something wrong?”
“Did you go to Janie’s House on Sunday?”
“Sure. Sunday afternoon. I was there just long enough to shower and clean up before I had to go to work.”
“What time?”
“What time did I go there?”
I nodded.
“Sometime around four, I guess,” he answered. “I was due to go on shift at six. Got off at midnight.”
“Did you happen to see Amber there?”
“No.”
“What about last night?” I asked. “Were you at work then, too?”
The previously open look on his face abruptly slammed shut. “I don’t have to tell you where I was,” he said. “Not until I know why you’re asking all these questions. And if I’m a suspect, don’t you have to read me my rights?”
That’s what I love about kids these days. That’s the only thing most of them seem to know about the law—that police officers are supposed to read them their rights.
“Show him the file, Mel,” I said. “That’ll give him a better idea of why we’re here.”
“What file?” Greg wanted to know.
“Sunday night, someone using your user name uploaded a file from one of the Janie’s House computers to a Janie’s House cell phone,” Mel explained. “That file was eventually sent to Josh Deeson’s cell phone.”
“I already told you I don’t know Josh Deeson.”
Mel located the file in her cell phone, cued it up, and then handed the phone to Greg. He glanced at it. “That’s Amber,” he announced when the clip started playing. “I already told you I know Amber.”
“Keep watching,” Mel said.
He did. Gradually, Greg’s eyes widened. I didn’t have to see the screen to realize that, as Amber’s apparently lifeless body stopped struggling and fell face forward onto a table, all color abruptly faded from Greg’s cheeks.
“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, stepping away from the phone and leaning hard against the gate. “Did they really kill her right then? Really?”
In terms of Greg Alexander’s future, those were the right questions for him to be asking. And his questions turned out to be the correct answer to any number of potential questions Mel and I might have asked. Unlike Greg, Mel and I both knew that the snuff film was faked. If Greg believed that he had just seen Amber Wilson murdered on the little screen before it was sent to Josh, then he hadn’t been involved in either the filming or in dumping Rachel’s lifeless body into the retention pond once she really was dead.
It was several moments before Greg was able to speak. “Why did they do that?” he asked finally, wiping his eyes. “She seemed like a nice girl to me. She wanted to become a cheerleader.”
Yes, I thought. Greg Alexander did know Rachel Camber.
“How could they gang
up on her like that? It had to be at least three to one. What’s fair about that?”
I had to remind myself that Greg was young. He still thought life was supposed to be fair.
“Do you know of anyone who had some kind of beef with Amber?”
“No. Not at all, and she was only there a couple of times. I think she was from somewhere out of town.”
On the far side of the gate, the door opened on the same moss-covered motor home into which Greg’s father had disappeared. An immense woman stepped out. She was wearing flip-flops and a tie-dyed muumuu that would have been totally at home at a Grateful Dead concert. She tottered down the steps and came walking purposefully toward us.
“Greg,” she yelled as she walked. “You get back inside here right now! Dad says these people are cops. We don’t want you talking to no cops.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Greg said reassuringly. “It’s no big deal.”
I changed the subject by gesturing toward the Toyota. “Is that your ride?”
He nodded. “It’s a piece of crap. I keep it running with junked parts. Once I graduate, I want to join the Air Force and learn how to be an airplane mechanic so I can afford a better car.”
“You still haven’t told us where you were last night,” Mel said.
Asking the same question over and over works on occasion, and this was one of those times. With Greg’s mother bearing down on us, Mel must have looked like the lesser of two evils.
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” he admitted. “She’s older—a lot older than me—and divorced. I met her at work. I was with her last night, at her house.”
“What time?” I asked.
“We both got off at seven. I went to her place after that and didn’t leave until sometime after midnight.”
“Can we check with her?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t tell my folks.”