by Dennis Kelly
Firemen positioned a Jaws of Life cutter on the car’s crumpled roof in an attempt to extricate the passengers. A hydraulic surge to the blades separated the compressed metal. A member of the rescue team leaned into the cavity with a flashlight and emerged with a lottery ticket between his fingers. “Them boys plumb ran out of luck.”
Conspiracy
The governor stepped cautiously onto the roof of the Minnesota State Capitol under a cool blue midday winter sky. He cinched the belt of his wool-lined trench coat and picked his way along the granite parapet. Below, in the distance, the ice-chunked Mississippi snaked along the edges of downtown St. Paul. A puff of smoke rose next to the Quadriga, the gold-leafed sculpture of a chariot and four muscled horses—centurions of the state—at the base of the Capitol’s dome.
“Morty, what the hell are we doing up here?” the governor asked.
“Smoking.”
“That’s disappointing!” The governor was shouting to be heard over a low-flying jet. “Thought you wanted a witness to your jump! I’m getting hammered in every paper and on every channel.”
“Pinhead talk shows and their conspiracy theories.” Morty crushed the cigarette butt underfoot. “Crissake, it hasn’t even been a week since the drawing,” Morty said. “Can’t these press jackals give the winner a little breathing room?”
“No, and thanks to you,” the governor said, “my tax plan and credibility are directly linked to this fiasco. I’m starting to take heat from the legislators—who are getting hounded by their constituents.”
The airwaves were abuzz with speculation on how the $750 million BlizzardBall drawing had been rigged from the start. The talk jocks, bloggers, and office Dilberts pointed out how the first BlizzardBall number drawn had been a mistake—disqualified, due to technical difficulties (wink-wink). They surmised that the restart and subsequent picks were part of a string of planted numbers the Lottery officials knew would not be claimed. The theorists further speculated that the convenience store where the winning ticket was issued was a government front. Absent a claim, the jackpot would revert back to the state coffers. To cover their tracks, the conspirators flooded the convenience store and murdered the owner, thus dodging the retailers $100,000 bonus payout for selling the winning ticket.
“Hey, buck up,” Morty said, “you got to let this play out.” Morty pulled a flask from his coat pocket and took a swig. “The winner’s just lying in the weeds trying to get over the shock.”
Morty extended the flask to the governor. “Here, put a little antifreeze under your hood.” The governor’s face pinched from the whiskey burn. “You gotta keep these legislators in line,” Morty said. “Just remind them about how much money the lottery’s delivered to fund their piggy little programs and they’ll back off. Gaming’s the future. It’s a rough business. The lottery’s simply a launching pad, a foothold into other state gaming opportunities.”
“Surely you’re not forgetting the Indians and their gaming pact with the state?” The governor kicked away an aggressive pigeon trying to peck his shoe. “What are you going to do, run them off the reservation?”
“Let ’em have their smoke-filled pole barn casinos,” Morty said, retrieving the flask. “The future’s instant gratification. Instant win games are to lottery what crack is to cocaine. Supercharged games, delivered electronically through an infrastructure of video terminals and online sites, twenty-four seven. We’re talking about a billion dollars of incremental revenue.”
“Look, just bring me a winner, so we can get the lottery ticket sales reenergized and this conspiracy lunacy behind us.” The governor pulled his trench coat collar around his ears and retreated inside, leaving Morty to the birds.
Dentist
Kirchner gingerly opened his mouth. An aspirator pulled at the inside of his cheek. A metallic pick probed the cracked molar: enamel, dentin, nerve. He flinched. “Still eating hard candy?” the dentist scolded. Kirchner had carried the toothache around ever since the Eastside AA meeting.
Cell phone vibrations tickled his thigh. He regretted not having turned it off, and with the dentist on his chest, he couldn’t reposition himself to reach it. His attention ping-ponged between the cotton wad pressed between his gum and cheek and the persistent calls. He counted six in all.
“Let that numb up a bit.” The dentist withdrew the Novocain syringe and moved on to another patient.
Kirchner used the respite to attend to his phone.
“We must have a bad connection, you sound muffled,” said Tyler, the young BCA analyst.
“I’m having some dental work done. Whattya got?”
“Some lottery tickets from the Cash and Dash were redeemed at a truck stop near Luverne, along the interstate. First ones we’ve been able to identify.”
Kirchner bolted up from his reclining position on the dental chair and struck his head on the overhead halogen exam lamp. He felt a welt rising on his forehead. “If the truck stop has a videotape, I want it pulled and the images transmitted pronto.”
“Won’t be necessary, we already got ’em.”
“Where, how?” Kirchner wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth. The right side of his face hung like dead meat.
“They met up with a Peterbilt.” Tyler scanned the report from the highway patrol. “Two males, Mexican, probably meat packers. Two green cards and one driver’s license found at the scene, but it’s fairly certain they’re bogus.”
“How do you know these are the same guys who redeemed the tickets?”
The dentist reappeared, extending his wrist to Kirchner and tapping his watch. Kirchner responded with the one-minute pointer finger.
“There were so many lottery tickets on the scene it looked like a bunch of flamingos were run over. A FedEx packing slip with a Vancouver shipping address was also found at the crash scene. I suspect it’s the location of a lottery reseller who was pounding ticket sales through the Cash and Dash.”
“Get the FBI to run it down. What about the plates?” Blood dripped from the corner of Kirchner’s mouth. He was unaware he’d bitten his numbed tongue.
“Probably falsely registered, but I got a search in the works,” Tyler said.
“Let’s meet,” Kirchner said.
“See you at Nina’s Café.” Tyler clicked off before Kirchner could offer an alternative. Kirchner flipped the phone shut. The dentist and assistant were standing at the head of the exam chair, arms crossed, waiting. Kirchner rubbed his jaw. He did not have a good feeling about this.
Super Geek
Tyler Bigsby, the cocky young BCA analyst, got off to an inauspicious start. As a young boy, he lived like a desert rat on the outskirts of Las Vegas while his mother, Lola, plied the casinos for work. Lola worked as a dancer, drink hostess, blackjack dealer, chip cashier—whatever it took to support a child in a dilapidated trailer home. The ever-precocious Tyler picked up on the trailer’s neglected condition and creatively patched holes to keep varmints and rain out. A regular little MacGyver, the neighbors called him. What he couldn’t fix was the parade of Lola’s nightly visitors that forced him outside into a pup tent. In the little camp he set up near a dry creek bed, he slept in the company of iguanas, sidewinders, and tarantulas.
The chip-cashing job was the last employment stop for Tyler’s mother. Lola got busted altering credit card slips from gamblers buying chips at her casino window. The cumulative theft, at $28,000, was not a large sum by Vegas standards, but nobody steals from a casino, and those who do pay dearly. Especially when one of the altered credit cards belonged to an angry big shot high roller, with girlfriend in tow. The dustup attracted the attention of the high roller’s wife, who thought he was at a software convention in Seattle.
Lola was sentenced to three years, and her thirteen-year-old son, now a ward of the state, was sent off to Mankato, Minnesota, a small college town just south of the Twin Cities, into the custody of a reluctant unmarried aunt. The temporary transfer, however, turned into a permanent change of residence for
Tyler when Lola died unexpectedly from meningitis in the prison infirmary.
Aunt Becky worked as a librarian at the local high school and kept tight tabs on her new dependent. Overwhelmed by the advance of electronic media, she increasingly relied on Tyler to manage the library’s computer system. However, Tyler’s assistance, with his intuitive feel for technology, came at a cost. Screen savers on the school’s computers randomly depicted hot babes. Sporadic snippets of dialogue from the movie Napoleon Dynamite—“You guys are retarded” or “Ugh! Gross! Freakin’ idiot!”—burst forth from the school’s intercom.
Tyler’s career in criminology brought with it an active connection to his childhood. It was an opportunity to demystify the dark world of cops and robbers and the system that had ripped his mother out of his life. Law enforcement work also placed him in the culture of male mentors—something Aunt Becky couldn’t provide and a role to which Kirchner, the alpha dog on the lottery case, was oblivious.
Kirchner arrived on time at Nina’s Internet Café on St. Paul’s Selby Avenue. Tyler was late as usual. The young analyst had been assigned to dig around at the BlizzardBall Lottery office to look for a connection between the death of the Cash and Dash store owner and the issuance of the winning lottery ticket. Tyler’s frenetic behavior drove Kirchner crazy. He was forever talking into space with a wireless ear piece stuck to the side of his head, while his thumbs tortured an electronic iPhone game. The only way Kirchner could get his dedicated attention was to feed him.
As Kirchner waited, he looked around. Casablanca-style fans wobbled on the restaurant’s tin ceiling. Large arched display windows kept hanging plants alive. Sand-colored brick walls enhanced the casual atmosphere. Customers sat zombie-like, alone, at mismatched tables and chairs and in old church pews set on the well-worn oak floor, their heads bowed deep into their laptops. “Used to call these people loners,” Kirchner mumbled to himself. “Can barely get a poker game together anymore. Most guys these days would rather gamble online in their underwear.”
More and more, it seemed to Kirchner that technology fostered personal isolation and a certain kind of societal numbness. A disconnect. He grew up on a farm in North Dakota where people embraced the natural world and took care of their elders and those that needed help. Today, everywhere he looked, people were getting boxed in or screened out: nursing homes for seniors, ghettos for the poor, hideaways for the mentally disabled and handicapped. The dead can’t even be dead anymore. Plastered with makeup and dressed in fine clothes, they look as though they were going to a party. When his wife died he brought her cremated remains back to the plains of North Dakota. They were set on top a scaffold built in the old tradition by her father. Kirchner sat with his wife’s relatives, smoked the ceremonial pipe, and watched the four winds dip into the open urn and broadcast her ashes to the universe. He wondered how long the high-tech, analytical, scientific, cyber-plumbed BCA would keep him around. He hoped somebody realized that common sense and insight into the nature of things was worth preserving.
Tyler, fifteen minutes late, made an unapologetic entrance and quickly ordered.
“You’ll never make it to thirty eating like that.” Kirchner pointed at Tyler’s plate stacked with cheese-loaded hash browns, bacon, eggs, and pancakes dolloped with butter. A large Diet Coke stood at the ready. Kirchner’s swollen face still hurt from his recent dental procedure. He ordered oatmeal with a banana and black coffee. “Whattya got?”
“In the BlizzardBall Lottery you pick five of fifty-nine red balls and one of thirty-nine white BlizzardBalls. There are 195,249,054 possible Pick Six number combinations,” Tyler said with his mouth full. “The lowest sum of these combinations is sixteen.”
Kirchner held up his hand to request a pause and plopped a notebook onto the table. “Give it to me on paper.”
“The lowest combination sum with the BlizzardBall is 16.” Tyler wrote out the figures:
1+2+3+4+5+BB1 = 16
“The highest combination sum is 324.” He added more figures to the paper:
55+56+57+58+59+BB39 = 324
Then he continued, “The sums between 140 and 180 represent only thirteen percent of the possible sums but deliver almost forty-two percent of the winning jackpot numbers drawn. Some folks call this winning range the hot zone.”
The waitress leaned over Kirchner, her bosom at his shoulder, to refill his coffee and took Tyler’s glass for a refill. Tyler’s attention momentarily tracked to her backside. “Sorry,” he said. “Where were we?”
“I think you’re in the hot zone.”
Kirchner resisted the urge to like the young analyst. The kid’s milky skin with its sprinkling of freckles and the reddish cheeks reminded him of Howdy Doody—a likeness certain to be lost on Gen X, Y, or Z. Most young hotshots didn’t last long in law enforcement anyway. They got tired of the long hours, lousy pay, and working in the cesspool of humanity. The job was a résumé filler on the way to law school, a private lab, or corporate gigs. Tyler, however, insisted he was in it for the long haul.
“Most people trust their luck to the Lottery Quick Picks, about eighty percent or thereabouts,” Tyler said, trading the pen for a fork. “A curious thing—over the past four months a large percentage of the hot zone combinations have not shown up in the Quick Picks. They’ve been suppressed.”
“Which means?” Kirchner asked.
“Keeping the combinations with the highest probability of winning out of the public’s hands increases the potential for the jackpot to roll over into bigger and bigger prizes and attract more players. Suppressing the numbers in the hot zone is not a guaran teed strategy, as potentially any number combination could win, but it’s a good ploy to juice the pot.”
Kirchner speared a banana slice off his plate and held it in the air. “And how is it that they suppress these numbers?”
“Every ticket terminal has a built-in random number generator. The operating software, based on numeric algorithms, and the equipment are provided by a third-party vendor. It’s not a big leap to suggest that someone who understands the random num-ber-generating Quick Pick code and has access to the transaction terminals, which the BlizzardBall operators do, could muck with the ticket numbers issued.”
“The suppression strategy could only benefit the state.”
“And the eventual winner,” Tyler added.
“At some point, with all the buying pressure, wouldn’t they have to release the numbers in the hot zone?”
“They would, and did,” Tyler said. “In the last drawing where the Cash and Dash produced the winning ticket, the Lottery authorities released all but a select few number combinations through the Quick Picks. The exemptions included twenty-five unique red ball numbers paired in every possible combination with one curious white BlizzardBall. This comprised a total of 53,130 number combinations. Lottery players call this type of number aggregation a ‘wheel.’ This isn’t many numbers in the whole scheme of things, but keeping these special number combinations out of the Quick Picks minimizes the risk of multiple winners. Not only did this pick scheme hit the six winning numbers for $750 million, it also yielded an additional one million four hundred thousand dollars in 5, 4, 3, 2, number and BlizzardBall match combinations.”
“If the numbers can be manipulated, why not just issue a ticket after the fact?”
Tyler signaled the waitress. “Can I get a caramel roll?”
Tyler informed Kirchner that as tickets are sold they are transmitted to two separate databases: one held by the BlizzardBall operators and the other by the vendor that supplied the ticket transaction terminals. Prior to the drawing, the two ticket databases are certified by an independent auditor to insure they balance and contain exact duplicate ticket transactions. An audit would quickly detect hacking into the ticket transaction files. The only way to truly win would be to hold a valid ticket that matches the winning numbers. Tyler volunteered that a visit to the independent auditing firm was high on his to-do list and licked his fingers.
“No, I’m full.” Tyler dragged his fork over the empty plate, leaving rake lines in the egg yolk.
“I mean about the investigation.”
“I suggest you talk to a Bonnie at the BlizzardBall Lottery office. She’s the database security manager. A Nervous Nellie. She and Morty are a real hush-hush pair. The guy has his hand glued to her ass. My guess is, if you put some heat on her, she’ll squeal.”
“You got her number? We’ll call her from the car.”
Kirchner settled in behind the wheel of his Crown Vic and Tyler dropped into the passenger seat. Kirchner dialed Bonnie’s number and introduced himself.
“Look, Agent Kirchner, I want you to know I don’t appreciate your pubescent technology brat. What’s his name?”
“Tyler,” Kirchner offered.
“Yes, he came into my office and demanded sensitive data files. So arrogant.” Kirchner could hear the tension in Bonnie’s voice. “I’ve got more to do than wait on him.”
“I take it you and Tyler did not hit it off. Manners seem to be a lost art.”
Tyler picked up on the conversation and waved a middle finger at Kirchner.
Kirchner sensed he had momentarily allied himself with Bonnie. He’d taken enough of the fight out of her to get a line in the water. “The agency has found some unusual patterns in the Quick Picks,” he said.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Numbers suppressed, not distributed, that could potentially cause the jackpot to run up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, irritated, “but there’s no harm building a big jackpot. How else are the animals to get protection?”
Kirchner balanced his notebook on the steering wheel. “Excuse me, Bonnie. Did you say animals?” Kirchner knocked on the dashboard to get Tyler’s attention and wrote the word animal with a big question mark.