‘Why do you think this crime is getting so much media attention?’ McQ wondered out loud to Blade during the first week of the investigation.
‘That’s easy,’ said Blade. ‘It’s the “ick factor.” Some guy getting it on with an unconscious young woman is pretty darn icky. People love that kind of stuff. I hate to say it but sick sells.’
The investigation had been going on long enough that public interest had waned. The onsite media had thinned out and only a quarter of the news vehicles and reporters were still hanging around. Tommy Devlin’s rising star was not as bright as it had been. For a few weeks, Devlin had been a nightly staple on a variety of cable news shows, but not anymore. When the Eliza Stern story first broke, the public couldn’t get enough of it. Like everything else, news runs in cycles and there were always newer, shinier objects for the public to shift their attention to.
As months passed and the horror of what happened to Eliza Stern settled into the public’s collective consciousness, people soon turned to a new debacle—a mass shooting in Indiana with thirty-seven fatalities. And with that, the media was off and running after the next salacious story.
As McQ and Marie drove up the Florida Turnpike towards Orlando, Marie reviewed Universal’s rides and attractions on the app on her phone. ‘I want to go to the new Harry Potter Diagon Alley first. That wasn’t open the last time we went. How long has it been since we’ve been there?’
‘We went about six years ago.’
‘And the Simpsons, I love that one. Remember? It smells like baby powder.’
Marie reminded him of all the attractions at Universal and McQ started to look forward to a relaxing two days away from Oceanside. Even though thoughts of his case were never fully out of his mind, he pulled into the Universal Cabana Bay Hotel parking lot, and within thirty minutes they were checked in.
They boarded a free shuttle to the park entrance and along with hundreds of others walked en masse towards the gates. At some point, there was a slow-down in the movement of the crowd even though they were nowhere near the entrance.
‘What’s the hold up?’ said an irritated McQ, trying to get a handle on why the foot traffic in front of them had stalled. As they inched closer, they saw what it was—a security checkpoint. Every single person entering the park was being fingerprinted and had to go through a metal detector. They soon learned your fingerprint became your ID to get you in and out of the park.
‘Security has gotten incredibly sophisticated,’ said McQ to his girlfriend. ‘I guess that’s what this world has come to. Now families have to be fingerprinted and scanned for metal before they can go on the Spiderman ride. It’s sad.’
‘If it keeps me safe,’ said Marie, ‘I’m good with it.’
‘The fingerprinting isn’t to protect you, Marie. They do it to prevent people from sharing tickets.’
‘That’s messed up,’ said Marie, aghast. ‘My privacy is compromised because they’re afraid of people sharing tickets? What gives them the right to do that? There should be a law against that.’
‘Do you not want to go in?’
‘No,’ said Marie, narrowing her eyes. ‘I’ll do it, but it’s not right. Who knows what they do with that information.’
After getting their fingerprints scanned and going through the metal detectors, Marie and McQ headed to Diagon Alley but stopped for a turkey leg on the way, just as Marie had promised.
By six o’clock that night, they were both tired, having gotten up and out of Oceanside before seven that morning. They went for an early dinner to one of McQ’s favorite places, Margaritaville.
As it always was, the place was Jimmy Buffett lively and even had a giant margarita volcano that erupted every ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of the dining room. Looking over the menu, McQ tested Marie to see if she would honor her commitment on no food restrictions or associated comments.
‘I think I’ll start with some of those volcano nachos,’ said McQ, waiting for a reaction. Marie didn’t flinch. ‘Then I’ll probably get the NY Sirloin with mashed potatoes and cheese.’ Marie did not look up from her menu and kept reading.
‘This isn’t fun,’ said McQ, pouting.
‘What?’
‘I was going to order nachos and steak and you didn’t say a single word.’
‘I promised you I wouldn’t bug you.’
‘You didn’t say anything when I ate that entire turkey leg this morning.’
‘Now, you want me to say something?’
‘At least before, I knew you cared.’
Marie started to laugh. ‘You’re unbelievable. If you eat nachos and a sirloin steak with potatoes and cheese, you’re going to keel over and die and I’ll have to take you home in a box.’
McQ grinned and reached for her hand. As he looked lovingly into Marie’s eyes he jerked his head back. ‘Wait a second,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’
‘Think of what?’
‘There are a bunch of commercial organizations collecting fingerprint data beyond just law enforcement. Universal does it and so does Disney. I completely forgot about that. Stadiums, car rentals and even airlines are using biometric technology. All sorts of establishments that cater to large groups of people and crowd control are experimenting with this stuff.’
‘That’s terrible. Where are all of the privacy laws to protect us?’
‘Don’t you see, Marie? Maybe the man who assaulted Eliza Stern or attacked Jenny O’Hearn didn’t have a criminal record,’ said McQ. ‘That might be why the unidentified set of prints we collected in Eliza’s room didn’t have a match from police or FBI databases. But maybe this joker enjoys theme parks or major league baseball or rented a car once or twice.’
‘You’re so smart.’
‘I’m not that smart or I would have thought of this a while ago.’
‘But, when we gave our fingerprints here at Universal, the guy at the booth said they dispose of all the records and prints once your ticket is no longer valid,’ said Marie.
An incredulous McQ looked at his girlfriend. ‘And you believed him because?’ Marie was silent. ‘Of course, that’s what they tell you, Marie. Data is valuable. That’s the currency everyone trades in now. I don’t care what they told us, I promise you, nobody’s throwing that data away. That’s pure gold. Now I’m thinking, maybe we can tap into it and match those unidentified prints we found in Eliza Stern’s room.’
He pulled out his phone and did a few Google searches. ‘There are several players in the Bio Metrics space but the big one is Know U. Tomorrow, I’m going to see if we can get into their database.’
The next day, the Oceanside police chief reached out to Mayor Tim Davidson, who in turn contacted the governor of Florida. Calls were placed to Universal Studios, Disney and a few other organizations that recorded fingerprints. With some gentle prodding from the governor, a few of the companies agreed to allow the police to crossmatch against their database of fingerprints. It was going to take some time because the companies weren’t set up for that kind of vetting, but McQ would wait however long it took. If they were able to find a match from Eliza’s room or the storage room where Jenny O’Hearn had overdosed, it could blow the whole case wide open.
56
The public’s interest in Eliza Stern’s baby had indeed peaked and the story was no longer headlining the news. People were still curious about what happened but without being fed continuous tidbits of information, the short attention span of the public had moved on.
Tommy Devlin, who only a few weeks before had been on every network’s speed dial hadn’t heard from anyone in over ten days. Talk radio hosts had clamored for interviews with him to get the inside track on the baby at Oceanside Manor. He could still taste the cinnamon flavored coffee and blueberry muffins in the CNN green room and now it was all slipping away. The last time he did a segment on CNN, one of the assistant producers casually mentioned he’d be a great fit at the network. The guy said the network brass thought he had
a face for TV. Devlin knew he had to get the Stern story back on the front pages of America’s newspapers and TV screens or he’d never get his shot. There would never be a story as big as Eliza Stern in Oceanside again, that he was sure of.
As he had every day for the past two months, Tommy positioned himself once again in the Oceanside Manor parking lot under a tree near the entrance, hoping to get a fresh lead. Only a handful of reporters were still camped out there and from what he could tell, they were all on the B team. Most of them were sitting alone in their cars or smoking cigarettes under the shade of a row of palms.
He checked his phone every five minutes to see if there were any new emails or texts from the cable shows. Nothing. He looked up from his phone and saw two women walking up to the brick building. They were the same chatty two who had given him the bogus tip about the baby in the wall. He sprinted over to them.
‘Hey, ladies, remember me?’ said Devlin, smiling.
‘Yeah,’ said the tall one. ‘I’ve seen you on TV a lot. I saw you a few times on CNN and Fox News.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Tommy, grinning. ‘How do you think I did?’
‘You were great,’ said the short girl, smiling at him. ‘I saw you on Anderson Cooper, too.’
‘Anderson’s a good guy. He and I, we’re pretty tight,’ said Tommy. ‘We got a lot in common. I’ll probably get together with him the next time I go up to New York to do a segment. We’ll probably go out for a beer or something.’
‘Really?’ said both girls, duly impressed.
‘So, ladies,’ said Tommy, ‘I might go back on the news shows soon but only if I dig up something important to tell them. This story has sort of stagnated. It’s been two months and nothing new has happened. You hear about anything unusual going on inside?’
The two women looked at each other and wrinkled their noses.
‘Well,’ said the short one slowly and deliberately. ‘I overheard a couple of people talking in a break room. I had a headache and was lying down behind a partition and they didn’t know I was there.’
‘Who was talking?’
‘They were cops,’ said the short girl.
‘You told me you didn’t see them,’ interrupted the tall girl.
‘I didn’t see them but I heard them and they sounded like cops and one of them had a police radio on and it kept going off,’ said the short one. ‘They were definitely cops.’
‘Ladies, ladies…what did the police officers say?’
‘They said that they did all these DNA tests and cleared just about every person who came in contact with this place between April and June of last year. They said there were still a few outstanding people who wouldn’t give up their DNA and there was one person who they were especially interested in.’
‘Really? Did they say who that person was?’ asked Tommy, starting to pant.
The short woman looked at her tall friend while the tall one narrowed her eyes and shook her head, signaling they should both keep their mouths shut. The short woman, enjoying the limelight and the attention from the reporter who was a personal pal of Anderson Cooper, ignored her friend and turned back to Devlin.
‘You can’t tell anyone, but they said they are waiting for a DNA sample from Dr. Frank Farwell, our chief facility administrator,’ said the short woman. ‘They said the money was on Farwell.’
‘You shouldn’t have told him that,’ said the tall one angrily.
‘But hasn’t Farwell been out of the country for over a year?’ asked Tommy, writing furiously in his notepad. ‘Isn’t he the one who’s been in South America the whole time?’
‘Yes,’ said the short woman, ‘but according to what the doctors determined, Eliza Stern was assaulted between April and June and Dr. Farwell was here for a few days during that time period.’
‘That seems like an awfully tiny window to pin all their hopes on. A few days? After all this time, that’s all they got?’ asked Tommy.
‘There’s one more reason,’ said the tall girl, now wanting to get in on the action with the reporter.
‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.
‘Eliza Stern’s baby, who is now two months old has red hair,’ said the tall girl as if she had just shared the secrets of the universe.
‘Why does that matter?’ asked Tommy.
‘You know who else has red hair?’
‘Ronald McDonald?’ said Devlin, laughing at his own joke.
‘Dr. Frank Farwell,’ said the tall girl, nodding with a satisfied smile.
Tommy’s eyes lit up and he smiled from ear to ear as he jotted the information down.
‘Are you going to report that on CNN?’ asked the short girl. ‘If you do, don’t you dare use our names.’
Tommy assured them everything would be kept confidential and the two women turned and walked into the front door of Oceanside Manor. Career building wheels turned inside Devlin’s head.
If I take this info to the news shows, they’d have a lead to run with and I’d be asked to comment on it. It’s not been verified and it’s really only a little gossip from the hospital parking lot, but the information did technically come from the cops. That short girl sounded pretty convinced. Besides, if Farwell didn’t do anything, once they get his DNA, he’ll be cleared. In the meantime, I’ll be back on prime time.
57
Day 63
McQ and Marie had been invited to Blade and Eve’s for a Friday night dinner. McQ and his girlfriend had been looking forward to it all week because Eve, an occupational therapist by trade, was also a phenomenal hostess and cook. Though Eve cooked strictly vegetarian and McQ leaned more towards red meat and fried foods, even he had to admit the dishes Eve served up were nothing short of spectacular.
‘I’ll tell you what, Evie, if I could make stuff like this,’ said McQ, helping himself to more, ‘I might give up Chick Fil-A.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Marie with a laugh. ‘That’ll be the day.’
‘The dishes Eve made tonight aren’t that hard to make,’ said Blade.
‘Look who’s talking,’ interrupted Eve, laughing as she pulled her long curly brown hair up into a ponytail. ‘When have you ever cooked, hon? That would be—never.’
‘I make our coffee in the morning. Besides, you do it so well. My cooking would only be a colossal disappointment for everyone concerned,’ said Blade with a grin and a wink at McQ.
Everyone helped clear the table and the group moved into the living room.
‘Hear anything more from the guys at the FBI?’ Blade asked her partner.
‘Oh no,’ groaned Marie, ‘we’re not going to talk about Eliza Stern again?’
‘I want to talk about it,’ Eve said. ‘Anita never tells me anything.’
‘You want to change places with me?’ said Marie. ‘Eliza Stern is all McQ talks about but he doesn’t tell me any of the interesting details. Everything’s confidential. I have to listen to him rant but I can’t know anything juicy. Does that seem fair to you?’
‘My wife doesn’t tell me anything,’ Eve said good-naturedly, looking at Blade and scrunching up her face.
‘Here we go,’ said Blade, turning to McQ for some support. ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll talk about the investigation for ten minutes but after that we’re done. Nothing we say leaves this room. Okay?’
McQ and Blade gave the two women an overview of the Stern investigation but said nothing terribly confidential. Eve was enthralled, Marie was bored—she’d heard it all before.
‘It should be simple to figure out who did it,’ Eve said. ‘DNA doesn’t lie, at least that’s what they say on Law & Order.’
‘That’s correct,’ said McQ, ‘but you’ve got to have someone to match it to. So far, we’ve evaluated hundreds of people and not one of them was a match.’
‘We had a few holdouts for a while who were at the top of our list,’ said Blade. ‘One was a doctor at the hospital with privacy issues, another was the brother of a patient. They’ve since both checked out negative.�
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‘There’s one more DNA result we’re waiting for but it’s a long shot,’ said McQ.
‘Who?’ chorused Marie and Eve.
‘Dr. Frank Farwell. He’s the Oceanside Manor administrator who has been on sabbatical in South America. He left around the time Eliza would have become pregnant.’
‘What makes you think it’s him?’ asked Eve.
‘For one thing,’ said McQ, ‘the timing of his departure could have worked and…’
‘It was his hair, or what was left of it that tipped us off,’ Blade said, jumping in with a wicked smile. ‘Eliza’s got light blondish brown hair but the baby’s hair is definitely red, just like what’s left of Farwell’s.’
‘We’ve been waiting for his DNA to come from Ecuador for weeks. It’s been held up at U.S. Customs for some unknown reason but,’ said Blade with a relieved smile, ‘today it cleared and we should have it in a day or two and then it’s off to the lab.’
‘And what if it’s not him? What’s next?’ asked Eve, leaning forward in her chair.
‘Back to the drawing board,’ said McQ. ‘We’ll have to figure out another way to make an ID.’
‘What about fingerprints?’ asked Eve.
‘There were loads of them in Eliza’s room and in the supply room where we found Jenny O’Hearn,’ said McQ. ‘The additional reach that we got from the prints at the theme parks enabled us to identify a few more prints that weren’t in the police database. We got matches on a couple of hospital aides, two nurses, and even Drs. Horowitz and Crawford. Guess they’d all been to Orlando at some point. But those people also had a legitimate reason for being in Eliza’s room so while it had promise, the whole exercise was a bust. In the end, almost every fingerprint match that was suspect, was later cleared by DNA.’
58
Day 64
Without Her Consent Page 19