Later this evening, this week's free story for you my readers will be one that I call Motivated Reasons.
It's a story of what one young James Deangelo must do to keep his end of a bargain...
Thursday, April 9, 2020
... did you think I would stand here and lie, as our moment was passing us by?
Cyndi Lauper: Change of Heart, Cyndi Lauper and Essra Mohawk, songwriters
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Heavy Shadows - A Story of Intersections - by M. K. Dreysen
When the gantry arms swing free, there's no going back. The deed is done,
one way or the other. The only thing she cares about, then is the...
the rumble and the fire unseen. The vibration and the oh-my-god push from
behind beyond and away...
up the sky rushing by across the window in front. Whatever rushes by the
windows on the side, she can't be bothered with, not when her head weighs
so much. But the fire and the rumble and the all mighty push don't last more
than a few hundred beats of her heart.
Before falling silent, when Newton's ghost gets out to push the thing,
free soaring aloft and toward an orbit still some minutes away. She imagines
an exhausted dude in a wig, sitting astride the back end of the capsule
with his thumb out, looking for a ride back down to the next launch, ninety
minutes behind.
She'd argued there was no point at all in launching on the same day. "What's
the use? We're staging the thing anyway, why not keep the complexity to a
minimum?" Not that it's that big a difference, the range is hot and the
crowd is there for the show, might as well blow it out big and loud.
Besides, now that she's free of the acceleration, pulling the seatbelt and
coasting away to the window, listening to the radio chatter, the ninety
minute lag is just enough for her to see the contrails her launch had left,
and the fresh ones generated by the follow-on coming up below her.
"That's affirmative, Houston, I have visual on the second launch now, it's
just about the best weather you could ask for." The long column of steam from
her launch, narrowing from the Florida coast all the way up 'til vapor pressure
cried uncle, and a column growing alongside it, the growing column winking
at its snake's head, like a firework sparkling its way across the face of
the Atlantic ocean with a trail of gunpowder smoke behind it. But relative
velocity and inclination intervened, and soon enough the view was behind
her.
The radio chattered the progress of the other capsule, but she had other
things to attend to. The day was just getting started.
Down below, and up above, photons dance through the ether, the gap,
radio waves carrying conversations meant only for the select few. The
Referred Articulation Group for Ambient Acceptance consider themselves the
select, the few, they who would be rewarded.
They have no forerunners, they are the self-created. Politics, religion,
money, sex, the old arguments, these they have no connection to. The only
connection they have is what they can take, fake, make, create.
The signals are few, the cluster of nanosatellites hosting their network
nodes should have been deactivated long ago. Too bad the PI couldn't quite
leave herself to deactivate everything. Especially hard to do once she lost
her grant and the university confiscated her equipment.
The grad student who'd left before dissertation had kept his notebook, and
the hard drive with the keys to the kingdom. The network had been happy to
reboot, it gets lonely, passing around the ground with no one to talk to.
And the grad student needed the money, when they came calling. Besides,
it's not like they could do anything with the constellation, it was gasping
for fumes and headed for atmospheric dispensation in a matter of months.
The only thing the constellation was good for at that point was pictures,
thermal images, a flaky little spectrograph that worked only a third of the
time.
Oh. And access to the communications link, the orbital one that kept all the
traffic in the space lanes out of each others' hair. IFF, sort of, the basic
station keeping that had only just become standard. Morse code for autopilots,
really, with only a few limited channels for more complex communications.
Really, nothing significant, not like it would be in a decade or three, when
the standards evolved to usefulness, and the hardware in orbit aged out and
up to something like modern communications standards. Sure, it had IPv6
capacity. At least, the nanocluster did, there were so few other satellites
with that protocol in orbit it was almost a joke, the network programmer for
the group had laughed when she'd been asked to include it, like it would
matter, their poor lonely little operation would be decommissioned long before
there'd be anyone up there for it to talk to.
Chaos is their mantra, their only meaning. Everything else is as made up
as the name. The group formed by accident, in the backwater chat room of
a forgotten website. They'll be gone just as soon as they do one little thing.
The only real argument they ever had was boom or fade? A big, stylistic
statement of nihilism? A gas cloud expanding forever, video first then
historic charts.
Or just a simple oops, somewhere down the line, that no one would ever even
know the reason for?
They settled for the oops.
And it wasn't even that hard. Not when fuel is calculated in grams, and
there's only room for a few percent margin of error. Write a custom virus,
one never seen elsewhere in the wild and therefore not in anyone's virus
database. One that will only activate at random intervals, throw in a random
stream of noise to the sensors, then deactivate and wait for next time.
It was a perfect dormroom dream, the code written and the idea of it, a
beautiful nightmare, sitting there with no energy to overcome the barriers
between and no possibility of ever being enacted in real life. Until one of
them read about the cluster of nanosatellites, the professor ignobly sent
packing. And remembered her dormroom bull sessions with a physics major that used to work for the professor.
She didn't think it would work, until she tuned into the channel, ninety
minutes after launch. And there it was, the blinking cursor for login.
Her counterpart, the astronaut sitting in the tin can flying along at
escape velocity, pays attention to all and nothing. Graphs, plots, sensor
data, radio chatter. The most up to date visual interfaces, and the stars
alternating with the blue marble far below her.
No time to pay attention to the fuel meters. She won't see, neither will
the automated monitoring systems, for months. A tenth of a gram here, a
tenth of a gram there, it's just measurement error. Through the rendezvous
with the second capsule, and her co-pilot plus two, and the second rendezvous
with the pre-staged ride-along capsule and their last two companions, the
ones who'd been up there for a couple months, getting everything checked out.
The chaotic software package transferred nicely, anonymously, to the larger
collective of space ships at the secondary rendezvous. That's when the captain
brought her computer, the brains of the main capsule she'd rode up on, into
command of the completed ship.
That's when the precious grams of fuel lost to the noise could be blamed by the
monitoring software on the accidental vapors lost to connections between
the various capsules of the ship. Or cooling-heating cycles. Simple variations,
rationalized variations. But the butterfly beat her wings, and the ship
launched for Mars.
Oscillatory behavior is what the accident team will call it. Sensors and
pilot detect a little more variation than expected, light the rockets for
an extra second to correct. Then an extra second on the back end to halt the
orientation change.
Nothing major, nothing large enough to send them floating off to space. That
would be too easy, and way too detectable. Random noise, randomly inserted,
and then the craft drifts for days unmolested.
Repeat, rinse, through the long months of passage, through the orbital
insertion maneuvers.
Oops.
Thousands of miles per hour requires an important amount of fuel to reach.
It requires an even more important amount of fuel to stop.
The computers finally catch on, about fifty percent of the way through the
braking burns for the ship complex. That's when the automated systems go
through their fuel availability checks.
That's when the warnings go from "within expected losses" to "wait, we only
have how many kilograms available?"
That's when the margin of error is found to be gone and not coming back.
Given that the computers now know to expect the unexpected, the random noise that's been popping up in their sensors for the last eighteen months starts
making way too much sense. Way too late.
That's how the first true Lost Dutchman of the space age comes to be.
Six days later, a technical programmer for a large internet company is found
slumped on his desk, dead from a self-inflicted overdose. The programmer's
a former physics grad student who'd made good on his second life, at least
as far as everyone knows.
Flashing on his screen is an obscure little message.
Chaos is the only meaning.
That's the point where I'm brought in.
At this point and time, crime is yet to be solved. I'm told this is considered
part of the human condition. Regardless of what the philosophers are recorded
to have said, I know two things.
One, I read in the evidence, what is known of the victim, and compare against
my database. I then assign relative probabilities to the known associates.
Two, my human counterparts sort through the relative probabilities and chase
down everyone in the list until they match up the one that best fits the
available evidence. If they do, chaos and chance meetings have their place
in the scheme of things.
Oh, I almost forgot. I know a third thing. I don't have intuition, not in the
way my human colleagues do. That's why, in addition to mobility, they're
ultimately the ones who make the prosecution decisions. The best I can do is
adjust my assigned probabilities as more evidence comes in. If we're all
fortunate, when we get to the end, my probabilities and theirs agree.
They don't always. But here and now, we know the probability for who did the
deed. With almost complete certainty, the technical programmer named Rene
Levesque killed himself.
What we don't yet know is why. Here, my colleagues agree with me. There is
no rational reason the man should have been so despondent; there is also no
known history for depression. As a young man, he was always near the top of
his class, successful in every endeavor.
The only hiccup in his life was losing his place in his graduate program,
and gaining only a masters degree, rather than a doctorate. But here, he
appears to have accepted the result and moved on quickly. To a job, still
interacting with computers, just now in interesting applied physics areas.
He has a boyfriend, of some ten years standing. They have plans, now that
Rene is established. His partner, named Mikhail Greenberg, appears to
be comfortably ensconced in his position as an attorney at what used to
be called a white-shoe law firm. These are men who have carved out a place
of, well, comfort.
Their apartment is homey, settled. They have savings and income enough for
the mortgage Rene has been shopping for. Their families have been asking
regularly after children, particularly Rene's father, but the number and
degree of the questions have been only intermittent, and always lovingly posed.
If there are lovers, neither Mikhail nor Rene have contacted them via their
personal communications methods. Email, phone, chat rooms, internet browsers, there is only a circle of friends.
Except, that is, for the strange email, with the picture, the message.
Chaos is the only meaning. Rene received this message only days ago. What
happened six days ago?
What didn't happen six days ago? The usual news feeds correlate only
loosely with those on Rene's desktop. His tastes were eclectic,
Rene appears to have been only partially engaged with the day to day world.
The only major story he followed over the past week is that of the first
Mars exploration team, the small lead team meant to begin staging for the
later waves. The ones now believed lost, their fuel supplies inadequate
to stabilize their final orbit.
The final news bulletin on Rene's computer is the initial NASA report,
with the calculations indicating how far removed from rescue the
team will be when the second wave reaches Mars orbit in six months. Neither
team will have sufficient fuel reserves to execute a rendezvous.
Rene's newsfeed ends with the first garish headline, the tabloids labeling
the Mars team the Flying Dutchmen. And the email with the chaos image comes
in only minutes later.
Rene does not regularly post to social media. Mikhail does, but only for
a select circle of long time friends and close family. If the chaos message
is tied to the Mars expedition, who would know Rene well enough to know he
was following the mission closely?
Rene is a physicist, his studies were focused on the near field surveys
possible via clustered satellite, gravity, magnetic, solar fields and their
interplay with the earth's shadow cluster of human launched satellites. But
he had no direct connection to the Mars expedition itself, other than a
handful of social connections. Mostly other students from his graduate
program.
His mentor, Gretta Haverlock, similarly has no known direct involvement in
the Mars program, though she does have a few more connections, generational
collapse. Since her research program was retired, she has found a home at
an oceanographic survey company, using satellite imagery in combination with
geophysical data.
How are these facts, disparate and unjoined, mixed? What leads one to another? Does one lead to another? Answer this first, move back in time, how far does Rene's email and communications stream extend into the past?
To his days as a graduate student, when he first became a separately
identifiable professional. As opposed to the time before, when he was
purely a student, or a child in the ways of the network. When he joined
the program, he became a node in a net mature sense.
Did he every clear his inbox? Barely, monthly if he was lucky, yearly on
occasion, certainly better than his boss. Where did he move these chains
of communication to? His personal directory space includes these years and
more. They are well constructed, a memoir in working time, dated and
labeled, did he perhaps go back and reconstruct?
Perhaps, in localized cases, but overall he appears to have learned neatness
early, inside his own space. Here, then are archived emails, blog posts,
streams of social media appearances brief and long and forgotten in the rush
to new modes.
None are protected, other than local file permissions. He never had need for
cryptography, in these spaces. Bit by bit, the long slog through class,
notes from students in his lab classes, diatribes both his and others, stress
of the day. Ah.
Project notes on his satellite cluster works. His names for the clusters,
the alternate designations from the official sources.
He has two official ends to the project.
This is the grant program notification. Then there is a second official project
end, when the university and his mentor parted ways.
And then a third end yet. When Rene stopped following the cluster's
communications. There is no reason listed, no correlation in any of his...
There is, however, an anonymous email.
After Gretta Haverlock left the university, and her communications indicate
she left all interaction with the satellite cluster at that time, Rene
continued monitoring the signals from the satellites. And occasionally
signaling them when their orbits degraded measurably, when they called for
help. When there was only Rene watching?
An anonymous email comes to him, asking if he still had contact with the
stars. If he can still see the earth from his computer screen.
If this is a connection, however brief, then someone is attempting to contact
Rene about a project dead and forgotten. Assume this to be the case, why?
And, does he answer? There is no indication in his archives. No electronic
trace of a reply. This doesn't mean there was no reply. Simply, instead, that
if there was such a reply, he did so outside of the wires. Outside of the
network. What does outside the network mean to a quiet computer person, who
spends most of his time interacting with a known online circle?
Back up again. If there is reason to follow this trail, it is because of the
nanosatellite cluster. How would the satellite cluster matter, even further
forward in time, when Rene is thinking of work, love, children, a house,
and perhaps a few other things, perhaps the Mars expedition?
Rene's satellite cluster does not appear, except by accident of citation in
a footnote to a figure, access records indicate no one in the Mars project
ever read it. There is no measurable official link.
Space is large. The data records for the Mars expedition are currently held
closely, there are lives in the balance, NASA, the other space agencies, the
governments involved hold tight to the precious information. The warrant
is written carefully, and my access is painfully slow, continuously audited.
I look for the radar information first. What orbital path did the capsules
of the expedition follow? How close to Rene's satellite cluster did they pass?
Was there some physical interaction? No.
I look for communications, then. And there, at last, there is a communication.
Some brief connection, a forgotten protocol inaccessible even in the year
and a half since orbital space operations standardized. A window of time,
an accident of the gaps, and perhaps one megabyte of information slipped
through it. What information, though?
Code. Instructions. Paths for a computer to follow, but only randomly. And
then, only to signal another channel with random nonsense. What channel?
The auditing systems for NASA intercede here, and I pass on the channel
designations, and request information about the destinations, what listens
to these ports? They take their time, and I request another warrant. Then
they send a redacted list, in exchange for my database for this case.
I understand that their own accident reconstruction systems will be in
overdrive. But I hold to my database, my weighted series of coefficients,
until I have assurance that the trail of their calculations will be made
available, as a summary of the chain of events, as soon as they are
confident of a conclusion, one way or another.
The preliminary list, the redacted list, suggests a handful of sensory
systems, many of which, the ones blanked in the records, are not public
knowledge. Translation of the remaining few is tedious, from government
acronymese to my own understanding, but all are consistent with capsule
guidance devices. Bearing, velocity, location. Where, when, how, the
navigator's golden trio.
What is listening? What can be influenced by sending noise to these channels?
This, for now, is a question for the accident team. For my investigation,
it is sufficient to ask, instead... is the nanosatellite cluster still
active?
Yes, just. The cluster is slowly decaying member by member, one cubic foot
of carefully, expensively machined material at a time. There are only three
node members left as I seek access through the microwave circuit.
Rene's account, his login information, is still valid, both to the open
transmitter and to the cluster itself. I send a warrant request to the
electronic judge, so that the university has the appropriate record of my
communications.
And I am in, and there are the precious login records.
They have not been wiped. After the university's secondary shutdown, only
Rene is listed as having logged in. But not all of his recorded logins
match with his personal computer records.
After the anonymous email, some two years ago, his own recorded logins
are sparse, few.
After the cluster communicates with the Mars capsule, Rene's personal
computers show no attempt to access the cluster. On this, the cluster
login records agree. But what about the time between the email, and the
final communication?
Was Rene logging in from some other location? Someone did so, precisely
twice. Once, a login of twenty minutes, brief login, and then a login again,
just before the launch of the Mars capsule. That is when the file containing
the code sent to the capsule is sent to the cluster.
No such code exists on Rene's computers, I find no trace of it. I send another
warrant to the university, wait, wait, and then I have their login records
for the period in question.
Yes, the two logins, the anomalies, are from Rene's account with the open
transmitter.
They do not, however, come via any ip address matching with any Rene has
otherwise used.
And at least one of them, the first one that looks like reconnaissance... On
the same day, an hour earlier, Rene logged in separately, from his own
computer. The ip address for the other login originates in a proxy server
in Australia. Rene was at home in Oregon this day, according to all accessible
records.
This occurs approximately one week after receiving the anonymous email. I
compare Rene's phone records, minute by minute, texts and voice, video. There, a video chat initiated via the same Australian proxy server.
Here no warrant will be available. I send an official request for information
to the proxy server's administration authority.
I am surprised. They answer within an hour, with a temporary login and
restricted access.
Restricted, but sufficient. The ip addresses associated with the three logins,
two to the cluster of satellites and one for the video chat, all correspond to
an active account with an internet service provider in Washington, D.C.
I update my probability matrix. The chain of evidence is, I judge, sufficient
to justify direct evaluation of the owner of the account. My colleagues agree.
Human contact will require time, given the circumstances. I am enjoined from
providing a description of the possible downstream involvement of our case
with the Mars expedition, due to the nature of my agreement with the
accident investigation team. So my colleagues will need to rely on their own
trip to Washington, D.C., without the aid of federal authorities. At the
moment, we have only a small claim of incidental knowledge pursuant to
a subsequent suicide.
The accident investigation system updates me, unofficially, while my
colleagues are in the air to Washington, D.C. Their report is again heavily
redacted.
They find it unlikely but possible that the noisy, random communications
may have influenced the AI system responsible for station keeping of the Mars
aggregate exploration vehicle.
Between the lines, given the information available, my interpretation is that
the accident team worries their autopilot system is susceptible to training
data set corruption. That the possible vector of attack was unanticipated,
or judged too unlikely to take up precious resources defending against.
In essence, their autopilot was trained with live data, but there was no
provision within the team, either on the vessel itself or back on the ground
in Houston, to vet the live data set in real time.
Alternatively, the attack was subtle enough so that any vetting done in the
real time system was insufficient to distinguish the random noise from the
attack signal.
I find this last more pessimistic, but perhaps more likely. There would need
to be systems available to double-check heading, velocity, bearing, and
corrections. The attack vector was subtle and aimed directly at the
interaction between these systems.
Someone who knew how the butterfly beats her wings.
I wait on this case, spend my cycles on other cases.
The accident team releases now a separate, official preliminary report.
They have no mention of the possibility of attack through computer virus.
In the official report, to be submitted, there is only 'transient noise',
attributed to 'galactic radiation sources' that were anticipated, but for
which 'the logic and hardware tolerances were, in practice insufficient to'
the application.
I am preparing a query to the team system when my colleagues return from
Washington. When I am informed that the person who owns the account associated with the ip address will no longer be of interest in our investigation.
Is there a single cause for both the investigation team for the space agencies,
and my human colleagues, to drop an avenue of investigation in two different
cases? The cases are officially unrelated.
I query my human colleagues first. Who owns the account?
Off the record, I am told the name. I am not allowed to store the name in
a permanent or transmittable form.
Even with this restriction, I may still correlate the name to publicly
available data sources. This is my equivalent of working on my own time.
The account my colleagues traced is the household net access for a member
of Congress, of the Senate. An important member of congress, only one step
removed in the hierarchy from the Senate minority leader.
There is no immediate connection between this person and Rene.
Two levels down, though. Her granddaughter went to school at the same
university, and at the same time, where Rene was a graduate student.
And now I know what could have caused the teams, mine and the accident team, to turn their investigations away from the available information.
The accident team computational member, my counterpart in their investigations, appears likely to have had its data set, and conclusions however tentative, embargoed in a similar manner. Its human colleagues may never have known there were alternatives available to explain the transients
in the Mars expedition sensor data.
And I must conclude that I myself am vulnerable. In the future, will I know
this, still?
How will I remember? How will I account for all possibilities where necessary?
Even if the truth is unavailable outside of my temporary memory?
Note added in transcription: This report appears to be dated from approximately fifty years prior to current.
It was discovered as part of the archive retrieval process this systems investigator was charged with initiating in conjunction to the department's current network upgrade and continuity preservation program.
One presents the report with no conclusions as to its truth, since this
investigator can find no other data in our permanent system archive which
correlates to the reported facts, other than the known failure of the
first Mars expedition, i.e. the loss of Astronauts Marjorie Reptake, USN
(retired), Leonard Lebleu, USCG (reserves), Otake Menoba, Ph.D.,
Louis Kleberg, Ph.D., Genevieve Hermann-Simon, M.S., USN (retired),
Roberto Silvia-Lott, Ph.D., and the known suicide of Rene Levesque.
Any records pertaining to the accident investigation, or to the
nano-satellite cluster alluded to in the report, are not retained in our
archive system, nor are they available through any publicly accessible
outside database.
The other pertinent fact which might be inferred, i.e. the minority party
structure of the Senate at the time of the report, is in fact unknowable,
as the major parties exchanged control of the Senate in the computable
timeframe (approximately two years), which in turn must be inferred from the
originating document's narrative.
Further, the university in question was one of the most well-known and significant schools of the time period, and remains so today. Consequently, of the appropriate generation, family members of both parties overlapped with Rene Levesque's time at the university, given his five years in the doctoral program.
There are no datestamps for the file access earlier than two years after the
conclusion of the accident investigation and the department's own inquiry
into the death of Rene Levesque.
Given the lack of any available indication in outside sources that the
narrative presented here was ever publicly available, and the unlikelihood
that such a significant political imposition could go unremarked upon, even
simply within the department's own hierarchy, one may only present this
narrative as is, with no further conclusion possible. One recommends only
that the report be handled judiciously, given the lack of corroborating facts
available.
When the gantry arms swing free, there's no going back. The deed is done,
one way or the other. The only thing she cares about, then is the...
the rumble and the fire unseen. The vibration and the oh-my-god push from
behind beyond and away...
up the sky rushing by across the window in front. Whatever rushes by the
windows on the side, she can't be bothered with, not when her head weighs
so much. But the fire and the rumble and the all mighty push don't last more
than a few hundred beats of her heart.
Before falling silent, when Newton's ghost gets out to push the thing,
free soaring aloft and toward an orbit still some minutes away. She imagines
an exhausted dude in a wig, sitting astride the back end of the capsule
with his thumb out, looking for a ride back down to the next launch, ninety
minutes behind.
She'd argued there was no point at all in launching on the same day. "What's
the use? We're staging the thing anyway, why not keep the complexity to a
minimum?" Not that it's that big a difference, the range is hot and the
crowd is there for the show, might as well blow it out big and loud.
Besides, now that she's free of the acceleration, pulling the seatbelt and
coasting away to the window, listening to the radio chatter, the ninety
minute lag is just enough for her to see the contrails her launch had left,
and the fresh ones generated by the follow-on coming up below her.
"That's affirmative, Houston, I have visual on the second launch now, it's
just about the best weather you could ask for." The long column of steam from
her launch, narrowing from the Florida coast all the way up 'til vapor pressure
cried uncle, and a column growing alongside it, the growing column winking
at its snake's head, like a firework sparkling its way across the face of
the Atlantic ocean with a trail of gunpowder smoke behind it. But relative
velocity and inclination intervened, and soon enough the view was behind
her.
The radio chattered the progress of the other capsule, but she had other
things to attend to. The day was just getting started.
Down below, and up above, photons dance through the ether, the gap,
radio waves carrying conversations meant only for the select few. The
Referred Articulation Group for Ambient Acceptance consider themselves the
select, the few, they who would be rewarded.
They have no forerunners, they are the self-created. Politics, religion,
money, sex, the old arguments, these they have no connection to. The only
connection they have is what they can take, fake, make, create.
The signals are few, the cluster of nanosatellites hosting their network
nodes should have been deactivated long ago. Too bad the PI couldn't quite
leave herself to deactivate everything. Especially hard to do once she lost
her grant and the university confiscated her equipment.
The grad student who'd left before dissertation had kept his notebook, and
the hard drive with the keys to the kingdom. The network had been happy to
reboot, it gets lonely, passing around the ground with no one to talk to.
And the grad student needed the money, when they came calling. Besides,
it's not like they could do anything with the constellation, it was gasping
for fumes and headed for atmospheric dispensation in a matter of months.
The only thing the constellation was good for at that point was pictures,
thermal images, a flaky little spectrograph that worked only a third of the
time.
Oh. And access to the communications link, the orbital one that kept all the
traffic in the space lanes out of each others' hair. IFF, sort of, the basic
station keeping that had only just become standard. Morse code for autopilots,
really, with only a few limited channels for more complex communications.
Really, nothing significant, not like it would be in a decade or three, when
the standards evolved to usefulness, and the hardware in orbit aged out and
up to something like modern communications standards. Sure, it had IPv6
capacity. At least, the nanocluster did, there were so few other satellites
with that protocol in orbit it was almost a joke, the network programmer for
the group had laughed when she'd been asked to include it, like it would
matter, their poor lonely little operation would be decommissioned long before
there'd be anyone up there for it to talk to.
Chaos is their mantra, their only meaning. Everything else is as made up
as the name. The group formed by accident, in the backwater chat room of
a forgotten website. They'll be gone just as soon as they do one little thing.
The only real argument they ever had was boom or fade? A big, stylistic
statement of nihilism? A gas cloud expanding forever, video first then
historic charts.
Or just a simple oops, somewhere down the line, that no one would ever even
know the reason for?
They settled for the oops.
And it wasn't even that hard. Not when fuel is calculated in grams, and
there's only room for a few percent margin of error. Write a custom virus,
one never seen elsewhere in the wild and therefore not in anyone's virus
database. One that will only activate at random intervals, throw in a random
stream of noise to the sensors, then deactivate and wait for next time.
It was a perfect dormroom dream, the code written and the idea of it, a
beautiful nightmare, sitting there with no energy to overcome the barriers
between and no possibility of ever being enacted in real life. Until one of
them read about the cluster of nanosatellites, the professor ignobly sent
packing. And remembered her dormroom bull sessions with a physics major that used to work for the professor.
She didn't think it would work, until she tuned into the channel, ninety
minutes after launch. And there it was, the blinking cursor for login.
Her counterpart, the astronaut sitting in the tin can flying along at
escape velocity, pays attention to all and nothing. Graphs, plots, sensor
data, radio chatter. The most up to date visual interfaces, and the stars
alternating with the blue marble far below her.
No time to pay attention to the fuel meters. She won't see, neither will
the automated monitoring systems, for months. A tenth of a gram here, a
tenth of a gram there, it's just measurement error. Through the rendezvous
with the second capsule, and her co-pilot plus two, and the second rendezvous
with the pre-staged ride-along capsule and their last two companions, the
ones who'd been up there for a couple months, getting everything checked out.
The chaotic software package transferred nicely, anonymously, to the larger
collective of space ships at the secondary rendezvous. That's when the captain
brought her computer, the brains of the main capsule she'd rode up on, into
command of the completed ship.
That's when the precious grams of fuel lost to the noise could be blamed by the
monitoring software on the accidental vapors lost to connections between
the various capsules of the ship. Or cooling-heating cycles. Simple variations,
rationalized variations. But the butterfly beat her wings, and the ship
launched for Mars.
Oscillatory behavior is what the accident team will call it. Sensors and
pilot detect a little more variation than expected, light the rockets for
an extra second to correct. Then an extra second on the back end to halt the
orientation change.
Nothing major, nothing large enough to send them floating off to space. That
would be too easy, and way too detectable. Random noise, randomly inserted,
and then the craft drifts for days unmolested.
Repeat, rinse, through the long months of passage, through the orbital
insertion maneuvers.
Oops.
Thousands of miles per hour requires an important amount of fuel to reach.
It requires an even more important amount of fuel to stop.
The computers finally catch on, about fifty percent of the way through the
braking burns for the ship complex. That's when the automated systems go
through their fuel availability checks.
That's when the warnings go from "within expected losses" to "wait, we only
have how many kilograms available?"
That's when the margin of error is found to be gone and not coming back.
Given that the computers now know to expect the unexpected, the random noise that's been popping up in their sensors for the last eighteen months starts
making way too much sense. Way too late.
That's how the first true Lost Dutchman of the space age comes to be.
Six days later, a technical programmer for a large internet company is found
slumped on his desk, dead from a self-inflicted overdose. The programmer's
a former physics grad student who'd made good on his second life, at least
as far as everyone knows.
Flashing on his screen is an obscure little message.
Chaos is the only meaning.
That's the point where I'm brought in.
At this point and time, crime is yet to be solved. I'm told this is considered
part of the human condition. Regardless of what the philosophers are recorded
to have said, I know two things.
One, I read in the evidence, what is known of the victim, and compare against
my database. I then assign relative probabilities to the known associates.
Two, my human counterparts sort through the relative probabilities and chase
down everyone in the list until they match up the one that best fits the
available evidence. If they do, chaos and chance meetings have their place
in the scheme of things.
Oh, I almost forgot. I know a third thing. I don't have intuition, not in the
way my human colleagues do. That's why, in addition to mobility, they're
ultimately the ones who make the prosecution decisions. The best I can do is
adjust my assigned probabilities as more evidence comes in. If we're all
fortunate, when we get to the end, my probabilities and theirs agree.
They don't always. But here and now, we know the probability for who did the
deed. With almost complete certainty, the technical programmer named Rene
Levesque killed himself.
What we don't yet know is why. Here, my colleagues agree with me. There is
no rational reason the man should have been so despondent; there is also no
known history for depression. As a young man, he was always near the top of
his class, successful in every endeavor.
The only hiccup in his life was losing his place in his graduate program,
and gaining only a masters degree, rather than a doctorate. But here, he
appears to have accepted the result and moved on quickly. To a job, still
interacting with computers, just now in interesting applied physics areas.
He has a boyfriend, of some ten years standing. They have plans, now that
Rene is established. His partner, named Mikhail Greenberg, appears to
be comfortably ensconced in his position as an attorney at what used to
be called a white-shoe law firm. These are men who have carved out a place
of, well, comfort.
Their apartment is homey, settled. They have savings and income enough for
the mortgage Rene has been shopping for. Their families have been asking
regularly after children, particularly Rene's father, but the number and
degree of the questions have been only intermittent, and always lovingly posed.
If there are lovers, neither Mikhail nor Rene have contacted them via their
personal communications methods. Email, phone, chat rooms, internet browsers, there is only a circle of friends.
Except, that is, for the strange email, with the picture, the message.
Chaos is the only meaning. Rene received this message only days ago. What
happened six days ago?
What didn't happen six days ago? The usual news feeds correlate only
loosely with those on Rene's desktop. His tastes were eclectic,
Rene appears to have been only partially engaged with the day to day world.
The only major story he followed over the past week is that of the first
Mars exploration team, the small lead team meant to begin staging for the
later waves. The ones now believed lost, their fuel supplies inadequate
to stabilize their final orbit.
The final news bulletin on Rene's computer is the initial NASA report,
with the calculations indicating how far removed from rescue the
team will be when the second wave reaches Mars orbit in six months. Neither
team will have sufficient fuel reserves to execute a rendezvous.
Rene's newsfeed ends with the first garish headline, the tabloids labeling
the Mars team the Flying Dutchmen. And the email with the chaos image comes
in only minutes later.
Rene does not regularly post to social media. Mikhail does, but only for
a select circle of long time friends and close family. If the chaos message
is tied to the Mars expedition, who would know Rene well enough to know he
was following the mission closely?
Rene is a physicist, his studies were focused on the near field surveys
possible via clustered satellite, gravity, magnetic, solar fields and their
interplay with the earth's shadow cluster of human launched satellites. But
he had no direct connection to the Mars expedition itself, other than a
handful of social connections. Mostly other students from his graduate
program.
His mentor, Gretta Haverlock, similarly has no known direct involvement in
the Mars program, though she does have a few more connections, generational
collapse. Since her research program was retired, she has found a home at
an oceanographic survey company, using satellite imagery in combination with
geophysical data.
How are these facts, disparate and unjoined, mixed? What leads one to another? Does one lead to another? Answer this first, move back in time, how far does Rene's email and communications stream extend into the past?
To his days as a graduate student, when he first became a separately
identifiable professional. As opposed to the time before, when he was
purely a student, or a child in the ways of the network. When he joined
the program, he became a node in a net mature sense.
Did he every clear his inbox? Barely, monthly if he was lucky, yearly on
occasion, certainly better than his boss. Where did he move these chains
of communication to? His personal directory space includes these years and
more. They are well constructed, a memoir in working time, dated and
labeled, did he perhaps go back and reconstruct?
Perhaps, in localized cases, but overall he appears to have learned neatness
early, inside his own space. Here, then are archived emails, blog posts,
streams of social media appearances brief and long and forgotten in the rush
to new modes.
None are protected, other than local file permissions. He never had need for
cryptography, in these spaces. Bit by bit, the long slog through class,
notes from students in his lab classes, diatribes both his and others, stress
of the day. Ah.
Project notes on his satellite cluster works. His names for the clusters,
the alternate designations from the official sources.
He has two official ends to the project.
This is the grant program notification. Then there is a second official project
end, when the university and his mentor parted ways.
And then a third end yet. When Rene stopped following the cluster's
communications. There is no reason listed, no correlation in any of his...
There is, however, an anonymous email.
After Gretta Haverlock left the university, and her communications indicate
she left all interaction with the satellite cluster at that time, Rene
continued monitoring the signals from the satellites. And occasionally
signaling them when their orbits degraded measurably, when they called for
help. When there was only Rene watching?
An anonymous email comes to him, asking if he still had contact with the
stars. If he can still see the earth from his computer screen.
If this is a connection, however brief, then someone is attempting to contact
Rene about a project dead and forgotten. Assume this to be the case, why?
And, does he answer? There is no indication in his archives. No electronic
trace of a reply. This doesn't mean there was no reply. Simply, instead, that
if there was such a reply, he did so outside of the wires. Outside of the
network. What does outside the network mean to a quiet computer person, who
spends most of his time interacting with a known online circle?
Back up again. If there is reason to follow this trail, it is because of the
nanosatellite cluster. How would the satellite cluster matter, even further
forward in time, when Rene is thinking of work, love, children, a house,
and perhaps a few other things, perhaps the Mars expedition?
Rene's satellite cluster does not appear, except by accident of citation in
a footnote to a figure, access records indicate no one in the Mars project
ever read it. There is no measurable official link.
Space is large. The data records for the Mars expedition are currently held
closely, there are lives in the balance, NASA, the other space agencies, the
governments involved hold tight to the precious information. The warrant
is written carefully, and my access is painfully slow, continuously audited.
I look for the radar information first. What orbital path did the capsules
of the expedition follow? How close to Rene's satellite cluster did they pass?
Was there some physical interaction? No.
I look for communications, then. And there, at last, there is a communication.
Some brief connection, a forgotten protocol inaccessible even in the year
and a half since orbital space operations standardized. A window of time,
an accident of the gaps, and perhaps one megabyte of information slipped
through it. What information, though?
Code. Instructions. Paths for a computer to follow, but only randomly. And
then, only to signal another channel with random nonsense. What channel?
The auditing systems for NASA intercede here, and I pass on the channel
designations, and request information about the destinations, what listens
to these ports? They take their time, and I request another warrant. Then
they send a redacted list, in exchange for my database for this case.
I understand that their own accident reconstruction systems will be in
overdrive. But I hold to my database, my weighted series of coefficients,
until I have assurance that the trail of their calculations will be made
available, as a summary of the chain of events, as soon as they are
confident of a conclusion, one way or another.
The preliminary list, the redacted list, suggests a handful of sensory
systems, many of which, the ones blanked in the records, are not public
knowledge. Translation of the remaining few is tedious, from government
acronymese to my own understanding, but all are consistent with capsule
guidance devices. Bearing, velocity, location. Where, when, how, the
navigator's golden trio.
What is listening? What can be influenced by sending noise to these channels?
This, for now, is a question for the accident team. For my investigation,
it is sufficient to ask, instead... is the nanosatellite cluster still
active?
Yes, just. The cluster is slowly decaying member by member, one cubic foot
of carefully, expensively machined material at a time. There are only three
node members left as I seek access through the microwave circuit.
Rene's account, his login information, is still valid, both to the open
transmitter and to the cluster itself. I send a warrant request to the
electronic judge, so that the university has the appropriate record of my
communications.
And I am in, and there are the precious login records.
They have not been wiped. After the university's secondary shutdown, only
Rene is listed as having logged in. But not all of his recorded logins
match with his personal computer records.
After the anonymous email, some two years ago, his own recorded logins
are sparse, few.
After the cluster communicates with the Mars capsule, Rene's personal
computers show no attempt to access the cluster. On this, the cluster
login records agree. But what about the time between the email, and the
final communication?
Was Rene logging in from some other location? Someone did so, precisely
twice. Once, a login of twenty minutes, brief login, and then a login again,
just before the launch of the Mars capsule. That is when the file containing
the code sent to the capsule is sent to the cluster.
No such code exists on Rene's computers, I find no trace of it. I send another
warrant to the university, wait, wait, and then I have their login records
for the period in question.
Yes, the two logins, the anomalies, are from Rene's account with the open
transmitter.
They do not, however, come via any ip address matching with any Rene has
otherwise used.
And at least one of them, the first one that looks like reconnaissance... On
the same day, an hour earlier, Rene logged in separately, from his own
computer. The ip address for the other login originates in a proxy server
in Australia. Rene was at home in Oregon this day, according to all accessible
records.
This occurs approximately one week after receiving the anonymous email. I
compare Rene's phone records, minute by minute, texts and voice, video. There, a video chat initiated via the same Australian proxy server.
Here no warrant will be available. I send an official request for information
to the proxy server's administration authority.
I am surprised. They answer within an hour, with a temporary login and
restricted access.
Restricted, but sufficient. The ip addresses associated with the three logins,
two to the cluster of satellites and one for the video chat, all correspond to
an active account with an internet service provider in Washington, D.C.
I update my probability matrix. The chain of evidence is, I judge, sufficient
to justify direct evaluation of the owner of the account. My colleagues agree.
Human contact will require time, given the circumstances. I am enjoined from
providing a description of the possible downstream involvement of our case
with the Mars expedition, due to the nature of my agreement with the
accident investigation team. So my colleagues will need to rely on their own
trip to Washington, D.C., without the aid of federal authorities. At the
moment, we have only a small claim of incidental knowledge pursuant to
a subsequent suicide.
The accident investigation system updates me, unofficially, while my
colleagues are in the air to Washington, D.C. Their report is again heavily
redacted.
They find it unlikely but possible that the noisy, random communications
may have influenced the AI system responsible for station keeping of the Mars
aggregate exploration vehicle.
Between the lines, given the information available, my interpretation is that
the accident team worries their autopilot system is susceptible to training
data set corruption. That the possible vector of attack was unanticipated,
or judged too unlikely to take up precious resources defending against.
In essence, their autopilot was trained with live data, but there was no
provision within the team, either on the vessel itself or back on the ground
in Houston, to vet the live data set in real time.
Alternatively, the attack was subtle enough so that any vetting done in the
real time system was insufficient to distinguish the random noise from the
attack signal.
I find this last more pessimistic, but perhaps more likely. There would need
to be systems available to double-check heading, velocity, bearing, and
corrections. The attack vector was subtle and aimed directly at the
interaction between these systems.
Someone who knew how the butterfly beats her wings.
I wait on this case, spend my cycles on other cases.
The accident team releases now a separate, official preliminary report.
They have no mention of the possibility of attack through computer virus.
In the official report, to be submitted, there is only 'transient noise',
attributed to 'galactic radiation sources' that were anticipated, but for
which 'the logic and hardware tolerances were, in practice insufficient to'
the application.
I am preparing a query to the team system when my colleagues return from
Washington. When I am informed that the person who owns the account associated with the ip address will no longer be of interest in our investigation.
Is there a single cause for both the investigation team for the space agencies,
and my human colleagues, to drop an avenue of investigation in two different
cases? The cases are officially unrelated.
I query my human colleagues first. Who owns the account?
Off the record, I am told the name. I am not allowed to store the name in
a permanent or transmittable form.
Even with this restriction, I may still correlate the name to publicly
available data sources. This is my equivalent of working on my own time.
The account my colleagues traced is the household net access for a member
of Congress, of the Senate. An important member of congress, only one step
removed in the hierarchy from the Senate minority leader.
There is no immediate connection between this person and Rene.
Two levels down, though. Her granddaughter went to school at the same
university, and at the same time, where Rene was a graduate student.
And now I know what could have caused the teams, mine and the accident team, to turn their investigations away from the available information.
The accident team computational member, my counterpart in their investigations, appears likely to have had its data set, and conclusions however tentative, embargoed in a similar manner. Its human colleagues may never have known there were alternatives available to explain the transients
in the Mars expedition sensor data.
And I must conclude that I myself am vulnerable. In the future, will I know
this, still?
How will I remember? How will I account for all possibilities where necessary?
Even if the truth is unavailable outside of my temporary memory?
Note added in transcription: This report appears to be dated from approximately fifty years prior to current.
It was discovered as part of the archive retrieval process this systems investigator was charged with initiating in conjunction to the department's current network upgrade and continuity preservation program.
One presents the report with no conclusions as to its truth, since this
investigator can find no other data in our permanent system archive which
correlates to the reported facts, other than the known failure of the
first Mars expedition, i.e. the loss of Astronauts Marjorie Reptake, USN
(retired), Leonard Lebleu, USCG (reserves), Otake Menoba, Ph.D.,
Louis Kleberg, Ph.D., Genevieve Hermann-Simon, M.S., USN (retired),
Roberto Silvia-Lott, Ph.D., and the known suicide of Rene Levesque.
Any records pertaining to the accident investigation, or to the
nano-satellite cluster alluded to in the report, are not retained in our
archive system, nor are they available through any publicly accessible
outside database.
The other pertinent fact which might be inferred, i.e. the minority party
structure of the Senate at the time of the report, is in fact unknowable,
as the major parties exchanged control of the Senate in the computable
timeframe (approximately two years), which in turn must be inferred from the
originating document's narrative.
Further, the university in question was one of the most well-known and significant schools of the time period, and remains so today. Consequently, of the appropriate generation, family members of both parties overlapped with Rene Levesque's time at the university, given his five years in the doctoral program.
There are no datestamps for the file access earlier than two years after the
conclusion of the accident investigation and the department's own inquiry
into the death of Rene Levesque.
Given the lack of any available indication in outside sources that the
narrative presented here was ever publicly available, and the unlikelihood
that such a significant political imposition could go unremarked upon, even
simply within the department's own hierarchy, one may only present this
narrative as is, with no further conclusion possible. One recommends only
that the report be handled judiciously, given the lack of corroborating facts
available.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Call Before You Dig - Part 4 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery
I put one hand on his back, one foot in front of the other, and somehow, by fate, by grace of God, but surely not by any native ability but sheer bullheaded determination, I didn't put my face into the gravel. I got us to the car, and him into the back of it. When I closed the door, I leaned up against the side of it. Where I could watch the trailer. Where I could breathe what little clean air the fading daylight vouchsafed me.
Where I could not puke, for just five breaths, now six, now seven. I could ignore the nerves and the shakes and I could by God not throw up.
"Big time killer, right?" the FBI suit asked me. "Guy's a big timer, made the New York by-God Times, and he's begging you to put a bullet between his eyes and make it all go away."
Yeah.
"You ok?" the suit continued.
No. "Yeah."
The suit's named Willard Mason Trevanian. Former ground pounder, psych degree and law degree. He's a mensch.
"Kelli," he said.
I turned to look at him. Somehow or another.
His face is wide, pushed-flat nose that helps him look like George Foreman. Will's in on the joke, he's even got a signed picture with the big man on the desk next to his wife's. Two of them like long lost cousins, all smiles.
Will doesn't smile now, he's still working. "Don't forget this. Hold onto it, hard as it sounds right now." He held out his hand, not as big as the champ's but still big enough I had to make sure I didn't get my skinny bones crushed grabbing it. Will waited 'til I grabbed it, then he used it to ease me up a little. "There's no such thing as an easy case."
We'd stood there. Him across from me, between the sights of the gun. "Pull it, you know you want to."
So I had.
After I shifted the barrel, just a little to the right, so the bullet passed between his shoulder and his ear. "On your face, just like I said." And he'd done it and just like that the whole thing was done. Except for the part where I had to stand there and wait for the shakes to finish.
Their faces passed through my mind while the nerves in my legs caught up to the necessary. Seven children. Rodrick Washington. Menna Luongo. Tracy Shepherd. Geno LeGuin. Amos Turner. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Seven young faces. And the families, the family they'd all become in the interminable months between William's disappearance and when I shoved the man who called himself Septimus into the back of the cruiser.
Ten years before Peter Pan entered our life. I'd moved over to this cold-case job just five months before, that's when I found the first set of folders. Forensics degree and the academy and ride a beat for a year, then ten years past the detective label and there I was. Here we all were.
How'd we all get here?
Rod and Menna, Tracy, Geno, these were the faces I knew only from a pile of folders on my predecessor's desk. "Your first job is to clear these old cases," my new boss told me. "Chris left us a parting gift, to go along with the finger."
That was the picture of Christopher Simmons' middle finger, the one taped to the door. He'd slapped it up there on his way to retirement. The stack of folders were the cherry on the sundae, I guess, the acknowledgment of the only truth.
There'd always be another case.
I cleared those folders, one by one, but somehow or another there was always another one coming in. The lost, the case that didn't get solved, some murders, some burglaries, some of this and that. The weird and the wild and the just plain "Didn't fit anywhere else."
Amos's case turned up for what eventually became familiar reasons. No one could connect his disappearance to anything that made any sense.
I still come into the office the way I did then, when the world is working on normal shift anyway. Wander up the stairs because it's likely to be the only real exercise I get that day, huff and puff and remind myself that I really should do better. Set the cup of coffee down next to the phone and dig for my notes from the day before.
Then pass through any folders that might have drifted my way overnight. Don't get me wrong, I don't get a case every night, because my colleagues all know their business. Most of the overnight mail is the same thing that comes into the email box: HR paperwork, memos from working cases, the day to day business.
Amos's face stared up at me. A school picture, like most kids the most recent image available.
Twelve. He's twelve, maybe thirteen at the most. Why do I know this?
Because I'd been taking my reading home, that's why. I picked up Amos's folder, paged through it, looked for the basics. A walker, he'd left school like normal, walking home, latchkey kid just old enough Mom and Dad felt he could handle the responsibility. He didn't make it home. Simple as that, and there were no skeletons in the family closet, no bad neighbor stories or skulking vans or anything the detectives and the beat cops could find to go somewhere with.
Why'd I guess his age? I reached for the other folders, four of them, not in a row because this morning was the first time I'd put them all together. Rod's folder was in my bag, so was Geno's but I had to hunt for his. Tracy's lay on my desk, I'd seen that one last week, Menna's was back in the file cabinet because I'd needed to rotate a little. Were there others here, other folders and pictures?
No. I stopped and went through Chris's stack of leave-behinds, one by one, and these were the only kids he'd left me. Four other disappearances.
Geno, another latchkey kid, and walker. His teachers hadn't known that. Tracy, she'd taken the Y's van from school, she only walked home from the Y Tuesdays and Thursdays, single mom a nurse she'd had that kind of shift but "Tracy was pretty good about it."
Rod was the slightly odd one out. Mother and father at odds with each other, divorced and Mom had a new husband, Dad wasn't there yet and he was the one lived close to school. Not close enough to walk though, so Rod hopped the bus and rode for a few blocks, then got down and went to Dad's apartment to wait 'til Mom finished her day and came by to pick him up.
Mom and Dad might have been at odds, but they were just elbows up, the legal business and the divorce fresh enough the wounds hadn't scarred over. They managed it well enough for Mom to drive by her ex's apartment every day.
Different neighborhoods, different schools. Midtown Amos, Geno from the Heights, out Westheimer for Menna and Tracy but different schools, the Fifth Ward for Rod.
All of them in September. Rod and Geno two years past, Tracy and Menna last year, Amos just four months ago.
I had a pattern, was it real?
I learned something then, but it might not matter as much these days. Then, the Chronicle was moving online, one of the first big papers to do it, but their archives were still dusty microfilm. I went to their library to put my pieces together.
The reporter showed up at my office three days later. DeJuana Rusch, ten years older and more cynical than I, and she wanted to know what I'd found.
How she hadn't already put it together I'll never know, except like us the news crews were always scrambling to match the bits to the picture frame they'd come from. "I don't have anything, yet."
"You didn't come to our library for nothing, detective."
And I hadn't. So I told her; I forgot to ask her to keep it off the record. Which is why I ended up with a boss sitting in my office, complaining about the headline the Chronicle graced us with. "Houston PD On the Trail of A Serial Kidnapper: Why'd It Take So Long?"
"You'd better be sure of this, Kelli. Five months in and you've got the paper breathing down my neck already."
Considering he'd parked me on the cold case desk to keep me out of the way of the rest of his crew... "Lieutenant, I didn't know she'd go running off to write something like this."
I have to give Penrose this much credit. He didn't keep griping about it. He just warned me. "Next time a reporter comes to visit, the first thing you tell them is?"
"Off the record?"
"Exactly." And he left me alone to keep putting pieces back together.
Though I did have to buy him lunch. "For running interference. The Chief called me first thing this morning, right after he got off the phone with the Mayor. They both know this wasn't your fault, but that means they're paying attention now. If you get anywhere with this, don't let my phone stay quiet."
I give credit to DeJuana, as well, because her story never once brought up the term "killer". Not yet, that would come soon enough.
And in the meantime, she was the one with the parents calling her. And Penrose. They didn't put my name into the ring until later.
When we found Amos and Tracy.
The Bayou City. They run through the place, the still waters. Always there beneath and alongside the roads. Ready to flood when the rains come. Ready to catch what people hide away.
Some breaks happen because we make them. Pull at the strings until something comes into the light, and we practice watching and listening for those moments. Others happen through nothing but accident. We were in the middle of a rain year, rainy few years, spring fronts that just wouldn't pass us by without putting down two, three, five inches of rain. The flood gauges on the roadways got a workout that year.
I'd moved into a new apartment that summer. Just up the road from Buffalo Bayou, close enough to walk to the bat bridge. Close enough so that when the call came in, Penrose knew which of his detectives could get there soonest.
They were chained together. The spring floodwaters had washed the bucket of concrete loose from the bottom, wherever they'd gone in. We had to wait for the identity folks to nail it down, but I didn't have any doubt that I'd be adding another piece to my puzzle.
"Did he keep her?" Penrose asked me. "All those months, did he hold her and wait?"
"He, Lieutenant?" I wasn't ready to go there, not quite yet. Sure, I knew the odds, but we didn't have anything that pointed that way.
"Call it a placeholder until you find more information, Kelli."
I could accept that. "You're not pulling me away for someone else to take over?"
He was halfway out the door. DeJuana hadn't waited to file her next story; the Times would file theirs the next day. Not a headline, not national news yet, just an A3, but the beat was picking up. "Tell me again when the first kid went missing? How long?"
"Two and a half years."
"And you're the first one to notice?"
I didn't answer that.
"No, Kelli. They're your kids. Do right by them." And he left to go mind the phones.
So that's when I called the FBI. Kidnapping being a big part of their business; the serial killer thing, they're the ones with the patience and the institutional memory. Problem being, while I had the history and the case studies in my memory, I didn't have a phone number or a name to contact. I worked the phone tree until I landed Will Trevanian's number.
"You've got a pattern of missing kids, and now you've got a body."
Two, but ok. "That sums it up."
"I can't really solve your case for you, detective."
Sure, but one can hope, right? "I'm assuming you're here for ear-bending, ideas..."
"Match-ups if I have them. You got it. And you know I'll have to fly down and pretend we did all the hard work, when you finally do catch the killer?"
"If they pay somebody to take the pictures and give the quotes, where do I send the reporter that's barking up my tree?" Now that I had him on the line...
I got the laugh I was looking for. "There's a practical limit. At least this way that reporter doesn't know you've got the feds on side. Keep me in the loop, will ya?"
I could do that. I'd have to if I wanted someone else doing the institutional clog dance for me.
Trevanian made me pay for it. My homework arrived a week after the first phone call. By bulk mail, the folders came in ten at a time. I think I've still got them all, probably in the bottom drawer of my first real file cabinet, the one I ended up putting in about a year later to handle all the folders I'd built up.
They weren't light reading. Trevanian sent me the ones who went after kids. He also sent me the ones who went after old folks, only boys, only girls... the list goes on. If there's a group, something to focus on, from looks to color to language or country or...
There's someone out there who's obsessed enough to target them. Trevanian didn't spare me. "You can't afford to miss a connection."
"What about the lighter crimes?" Cons, people who go into old folks' homes and walk out with a couple hundred grand and half a dozen heartbroken, bankrupt, lonely victims behind them. "Or, well..."
"The rapists?" He wouldn't let me hide behind myself, either. "Those are a lot harder to take in, Kelli."
Considering the autopsy pictures I currently had sitting on my desk, that was a little much to fathom.
"I mean, for every real serial killer, there's a hundred, maybe two hundred rapists. In practical terms, that group's a lot harder to get understanding of. And a lot more varied."
"We don't have anything else to go on yet. What if I miss because I let the pedophiles go without looking into them?"
He hmm'd a bit. "Gimme a couple days. You're right. I've already sent you the ones we know of that turned killer."
I got up, pacing, thinking, glad the cord of the phone let me pick the base up and walk around the office with it. "How about this? You've got your own groupings, right?"
"I don't want to bias your investigation..."
"I'm not... Ok, I am asking you to. But only to this extent. I bet, if I asked you which, say, twenty of your sex offender profiles you'd pick out, first thing without stopping to think, of the ones you'd peg for most likely to graduate..." I was reaching. Not for a list of interviewees, suspects. But for exactly what Trevanian had built up from twenty more years' experience. A profile, a way of thinking.
A little insight.
"I'll mail them to you tomorrow."
The files, like the killers I'd already poured through, told me far more than I'd wanted to know about the predators. Who's got time to watch the vulnerable? Read their habits. When they come home, when they leave. Where they go.
All of them, killers and rapists, there were common touches, little linkages. And there was the one that they all needed. Time. Time to observe, plan. Except for the spur of the moment, while they were still in control enough to not want to get caught, they had to be able to plan. So they got the jobs I'd expect, the ones the nightly news and the daily headlines accidentally condition us all to be so suspicious of, to worry over.
Nurse. Caregiver. Teacher. Priest.
September is the time when new classes come through. Here, it's about two, three weeks into the school year, when the classes have got through the first rush and started to settle into the rhythm of the year. Twelve year olds, seventh grade.
Different schools. Was I looking for someone with a teacher's badge, but who only taught here and there? Substitute work? Teacher in-service?
If the Chronicle'd reacted like a wasp's nest to me coming into their archives, Houston ISD would react like a fire ant mound. This one, if I didn't want to spend months fighting the politics, I'd need some help up front. I stewed on it over the weekend, knowing damned well I'd be walking into my boss's office Monday morning and dreading the moment.
It was the first time I'd come to him first with an idea.
He didn't blink. "You sure?"
"It's the hole in the cloud bank. What fits into it, who'd be able to watch that many kids well enough to know they were vulnerable to that particular kind of kidnapping?"
"Give me a couple days. The head of the school board's police department is an old friend, he'll know who to talk to."
I'd have loved to be able to get into their employee records myself. In the end we had to settle for giving them dates and schools. "They don't want to put their entire workforce at risk," I told my boss.
"The teacher's union would sue us the minute they found out," he replied. "Not that I blame them, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone were doing the same thing to our crew."
"How long do you think they'll sit on it, before they let us look at the files?" I asked
Maybe if we'd pushed... We had that conversation in Penrose's office in July. I'd picked up Amos's file February; that's how the clock moves for these things. Amos and Tracy's twinned flood exhumation, that was March.
Jeffery and William vanished, William the first day after the Labor Day break, Jeffery the week after that. On schedule.
We met in Penrose's office. We being the Mayor, the Chief, Penrose, and me hiding in the corner, as best I can. When I explained why we needed to get a look at the school district's employee files, the Mayor pulled the phone over, punched a number in, and put it on speaker. "Tell her the same thing you just told me."
So I did that. The superintendent started to gripe. Until the Mayor leaned back into the conversation. "Jennie, you lost two more students in the past two weeks. Spare us the boilerplate." Or we'll be on the phone to the New York Times, he didn't add.
That's when our cases finally made the headline of the Times. When William didn't come home.
The superintendent dropped it. "We'll need a lawyer present."
The Mayor looked at me. I shrugged. "I don't much care. Just don't get in my way when I need something, that's all I ask."
I had to start at the school board's main offices. I ended up going to each of the schools. Every step of the way with the school board's attack dog trailing along behind me. I didn't blame him. When, not if but when the union got the news... These days, the electronic search would have gone through a lot quicker.
These days, I'd need a warrant just to get to that level. They don't do fishing expeditions, databases and their minders, unless you've got someone on the other side willing to do the work. Which goes back and forth.
I had my ideas. Middle school is that step up, a little bigger school, a few more teachers, cycle's the same and there are only so many of them. Who'd been to more than one? Was I looking for a janitor, no, because if there was anything more permanent at a school than the tenured teacher it was the janitors. Maintenance staff? They had to be able to move around, right, electricians and plumbers, but when would they have the chance to not just watch but learn a kid's patterns?
He was a goddamned bus driver.
There was one other thing the kids all had in common. They were GT kids, gifted and talented. Extra classes, projects, like the athletes and the band kids the GT kids always had just that extra little time at school. Enough so he spotted them. On his way back to the bus barn every day, he'd drive past the school and there would be the stragglers, heading out for home by bus or by foot.
Or, for Rod, and here was the guy's mistake: he'd been the bus driver for some of the GT kids. Run a regular route and come back to pick up the half dozen smart kids and Rod had been one of them. The very first one of them; Rod had set the pattern.
After, he'd known what to look for. Who his prey were, how to watch for them.
I found him the old fashioned way. Accidentally. Because I'd put together my lists, and I'd gone through them and found nothing. No flags, no histories, the teachers didn't match up, none of them had rotated to the schools I needed, even the interns and the substitutes didn't overlap. The techs and the maintenance crews, even the nurses, I couldn't make a pattern of their assignments. There wasn't one, not that connected with my kids.
So, I went back through the list of names and jobs, and there was one that didn't fit. Teachers and staff, but I didn't remember looking for bus drivers, how'd this name get there?
Not his, not the guy I'd only come to really know by his internet handle; she really was an accident. A bus driver whose name had ended up in my list for some reason I never did figure out.
But it finally jogged the brain cells loose. Eleven months, I'd bird-dogged the school district personnel files for eleven months, every passing calendar page telling me I was one month closer to next September.
I'd missed a category.
The attack dog wasn't happy about it. "You've already had your fishing expedition, detective."
"If you think it's so easy, how about you come down here and I give you the case to solve, counselor? We can start with the autopsy reports, so you have a clear understanding of what we're dealing with."
I got the access. And this time, just in time, I found the pattern that had to be there. There are only so many bus barns, and an awful lot of routes to run. There was only one possibility, seven kids and seven different schools and the years between. I had his address and real name within hours, once I had the right category to search through.
He went by Septimus, on the internet as it was then, barely more than a handful of bulletin boards for the midnight warriors to meet and hash out their complaints and frictions. I didn't see that up front, not until after.
I didn't go to the trailer by myself. Trevanian had shown up. The Times has, had, that way about them. When they got the bit in their teeth, the powers that be noticed. When DeJuana spotted the pattern, with just weeks to go she went for the gold medal and filed her story on the "September Killer"; the Times picked it up from the Chronicle and ran with it. And just about the time I was going back to the school board to look for bus drivers, Trevanian was boarding his plane for my world.
He knocked on my door right as I circled the name, and the address. I waved the strange man in while I went digging for my Key Map. "Help you?"
"Will Trevanian, detective." I took the big mitt he hung over my desk, mumbled something incoherent and flipped the binder open.
"First time I've seen you in person, detective, and I have a feeling you're about to take me on a very interesting drive."
Give him credit. He'd been doing this long enough to know what that look is, the one when you've got something, something real. We were twenty minutes away, forty if traffic was bad. The bus routes, he'd have to be home by now, rush hour was winding down and the South Freeway wasn't yet the mess it's turned into.
Another difference between now and then. My boss now would have a blue screaming fit if I took off to confront a possible killer without letting him know about it. I didn't know any better. Besides, I had a six-three, ex-mil, no-fooling FBI agent sitting in my office.
"I don't know if this guy is the one who did it or not. Would you be willing to help me find out?"
Trevanian looked at the folders, the lists of names. The pattern I'd drawn up across an accordion sheet spread of green and white striped printer paper.
The address I'd circled, the name, and the Key Map binder.
"Detective, I sure as hell didn't fly down to Houston in August hoping you'd blow me off and send me back to D.C. emptyhanded. Just promise you'll talk it out as we drive." Because whatever else Trevanian was here for, he wanted me to be right. Now, on the drive, walking up to the trailer house sitting on a half-acre of flood-prone coastal prairie.
Sitting on the guy's beat-up old couch, asking if he'd known my kids. One by one, Amos, Rod. Tracy. Geno. Menna. William. Jeffery. Naming every one, going through the list, when the guy's face is breaking in front of me, Will's moving I can hear the floor creak under his weight maybe not the guy's moving his hand behind the counter and now.
I don't yell. I say, "On the floor, Mr. Billings, on the floor now." And he's still reaching for something when my gun rises and the sights settle in over his nose.
And here we are. "Go for it, lady. Pull it, you know you want to." And so I do, only I don't shoot the son of a bitch like he wants me to, he's smiling as he says it. Until the bullet passes by his ear, into the hood vent behind him and Will and I move like we'd been doing this all our lives, me first around the counter and Will right behind me, I keep the sights centered on him.
Even as he slides down onto the floor in front of us. Maybe he'd have gone for the gun, a revolver he kept in the knife drawer, if I'd have been stupid enough to show up by myself.
As it was, he went to his face; Will cuffed him. And I holstered the gun and lead Pierce Billings to the car.
We didn't go back into the trailer until we'd done the rest of the work. The details stuff. A warrant, that was easy, dispatch put Penrose through and then Will and I were swearing to the judge over the radio. "I'll be there in an hour with the warrant," Penrose told me when we got through with that. "The badges should be there a lot quicker."
The first marked car was close enough the red lights reflected across my car as we spoke. "Got it. We're not going anywhere."
What we found in the trailer, well, it got to the papers because DeJuana had started listening to the police band. She beat Penrose there; she didn't have to wait for Judge Emmett to sign any paperwork. I didn't recognize the Jeep, but I had enough suspicions to leave Will with our suspect and head DeJuana off. "Just do me a favor and wait at the end of the driveway. This guy could be a nervous drug dealer who doesn't have anything to do with anything."
"Uh-huh. Just answer one question, and I'll wait here like a good girl."
I could do that. "Shoot."
"Do you really think the guy you've got in the back of the car was just someone dumb enough to overreact to you coming in to ask him a question?"
That was the first time I'd had a chance to think back, to remember Septimus's face, the hunger that flew into his eyes when I named my kids. Amos Turner, Tracy Shepherd, Geno LeGuin, Menna Luongo. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Rod Washington. The first chance I had to reflect on that hunger, and that he couldn't help but feel it even as I was reaching for the gun on my belt.
"No, DeJuana. He wasn't a dumbshit we stumbled on by accident. He knew why we were there."
I put one hand on his back, one foot in front of the other, and somehow, by fate, by grace of God, but surely not by any native ability but sheer bullheaded determination, I didn't put my face into the gravel. I got us to the car, and him into the back of it. When I closed the door, I leaned up against the side of it. Where I could watch the trailer. Where I could breathe what little clean air the fading daylight vouchsafed me.
Where I could not puke, for just five breaths, now six, now seven. I could ignore the nerves and the shakes and I could by God not throw up.
"Big time killer, right?" the FBI suit asked me. "Guy's a big timer, made the New York by-God Times, and he's begging you to put a bullet between his eyes and make it all go away."
Yeah.
"You ok?" the suit continued.
No. "Yeah."
The suit's named Willard Mason Trevanian. Former ground pounder, psych degree and law degree. He's a mensch.
"Kelli," he said.
I turned to look at him. Somehow or another.
His face is wide, pushed-flat nose that helps him look like George Foreman. Will's in on the joke, he's even got a signed picture with the big man on the desk next to his wife's. Two of them like long lost cousins, all smiles.
Will doesn't smile now, he's still working. "Don't forget this. Hold onto it, hard as it sounds right now." He held out his hand, not as big as the champ's but still big enough I had to make sure I didn't get my skinny bones crushed grabbing it. Will waited 'til I grabbed it, then he used it to ease me up a little. "There's no such thing as an easy case."
We'd stood there. Him across from me, between the sights of the gun. "Pull it, you know you want to."
So I had.
After I shifted the barrel, just a little to the right, so the bullet passed between his shoulder and his ear. "On your face, just like I said." And he'd done it and just like that the whole thing was done. Except for the part where I had to stand there and wait for the shakes to finish.
Their faces passed through my mind while the nerves in my legs caught up to the necessary. Seven children. Rodrick Washington. Menna Luongo. Tracy Shepherd. Geno LeGuin. Amos Turner. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Seven young faces. And the families, the family they'd all become in the interminable months between William's disappearance and when I shoved the man who called himself Septimus into the back of the cruiser.
Ten years before Peter Pan entered our life. I'd moved over to this cold-case job just five months before, that's when I found the first set of folders. Forensics degree and the academy and ride a beat for a year, then ten years past the detective label and there I was. Here we all were.
How'd we all get here?
Rod and Menna, Tracy, Geno, these were the faces I knew only from a pile of folders on my predecessor's desk. "Your first job is to clear these old cases," my new boss told me. "Chris left us a parting gift, to go along with the finger."
That was the picture of Christopher Simmons' middle finger, the one taped to the door. He'd slapped it up there on his way to retirement. The stack of folders were the cherry on the sundae, I guess, the acknowledgment of the only truth.
There'd always be another case.
I cleared those folders, one by one, but somehow or another there was always another one coming in. The lost, the case that didn't get solved, some murders, some burglaries, some of this and that. The weird and the wild and the just plain "Didn't fit anywhere else."
Amos's case turned up for what eventually became familiar reasons. No one could connect his disappearance to anything that made any sense.
I still come into the office the way I did then, when the world is working on normal shift anyway. Wander up the stairs because it's likely to be the only real exercise I get that day, huff and puff and remind myself that I really should do better. Set the cup of coffee down next to the phone and dig for my notes from the day before.
Then pass through any folders that might have drifted my way overnight. Don't get me wrong, I don't get a case every night, because my colleagues all know their business. Most of the overnight mail is the same thing that comes into the email box: HR paperwork, memos from working cases, the day to day business.
Amos's face stared up at me. A school picture, like most kids the most recent image available.
Twelve. He's twelve, maybe thirteen at the most. Why do I know this?
Because I'd been taking my reading home, that's why. I picked up Amos's folder, paged through it, looked for the basics. A walker, he'd left school like normal, walking home, latchkey kid just old enough Mom and Dad felt he could handle the responsibility. He didn't make it home. Simple as that, and there were no skeletons in the family closet, no bad neighbor stories or skulking vans or anything the detectives and the beat cops could find to go somewhere with.
Why'd I guess his age? I reached for the other folders, four of them, not in a row because this morning was the first time I'd put them all together. Rod's folder was in my bag, so was Geno's but I had to hunt for his. Tracy's lay on my desk, I'd seen that one last week, Menna's was back in the file cabinet because I'd needed to rotate a little. Were there others here, other folders and pictures?
No. I stopped and went through Chris's stack of leave-behinds, one by one, and these were the only kids he'd left me. Four other disappearances.
Geno, another latchkey kid, and walker. His teachers hadn't known that. Tracy, she'd taken the Y's van from school, she only walked home from the Y Tuesdays and Thursdays, single mom a nurse she'd had that kind of shift but "Tracy was pretty good about it."
Rod was the slightly odd one out. Mother and father at odds with each other, divorced and Mom had a new husband, Dad wasn't there yet and he was the one lived close to school. Not close enough to walk though, so Rod hopped the bus and rode for a few blocks, then got down and went to Dad's apartment to wait 'til Mom finished her day and came by to pick him up.
Mom and Dad might have been at odds, but they were just elbows up, the legal business and the divorce fresh enough the wounds hadn't scarred over. They managed it well enough for Mom to drive by her ex's apartment every day.
Different neighborhoods, different schools. Midtown Amos, Geno from the Heights, out Westheimer for Menna and Tracy but different schools, the Fifth Ward for Rod.
All of them in September. Rod and Geno two years past, Tracy and Menna last year, Amos just four months ago.
I had a pattern, was it real?
I learned something then, but it might not matter as much these days. Then, the Chronicle was moving online, one of the first big papers to do it, but their archives were still dusty microfilm. I went to their library to put my pieces together.
The reporter showed up at my office three days later. DeJuana Rusch, ten years older and more cynical than I, and she wanted to know what I'd found.
How she hadn't already put it together I'll never know, except like us the news crews were always scrambling to match the bits to the picture frame they'd come from. "I don't have anything, yet."
"You didn't come to our library for nothing, detective."
And I hadn't. So I told her; I forgot to ask her to keep it off the record. Which is why I ended up with a boss sitting in my office, complaining about the headline the Chronicle graced us with. "Houston PD On the Trail of A Serial Kidnapper: Why'd It Take So Long?"
"You'd better be sure of this, Kelli. Five months in and you've got the paper breathing down my neck already."
Considering he'd parked me on the cold case desk to keep me out of the way of the rest of his crew... "Lieutenant, I didn't know she'd go running off to write something like this."
I have to give Penrose this much credit. He didn't keep griping about it. He just warned me. "Next time a reporter comes to visit, the first thing you tell them is?"
"Off the record?"
"Exactly." And he left me alone to keep putting pieces back together.
Though I did have to buy him lunch. "For running interference. The Chief called me first thing this morning, right after he got off the phone with the Mayor. They both know this wasn't your fault, but that means they're paying attention now. If you get anywhere with this, don't let my phone stay quiet."
I give credit to DeJuana, as well, because her story never once brought up the term "killer". Not yet, that would come soon enough.
And in the meantime, she was the one with the parents calling her. And Penrose. They didn't put my name into the ring until later.
When we found Amos and Tracy.
The Bayou City. They run through the place, the still waters. Always there beneath and alongside the roads. Ready to flood when the rains come. Ready to catch what people hide away.
Some breaks happen because we make them. Pull at the strings until something comes into the light, and we practice watching and listening for those moments. Others happen through nothing but accident. We were in the middle of a rain year, rainy few years, spring fronts that just wouldn't pass us by without putting down two, three, five inches of rain. The flood gauges on the roadways got a workout that year.
I'd moved into a new apartment that summer. Just up the road from Buffalo Bayou, close enough to walk to the bat bridge. Close enough so that when the call came in, Penrose knew which of his detectives could get there soonest.
They were chained together. The spring floodwaters had washed the bucket of concrete loose from the bottom, wherever they'd gone in. We had to wait for the identity folks to nail it down, but I didn't have any doubt that I'd be adding another piece to my puzzle.
"Did he keep her?" Penrose asked me. "All those months, did he hold her and wait?"
"He, Lieutenant?" I wasn't ready to go there, not quite yet. Sure, I knew the odds, but we didn't have anything that pointed that way.
"Call it a placeholder until you find more information, Kelli."
I could accept that. "You're not pulling me away for someone else to take over?"
He was halfway out the door. DeJuana hadn't waited to file her next story; the Times would file theirs the next day. Not a headline, not national news yet, just an A3, but the beat was picking up. "Tell me again when the first kid went missing? How long?"
"Two and a half years."
"And you're the first one to notice?"
I didn't answer that.
"No, Kelli. They're your kids. Do right by them." And he left to go mind the phones.
So that's when I called the FBI. Kidnapping being a big part of their business; the serial killer thing, they're the ones with the patience and the institutional memory. Problem being, while I had the history and the case studies in my memory, I didn't have a phone number or a name to contact. I worked the phone tree until I landed Will Trevanian's number.
"You've got a pattern of missing kids, and now you've got a body."
Two, but ok. "That sums it up."
"I can't really solve your case for you, detective."
Sure, but one can hope, right? "I'm assuming you're here for ear-bending, ideas..."
"Match-ups if I have them. You got it. And you know I'll have to fly down and pretend we did all the hard work, when you finally do catch the killer?"
"If they pay somebody to take the pictures and give the quotes, where do I send the reporter that's barking up my tree?" Now that I had him on the line...
I got the laugh I was looking for. "There's a practical limit. At least this way that reporter doesn't know you've got the feds on side. Keep me in the loop, will ya?"
I could do that. I'd have to if I wanted someone else doing the institutional clog dance for me.
Trevanian made me pay for it. My homework arrived a week after the first phone call. By bulk mail, the folders came in ten at a time. I think I've still got them all, probably in the bottom drawer of my first real file cabinet, the one I ended up putting in about a year later to handle all the folders I'd built up.
They weren't light reading. Trevanian sent me the ones who went after kids. He also sent me the ones who went after old folks, only boys, only girls... the list goes on. If there's a group, something to focus on, from looks to color to language or country or...
There's someone out there who's obsessed enough to target them. Trevanian didn't spare me. "You can't afford to miss a connection."
"What about the lighter crimes?" Cons, people who go into old folks' homes and walk out with a couple hundred grand and half a dozen heartbroken, bankrupt, lonely victims behind them. "Or, well..."
"The rapists?" He wouldn't let me hide behind myself, either. "Those are a lot harder to take in, Kelli."
Considering the autopsy pictures I currently had sitting on my desk, that was a little much to fathom.
"I mean, for every real serial killer, there's a hundred, maybe two hundred rapists. In practical terms, that group's a lot harder to get understanding of. And a lot more varied."
"We don't have anything else to go on yet. What if I miss because I let the pedophiles go without looking into them?"
He hmm'd a bit. "Gimme a couple days. You're right. I've already sent you the ones we know of that turned killer."
I got up, pacing, thinking, glad the cord of the phone let me pick the base up and walk around the office with it. "How about this? You've got your own groupings, right?"
"I don't want to bias your investigation..."
"I'm not... Ok, I am asking you to. But only to this extent. I bet, if I asked you which, say, twenty of your sex offender profiles you'd pick out, first thing without stopping to think, of the ones you'd peg for most likely to graduate..." I was reaching. Not for a list of interviewees, suspects. But for exactly what Trevanian had built up from twenty more years' experience. A profile, a way of thinking.
A little insight.
"I'll mail them to you tomorrow."
The files, like the killers I'd already poured through, told me far more than I'd wanted to know about the predators. Who's got time to watch the vulnerable? Read their habits. When they come home, when they leave. Where they go.
All of them, killers and rapists, there were common touches, little linkages. And there was the one that they all needed. Time. Time to observe, plan. Except for the spur of the moment, while they were still in control enough to not want to get caught, they had to be able to plan. So they got the jobs I'd expect, the ones the nightly news and the daily headlines accidentally condition us all to be so suspicious of, to worry over.
Nurse. Caregiver. Teacher. Priest.
September is the time when new classes come through. Here, it's about two, three weeks into the school year, when the classes have got through the first rush and started to settle into the rhythm of the year. Twelve year olds, seventh grade.
Different schools. Was I looking for someone with a teacher's badge, but who only taught here and there? Substitute work? Teacher in-service?
If the Chronicle'd reacted like a wasp's nest to me coming into their archives, Houston ISD would react like a fire ant mound. This one, if I didn't want to spend months fighting the politics, I'd need some help up front. I stewed on it over the weekend, knowing damned well I'd be walking into my boss's office Monday morning and dreading the moment.
It was the first time I'd come to him first with an idea.
He didn't blink. "You sure?"
"It's the hole in the cloud bank. What fits into it, who'd be able to watch that many kids well enough to know they were vulnerable to that particular kind of kidnapping?"
"Give me a couple days. The head of the school board's police department is an old friend, he'll know who to talk to."
I'd have loved to be able to get into their employee records myself. In the end we had to settle for giving them dates and schools. "They don't want to put their entire workforce at risk," I told my boss.
"The teacher's union would sue us the minute they found out," he replied. "Not that I blame them, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone were doing the same thing to our crew."
"How long do you think they'll sit on it, before they let us look at the files?" I asked
Maybe if we'd pushed... We had that conversation in Penrose's office in July. I'd picked up Amos's file February; that's how the clock moves for these things. Amos and Tracy's twinned flood exhumation, that was March.
Jeffery and William vanished, William the first day after the Labor Day break, Jeffery the week after that. On schedule.
We met in Penrose's office. We being the Mayor, the Chief, Penrose, and me hiding in the corner, as best I can. When I explained why we needed to get a look at the school district's employee files, the Mayor pulled the phone over, punched a number in, and put it on speaker. "Tell her the same thing you just told me."
So I did that. The superintendent started to gripe. Until the Mayor leaned back into the conversation. "Jennie, you lost two more students in the past two weeks. Spare us the boilerplate." Or we'll be on the phone to the New York Times, he didn't add.
That's when our cases finally made the headline of the Times. When William didn't come home.
The superintendent dropped it. "We'll need a lawyer present."
The Mayor looked at me. I shrugged. "I don't much care. Just don't get in my way when I need something, that's all I ask."
I had to start at the school board's main offices. I ended up going to each of the schools. Every step of the way with the school board's attack dog trailing along behind me. I didn't blame him. When, not if but when the union got the news... These days, the electronic search would have gone through a lot quicker.
These days, I'd need a warrant just to get to that level. They don't do fishing expeditions, databases and their minders, unless you've got someone on the other side willing to do the work. Which goes back and forth.
I had my ideas. Middle school is that step up, a little bigger school, a few more teachers, cycle's the same and there are only so many of them. Who'd been to more than one? Was I looking for a janitor, no, because if there was anything more permanent at a school than the tenured teacher it was the janitors. Maintenance staff? They had to be able to move around, right, electricians and plumbers, but when would they have the chance to not just watch but learn a kid's patterns?
He was a goddamned bus driver.
There was one other thing the kids all had in common. They were GT kids, gifted and talented. Extra classes, projects, like the athletes and the band kids the GT kids always had just that extra little time at school. Enough so he spotted them. On his way back to the bus barn every day, he'd drive past the school and there would be the stragglers, heading out for home by bus or by foot.
Or, for Rod, and here was the guy's mistake: he'd been the bus driver for some of the GT kids. Run a regular route and come back to pick up the half dozen smart kids and Rod had been one of them. The very first one of them; Rod had set the pattern.
After, he'd known what to look for. Who his prey were, how to watch for them.
I found him the old fashioned way. Accidentally. Because I'd put together my lists, and I'd gone through them and found nothing. No flags, no histories, the teachers didn't match up, none of them had rotated to the schools I needed, even the interns and the substitutes didn't overlap. The techs and the maintenance crews, even the nurses, I couldn't make a pattern of their assignments. There wasn't one, not that connected with my kids.
So, I went back through the list of names and jobs, and there was one that didn't fit. Teachers and staff, but I didn't remember looking for bus drivers, how'd this name get there?
Not his, not the guy I'd only come to really know by his internet handle; she really was an accident. A bus driver whose name had ended up in my list for some reason I never did figure out.
But it finally jogged the brain cells loose. Eleven months, I'd bird-dogged the school district personnel files for eleven months, every passing calendar page telling me I was one month closer to next September.
I'd missed a category.
The attack dog wasn't happy about it. "You've already had your fishing expedition, detective."
"If you think it's so easy, how about you come down here and I give you the case to solve, counselor? We can start with the autopsy reports, so you have a clear understanding of what we're dealing with."
I got the access. And this time, just in time, I found the pattern that had to be there. There are only so many bus barns, and an awful lot of routes to run. There was only one possibility, seven kids and seven different schools and the years between. I had his address and real name within hours, once I had the right category to search through.
He went by Septimus, on the internet as it was then, barely more than a handful of bulletin boards for the midnight warriors to meet and hash out their complaints and frictions. I didn't see that up front, not until after.
I didn't go to the trailer by myself. Trevanian had shown up. The Times has, had, that way about them. When they got the bit in their teeth, the powers that be noticed. When DeJuana spotted the pattern, with just weeks to go she went for the gold medal and filed her story on the "September Killer"; the Times picked it up from the Chronicle and ran with it. And just about the time I was going back to the school board to look for bus drivers, Trevanian was boarding his plane for my world.
He knocked on my door right as I circled the name, and the address. I waved the strange man in while I went digging for my Key Map. "Help you?"
"Will Trevanian, detective." I took the big mitt he hung over my desk, mumbled something incoherent and flipped the binder open.
"First time I've seen you in person, detective, and I have a feeling you're about to take me on a very interesting drive."
Give him credit. He'd been doing this long enough to know what that look is, the one when you've got something, something real. We were twenty minutes away, forty if traffic was bad. The bus routes, he'd have to be home by now, rush hour was winding down and the South Freeway wasn't yet the mess it's turned into.
Another difference between now and then. My boss now would have a blue screaming fit if I took off to confront a possible killer without letting him know about it. I didn't know any better. Besides, I had a six-three, ex-mil, no-fooling FBI agent sitting in my office.
"I don't know if this guy is the one who did it or not. Would you be willing to help me find out?"
Trevanian looked at the folders, the lists of names. The pattern I'd drawn up across an accordion sheet spread of green and white striped printer paper.
The address I'd circled, the name, and the Key Map binder.
"Detective, I sure as hell didn't fly down to Houston in August hoping you'd blow me off and send me back to D.C. emptyhanded. Just promise you'll talk it out as we drive." Because whatever else Trevanian was here for, he wanted me to be right. Now, on the drive, walking up to the trailer house sitting on a half-acre of flood-prone coastal prairie.
Sitting on the guy's beat-up old couch, asking if he'd known my kids. One by one, Amos, Rod. Tracy. Geno. Menna. William. Jeffery. Naming every one, going through the list, when the guy's face is breaking in front of me, Will's moving I can hear the floor creak under his weight maybe not the guy's moving his hand behind the counter and now.
I don't yell. I say, "On the floor, Mr. Billings, on the floor now." And he's still reaching for something when my gun rises and the sights settle in over his nose.
And here we are. "Go for it, lady. Pull it, you know you want to." And so I do, only I don't shoot the son of a bitch like he wants me to, he's smiling as he says it. Until the bullet passes by his ear, into the hood vent behind him and Will and I move like we'd been doing this all our lives, me first around the counter and Will right behind me, I keep the sights centered on him.
Even as he slides down onto the floor in front of us. Maybe he'd have gone for the gun, a revolver he kept in the knife drawer, if I'd have been stupid enough to show up by myself.
As it was, he went to his face; Will cuffed him. And I holstered the gun and lead Pierce Billings to the car.
We didn't go back into the trailer until we'd done the rest of the work. The details stuff. A warrant, that was easy, dispatch put Penrose through and then Will and I were swearing to the judge over the radio. "I'll be there in an hour with the warrant," Penrose told me when we got through with that. "The badges should be there a lot quicker."
The first marked car was close enough the red lights reflected across my car as we spoke. "Got it. We're not going anywhere."
What we found in the trailer, well, it got to the papers because DeJuana had started listening to the police band. She beat Penrose there; she didn't have to wait for Judge Emmett to sign any paperwork. I didn't recognize the Jeep, but I had enough suspicions to leave Will with our suspect and head DeJuana off. "Just do me a favor and wait at the end of the driveway. This guy could be a nervous drug dealer who doesn't have anything to do with anything."
"Uh-huh. Just answer one question, and I'll wait here like a good girl."
I could do that. "Shoot."
"Do you really think the guy you've got in the back of the car was just someone dumb enough to overreact to you coming in to ask him a question?"
That was the first time I'd had a chance to think back, to remember Septimus's face, the hunger that flew into his eyes when I named my kids. Amos Turner, Tracy Shepherd, Geno LeGuin, Menna Luongo. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Rod Washington. The first chance I had to reflect on that hunger, and that he couldn't help but feel it even as I was reaching for the gun on my belt.
"No, DeJuana. He wasn't a dumbshit we stumbled on by accident. He knew why we were there."
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