The Death of David Pickett

by G. A. Matiasz

  Jesse hovered around the periphery of the police barrier. However, it soon became clear that there was no getting near where the police killed the six young men. The crowd outside the cordon was growing larger. And angrier. He walked south on Mission, stunned and staggered. Police sirens wailed. He climbed his apartment stairs, tossed his knapsack onto the couch, and eased out his window to stand on the fire escape in the cool of the evening. The orange sun got entangled with Sutro Towers on its way toward bloody sunset.

  He remembered three grandparents, an aunt, and two cousins who died, as had two high school classmates, a college professor, and now David Pickett. But he hadn’t personally witnessed any of their deaths and now, within twenty-four hours, Jesse had seen seven people shot dead. Gunned down. Murdered. He turned on his smartphone but his fingers shook too much to use the tiny virtual keyboard. So he re-entered his apartment, switched on the Fetch, and activated its communication apps.

  There were seven additional voice messages, eight more texts, and an email from Angie, all of which he deleted without opening. Jesse had ended their relationship, a kind of death, but a gutless one. He’d never called it quits; he just stopped seeing or contacting her. He wasn’t proud of his behavior, but he couldn’t yield to the pull of his heart. The remaining messages—thirty-eight voice mails, sixty-six texts, and twenty-one emails—fell into several categories. Eight were wrong numbers/addresses and thirty-odd were advertisements. The rest were an assortment of messages, texts, and emails from friends and acquaintances about David Pickett’s death. Asking “Hey, did you hear…” and “What do you think about…” Some “Sorry about…” and “Hope you’re…”. He’d dealt with all the emails and texts and was working through the last third of the voice messages when he heard: “This is Investigator Van Cornin with the Homicide Detail. I need to speak to a Jesse Jacob Steinfeld at his earliest convenience.”

  How did Van Cornin know his smartphone number? Did he have to worry about Van Cornin hounding him at his apartment? He opened a browser on his Fetch to look up Van Cornin’s SFPD biography. Jesse saw on the social media newsfeeds that a demonstration, Occupy the Mission, was set for Wednesday at Dolores Park. He continued deleting phone messages. The last message raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “Jesse, this is David Pickett, calling you from beyond the grave.” The voice sounded loud and present, inflected with David’s signature gravel and a bit of a chuckle. “You and I haven’t been real good friends. Didn’t know each other well at all, matter of fact. But, now that I’m on the other side, I need you to take care of that thing with Toby for me. It ain’t cool, what he did in my name.”

  The voice on the message hung up. Jesse sat, dumbfounded. What kind of shitty joke was this?

  He kept the message but turned the phone to vibrate. Time to visit Kevin Farley. He’d contracted Kevin’s services when he’d gotten himself into a jam. Jesse handled other people’s data as a digital archivist, but in trying to cut corners and save costs, he’d let a client’s work get hijacked and held for ransom. Kevin had recovered the stolen data without paying the ransom. But Farley wasn’t answering his phone and his website only offered appointments for the next day, starting at 11 a.m. Jesse took the first available appointment.

  Between thinking about the call from Van Cornin and the one supposedly from David Pickett, Jesse’s fears kicked in. He ran down to the corner taqueria, Goyaałé, for a burrito and the corner liquor store for three bottles of Chimay Tripel, but neither food nor alcohol nor several hits of prime indica bud alleviated his anxieties.

  THREE

  Jesse awoke the next morning, showered, and downed copious amounts of coffee. To jeans and T-shirt he added a “Groucho Marxist” sweatshirt. He switched on his Fetch for news of the deepening turmoil in China and NATO’s counter to the Ukrainian/Moldovan invasion of Romania, only to quickly turn it off. He ignored his new phone messages, the preponderance of them from Angie. Instead he hefted the knapsack, with Fetch, CD, and notebook inside, locked his apartment, and ran down the stairs to his apartment building two at a time, hoping not to run into representatives of the SFPD on their way up.

  Kevin lived in a three-story Victorian house in the heart of the Inner Mission, surrounded by sketchy public housing and colorful Precita Eyes murals. During the heyday of Silicon Valley, Kevin made his nut and then some, more than enough to retire and purchase the Victorian. He lived alone. A server farm occupied the air-conditioned basement, supporting his various and sundry web enterprises. The second-floor rooms had been modified to accommodate a high-grade hydroponic marijuana farm—insulated for moisture, heat, and light; vented and filtered through the walls and attic. Solar panels covered the roof, and a biofuel/electricity generator and windmill shared the backyard with a chicken coop and rabbit hutch. Kevin had the ground and third floors for his residence, the whole structure properly defended by bars, alarm systems, armed robotics, 24-hour mobile surveillance, and an on-call private security patrol.

  It was approaching noon when Jesse knocked. The porch was sunny and spacious. As he waited, listening to birds chirping and chickens clucking, he sensed that various surveillance systems were checking him out.

  “Come on in,” Kevin said through a speaker as the front door unlocked. “I’m upstairs, in CentCom.”

  The door closed and locked behind him. The dark entryway was spotlighted at the far end. The lighting anticipated him as he progressed through the living room, up three flights of stairs, and down a hall. The door to CentCom, short for Central Command, was up another short flight of stairs and wide open.

  “Jesse, my boy.” Kevin swiveled his sizable bulk in an Aeron chair modified for his mass. “What can I do you for?”

  Kevin was obese by any standard. Dressed in a light-gray sweatshirt, dark-gray sweatpants, and unlaced silver-gray track shoes, he was surrounded by a dozen flickering computer screens. Central Command occupied the top floor of a turret tower running the house’s northwest corner to just above roof level, with panopticon windows providing a panoramic view of the Mission. Jesse slung the knapsack onto a table near the door.

  “I need your investigatory talents,” Jesse said, and took the only other chair in the room. “I’ve got a mystery here that’s bordering on the bizarre.”

  “Gotcha.” Kevin smiled.

  “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “First things first. Tell me your problem.”

  Jesse pulled out his smartphone and replayed the David Pickett message. Ambient air conditioning kept the atmosphere odorless. “I want you to tell me as much as possible about this message. Who sent it? Was it really from David, or did somebody engineer a fake message? And, I know this would be beyond your abilities, but can you hazard a guess as to why somebody would want to send me such a message?”

  “Wow.” Kevin extended his hand and closed his pudgy fingers on the phone. He searched through several cables next to him, pulled one up, and attached it to the smartphone. “Mind if I port your phone? I’m first going to record the message, then I’m going to access your provider. This should take a minute or two.”

  In five minutes, the screen in front of Kevin was divided into several quick-reference video panels. He didn’t like working to music, so the sounds of the neighborhood mingled gently with the hum of electronics and the clack of his keyboard.

  “Okay, let me see here.” Kevin perused the screen. “I’ll be able to run some diagnostics, both on the recorded message and on the message as routed through your provider to your smartphone. If you want me to continue, we can discuss payment.”

  “By all means.”

  “My basic rate is one fifty for thirty minutes.” He smiled at Jesse. “For friends, it’s a hundred. That’s for any part of a half hour.”

  “Give me an hour, to start.”

  “Right,” Kevin said, and turned back to the screen. “Let’s start with the recording. There are plenty of apps out there we can run this recording through to verify its ve
racity. Or lack thereof.”

  Kevin fast-forwarded through scores of podcasts and YouTube recordings of Pickett’s copious speeches, talks, lectures, monologues, debates, spiels, and the like, processing them before running the smartphone message through the same software.

  “You participating in the huelga general tomorrow?” Kevin asked as he worked.

  “The what?”

  “The general strike. To protest killing the homeboys and David Pickett.”

  “I haven’t been paying much attention lately,” he deflected. “By the way, can you help me with something else? Something minor. Can you tell me what’s on this?”

  Jesse handed Kevin the sleeve and CD, minus the Post-it.

  “Talk about stone knives and bearskins.” Kevin examined the disk before feeding it into a computer slot. “There are twenty-three PDFs here of what appear to be legal documents.”

  “Can you print them out?”

  “Will do,” Kevin said, then pointed to a far corner of his desk, once again engrossed in work. “Printer’s there.”

  Jesse picked up the papers from the printer and the CD from Kevin, then sat down to read the printed contents of the CD while Kevin worked. The first two pages were the copy of a cover letter detailing a Freedom of Information Act filed against the FBI by a broad coalition of progressive California organizations. The Chicanosaurus Art Collective had been party to the FOIA, with a “cc” sent to Marco Layola. One midnight in July, Synarkist guerrilla cells attacked the Bohemian Grove’s meeting with waves of hang gliders and microlites. They bombed the secret get-together with vicious psychochemical drugs and livecast the whole operation. The FBI used the attack as a pretense to conduct mass raids, detentions, and arrests against the wider progressive community. The remaining pages were of the actual FBI documents referencing the Bureau’s actions, but they were so heavily redacted Jesse had trouble deciphering them. Somebody had conveniently marked up the originals in five places where the moniker HOOLIGAN-X appeared. From what Jesse could glean from context, HOOLIGAN-X was not an FBI confidential informant but an undercover agent. He was also high up in the leadership of the Bohemian Grove protest and a member of DUI.

  “Damn,” Kevin said, with twenty-five minutes on the clock. “So, the weird news is that the message on your cell appears to be authentic.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Kevin turned his attention to Jesse.

  “The message itself doesn’t seem to be composed of different snippets of David speaking, the segments pieced together into some jerry-rigged whole. That’s my analysis, backed up by at least three separate tests. First, I looked at the words of the message themselves. Then I cataloged Pickett’s previous words from past podcasts and YouTubes and compared them to the words on the message. Finally, I analyzed the background noise on the message itself. In my humble opinion, that message is real. Authentic. Genuine. Every digital test that I can throw at it or run it through proves it. Either that or this is the cleverest, most sophisticated forgery I’ve ever run across. CIA-level forgery. No. Fucking Mossad-level forgery. Which is ridiculous. Why would anybody be interested in counterfeiting a message from David Pickett?”

  “Good question.”

  “Good question, indeed.” Kevin cocked an eye. “So, who’s this Toby?”

  Jesse told Kevin about Tobias in a rush—their acquaintance, seeing him in the park before the riot, witnessing the restaurateur’s murder—in a cathartic confession.

  “I can’t say for certain that Tobias gunned down Spencer’s owner,” Jesse said. Pleaded. “I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”

  “Back on fleek.” Kevin returned to his screens. “There are only three possibilities here. One: David is still alive. Two: David is somehow communicating with you from beyond the grave. Or three: The message is fake. Our next step is to track the message from your phone to where it was sent. Meaning I start with your smartphone; trace the signal to your local cell tower, down along the wire or fiberoptic line to the wireless access point and the multiport switch where its routed through a T1 or T3 or microwave backhaul; then back out the backhaul on the other end, up through that switch to the far cell tower, and finally out to the origin cellphone. It sounds long and complicated, but actually, it’s quite simple and quick. Or potentially so.”

  He busied himself with keyboard and mouse, then sat back. After fifteen minutes, Kevin frowned and leaned into the screen. His fingers typed furiously. This time, he concentrated on the computer’s activities for the next twenty minutes, only to shake his head in disbelief.

  “That’s impossible,” he mumbled.

  “What’s the matter,” Jesse asked.

  “The trace. It worked, but not the way it was supposed to. Every hop and stop was correct, and trackable, except that they aren’t. I can’t resolve where the hell the call came from. The source, the starting device, or the precise route it took. It’s a fucking mystery.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “I can’t even begin to tell you. I ran the trace twice more. It resolved correctly each time, but it wasn’t the same. I can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in the hereafter or that David Pickett is calling you from it. Which means he was either still alive when you got that message, or this is all an elaborate hoax.”

  “Okay, so what do you want me to do?”

  “You only owe me for an hour. I’ll keep running traces on this, trying to figure it out. I’m a dog with a bone now.”

  Jesse gave Kevin his fee via Square. He noticed a pile of Day-Glo cardboard glasses with reflective foil for lenses in a rack next to the door, like old-school 3-D glasses or eclipse shades.

  “What’s this?” He picked one up.

  “Cheap PUD scanners.” Kevin continued typing. “I wired ‘em to intercept public and private PUD broadcasts and project them onto the lenses. Just press the ‘third eye’ symbol on the bridge to switch broadcasts.”

  “Cool!” Jesse grinned. He slipped on a pair and was immediately hovering one hundred fifty meters away, nine meters in the air, observing a traffic accident on Potrero. Pressed the switch and he sailed over Mission residences toward Bernal Heights. If only he’d had a pair when the six young men were gunned down in the BART plaza. “I’ll take a couple.”

  “They’re free. I want to give people the power to watch the watchers.”

  “Thanks for your efforts on the message.” Jesse slipped the Fetch back into the knapsack. “Let me know what you find.”

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow morning.” Kevin smiled. “Meantime, I got a little surprise for you. Check your email when you get home.”

  Kevin had spent more than three hours on Jesse’s issue. On the trek back to his apartment by way of Cesar Chavez and the homeless tent city along its sidewalks, Jesse did some grocery shopping for staples at People’s Picnic. A TV screen above the checkout stand carried a live broadcast of the joint press conference held by the mayor’s office and SFPD where the murdered restaurant owner was lavishly mourned; the rioters were mercilessly condemned, the six dead youngsters were dismissed as gangsters committing crimes, and the proper authorities were only mildly excoriated.

  Chú Giáp, a cheap Vietnamese restaurant that served excellent phở, was crammed. A hangout for the city’s precariat, the establishment had witnessed a pitched ideological battle between David Pickett’s DUI and Angie Markham’s PU over union raiding that descended into a screaming match between the two. The place had been a favorite of Angie’s, who once said their soup was the best cure for a hangover. Jesse stopped his heart from clutching with the memory. He couldn’t commit to the relationship out of fear and couldn’t tell her out of more fear. He picked up a quart of thin sliced beef and noodle soup to go. Exiting, he noticed Stenny Amps entering, but both avoided acknowledging each other. He was in his living room fifteen minutes later, the groceries put away in his kitchen, his Fetch open and logged on, a second card left by Inves
tigator Van Cornin in his pocket. The smell of cilantro with beefy broth scented the air.

  The Internet buzzed with the call from an ad hoc coalition of Latinx and progressive community organizations to occupy the Mission tomorrow. The police identified the six Latino men who died as Mara Salvatrucha members and arguments raged over whether they had displayed guns in the inconclusive UAV videos being broadcast by the media. Rumors continued to swirl around government or corporate involvement in David Pickett’s death. David remained a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Lively discussions over plans for the Dolores Park rally on social media were quickly superseded by angry debates about the call by a loose network of anarchist, ultra-leftist, and Synarkist groups for concurrent antifascist black bloc actions.

  Kevin’s email attachment, in MPEG format, was a crude video that Kevin had obviously enhanced. The opening panorama was aerial, shot at night through streamers of smoke and pillars of fire. A crowd ringed a confrontation in progress. Black-clad protesters surrounded an individual dressed in a white chef’s smock, brandishing a shotgun, in the middle of a block. There was no sound. The video was granular. A tall lanky Mohawked man, dressed in black, stepped out of the throng and pulled a gun. Four muzzle flashes. The white aproned man fell away.

  Jesse identified a figure on the fringe of the crowd. Blurred, stunned, through smoke and flame. He recognized himself.

  FOUR

  Jesse woke to the Skype chime on his Fetch and the vibration on his smartphone. He rolled out of bed and smacked the start button for his coffee maker before opening his Fetch and beginning the Skype session. Kevin’s pixilated image appeared on the screen.

  “Tracking a particular cellphone involves three related dimensions.” Kevin launched into this discussion before Jesse was completely awake. “Three axes form a mobile tracking field. The x-axis is the provider, which acts as a gateway for the cellphone user’s messages and furnishes the IP address, which piggybacks on the mobile phone’s MSISDN, or phone number, of the SIM card. The y-axis is the GPS signal from the cellphone when it’s turned on. The z-axis is the triangulation of all messages from that cellphone through available network cell towers.”