Inevitable Discovery

by Melissa F. Miller

  “Sounds like Minority Report.”

  “It sort of is,” he told her. “But instead of psychics, the ‘pre-cogs’ in real life are complicated artificial intelligence programs.”

  “Computers predicting crimes that haven’t been committed yet—what could possibly go wrong?” she said drily.

  Her reaction was about what he’d expected. “Lewis was inspired to create Cesare because of a tragedy in his personal life,” he told her, repeating what he’d learned from a series of off-the-record phone calls with buddies spread throughout the law enforcement community.

  “Cesare?”

  “That’s the name of the AI. Probably named for Cesare Lombroso.”

  “And who is Cesare Lombroso?”

  “He was a criminologist who lived in Italy in the eighteen hundreds. He came up with a theory called anthropological criminology. Basically, he believed that criminality was an inherited trait and that he could tell who would become a criminal based on certain physical traits. Some of his theories were really wild. They’ve pretty much all been debunked now.”

  She grinned at him.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I forget what a big nerd you are,” she teased.

  “Really? I never forget what a petite nerd you are, counselor,” he teased her back.

  She giggled, then grew more serious. “So, what’s the tragedy in this guy’s past that made him create a creepy computerized version of a crank criminologist?”

  His smile faded. “His son was killed. It happened while he was still in California. The kid was in high school. He caught a bullet during a drug buy gone wrong. It’s not clear whether he just happened to be in the wrong place or what. Either way, he bled out in an alley.”

  “Oh. That’s horrible. And the shooter?”

  “He was a two-time loser named Calvin Tennyson. The cops actually stopped him the night of the murder, but he played it cool. He skipped town, ended up getting stabbed to death in a domestic dispute of some kind in North Carolina a year or so later. But Lewis was obsessed. He’s convinced that the death of his son could have been predicted and, thus, prevented.”

  She fell quiet and didn’t speak until they were standing on the sidewalk in front of their house. As they mounted the steps, she said, “I can see how losing a child like that could mess a person up. I mean, my parents had a couple bad years after Patrick. And, even now …”

  “Even now?” he prompted as she trailed off.

  “Well, unlike Mr. Lewis, who seems obsessed with knowing what happened, my parents seem committed to closing their eyes to the truth.”

  He reached out his hand and stopped her as she was turning her key in the door. “What does that mean?”

  “I think my brother might have had an illegitimate child. I think Allie might have been pregnant with his baby when he died.”

  He gaped at her. He had too many questions competing for primacy. He didn’t know where to start.

  “Here, I took a picture this morning after I took Jordana home. Let me show you.” As she pushed open the door and crossed the threshold into the living room, she pawed through her bag for her phone. “Hold this, please.” She handed him the puppy dog snack pack and pulled out her phone.

  He closed the door behind them and waited to see the picture she wanted to show him, but she was staring down at her text messages.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess I got some texts while we were walking home. Charlie Robinson’s been released, along with another man named Sam Blank. Raquel—Charlie’s partner—says they’re okay, but shaken. I need to call her real quick and set up a time to talk to them in the morning.”

  He recognized the look in her eyes. Her mind was spinning at top speed, churning out questions to ask, cases to consult, causes of action to bring. She was gearing up to throw herself into her case. And that was fine. But first she needed to unburden herself about Patrick.

  “I’ll walk the dog and feed the cat while you do that, but I want to hear about your brother as soon as you’re off the phone. Okay?”

  She nodded. “I’ll tell you all about it before bed. I promise.”

  23

  Sasha ended the call with Raquel and Charlie, went over her notes, and then sketched out a short agenda for their meeting tomorrow. Most of what Charlie had recounted squared with Connelly’s explanation of Landon Lewis and his predictive policing program. She emailed Jordana some research questions to get started on when she had her feet back under her. Then she cracked her back, changed into pajamas, and did a short yoga wind-down sequence.

  After she washed her face and brushed her teeth, she padded through her unusually quiet house in search of her husband and the pets. She found all three sound asleep on the couch in the living room. Connelly was sleeping hard, his arm flung over his eyes, his feet propped up on the ottoman, the cat curled into a comma on his lap. The dog nestled into his side, snoring softly.

  He’d been awake as long as she had. She checked the time—almost midnight. It had been a twenty-plus-hour day. She yawned. No wonder he was crashed out.

  She covered him with a warm blanket and turned out the lights. He would have carried her up to bed if the situation was reversed. But she had her limits. And carrying a six-foot-tall, hundred-and-seventy-five-pound man up a flight of stairs exceeded those limits. She brushed her lips over his forehead and tiptoed out of the room.

  She crawled into bed, expecting to fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Unfortunately, instead, her eyes popped open, and she stared, wide awake, at the ceiling. Part of her brain was working through the call with Charlie Robinson and the massive civil rights case they planned to file. Her inability to shut off her thoughts was a frequent side effect of working late at night.

  But most of her mind was preoccupied with a different topic entirely: Allie and Patrick. She combed through her memories, taking them out one by one and turning them over to examine them to see if they revealed hints or raised questions.

  And, in retrospect, it was clear. Obvious. Hard to miss, even. Her brother and her roommate had been having an affair. And Allie had gotten pregnant.

  That time she found Patrick hanging out in her childhood bedroom with Allie when she got home from her summer associate job early.

  Or when Allie randomly scored a pair of tickets to game three of the American League Championship in Boston, just six weeks before Patrick died. As far as Sasha knew, Allie wasn’t a baseball fan, but Patrick was. And he’d jumped at the chance to see Roger Clemens pitch. And Sasha had thought nothing of Allie and Patrick going to Boston together—because he always said Allie was like a second little sister.

  And what about how sick and tired Allie was that entire Fall semester, sleeping in, skipping breakfast. Puking on the side of the road after the funeral. She hadn’t been overcome by emotion. She’d been experiencing morning sickness.

  So much suddenly made sense. Allie’s heartbreak over Patrick’s death, which had seemed a bit disproportionate at the time. Karyn’s eruption when Sasha’s mom read the Christmas card from Allie. And the way Allie dropped off the planet after Christmas. She never came back to campus, not even to clean out her room. Her parents had hired one of the maintenance men to box up her stuff and drive it to California in her little BMW. She never returned a single phone call, didn’t answer any letters, acknowledge Sasha’s emails. She cut off all communication.

  At the time, Sasha assumed Allie wouldn’t talk to her because she was embarrassed about dropping out. But maybe she’d been afraid she’d let it slip that she was pregnant and Patrick was the father.

  Which meant, of course, that Sasha was the baby’s aunt. He was her eldest nephew. And she had never met him. Her throat tightened, and she forced herself to take a centering breath.

  She reached over and clicked on her bedside lamp. The only questions left were whether Allie had kept the baby or put him up for adoption and whether he knew who his father was.

  She
’d spent her day tracking down the wrong woman. She needed to find Allie, not Karyn, if she wanted answers. She made a note to do some basic social media profile searches in the morning to see if Allie was active anywhere. And, if not, she’d call the Georgetown alumni office after she met with Charlie and Sam Blank.

  Having memorialized her next steps, she flicked off the light and nestled back into bed, hopeful that her mind would shut down and let her sleep now that she’d worked through it. She started counting backward from one hundred and only made it to sixty-seven before drifting off.

  She stirred just once, when Connelly wandered into the room half-asleep and collapsed onto the bed next to her.

  “Good night,” he whispered.

  “Mmm.”

  “I’m sorry I fell asleep before we could talk.”

  “In the morning,” she mumbled into her pillow.

  He kissed her neck and curled up beside her, one hand resting on her hip. “Love you.”

  “Love you more.” She fell back to sleep to the sound of his even breathing.

  24

  Charlie woke up and stretched extravagantly. He was sore and stiff from the time spent in the cell, but the luxury of sleeping in his own bed had soothed most of his minor aches. A mattress, a pillow, a soft clean blanket, and the warm curves of the woman in his bed had washed away the rest of them.

  He glanced over at Raquel and smiled. She was curled on her side, sleeping soundly, her hand resting on his hip. He eased her hand off and slipped out of the bed, taking care not to wake her. She’d spent a grim, sleepless night worrying about him; he owed it to her to let her sleep in. In fact, he decided, he’d make her breakfast before he met with the lawyer. School could wait. His students were adults; they’d understand if Rush taught today’s seminar.

  He crept toward the living room. Sam may not have his hearing, but in Charlie’s experience, that would tend to mean he’d sleep very lightly rather than heavily. His Auntie Rae used to start awake the instant someone entered her room.

  As he padded past the futon on his way to the kitchen to start the coffee, he frowned. The futon bed was still unfolded, but the sheets had been neatly stacked in a pile on the bottom, along with the fleece blanket Raquel had unearthed from the back of the closet. Sam, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  He glanced down the hall and noted that the bathroom door was ajar. Sam wasn’t in there.

  He flipped on the kitchen light and spotted the note sitting beside the coffee maker. He picked it up and scanned it:

  * * *

  Charlie,

  Thank you for your hospitality. But we both know this isn’t over yet with the Milltown PD. They won’t stop until they have what they want. And I don’t know what they want. I couldn’t live with myself if I brought any more trouble to you and your woman. I’ll be fine.

  Power to the People,

  Sam

  * * *

  Charlie swore under his breath and returned the note to its spot on the counter. Sam was right, he knew. Whatever the Milltown Police Department wanted with Sam, it was unlikely to end just because the hopped-up guy with the goon squad had cut him loose.

  All the same, the thought of Sam on the run from the cops, with no fixed address and no one to interpret for him, made Charlie feel queasy. He abandoned his coffee and headed into the bathroom.

  Power to the People? Sam must be older than he looked. That slogan went out in the late sixties, early seventies at the latest.

  He turned on the water in the shower full-blast. While he waited for it to heat up, he studied his reflection in the mirror. He looked haggard, and, more than that, he looked like a man who wanted to pretend everything was fine, just coast along under the radar and avoid trouble.

  “No,” he said aloud, biting off the word.

  Some trouble was necessary. Good, even. And finding Sam and helping him was the kind of trouble worth getting into.

  “No,” he repeated.

  Maybe the lawyer—his lawyer—would know how to track down Sam. Whether she did or not, he promised himself as he stepped into the steamy shower stall, he would find Sam Blank. No matter what.

  He stepped into the shower stall and positioned himself under the spray. Hot, forceful water pounded down on him. He closed his eyes and washed away all thoughts of the cell, the guards, and, yes, even Sam. It was cleansing, cathartic, even. But as soon as he twisted the faucet to stop the flow of water, he felt guilty. Dirty again. Like a traitor. Because he’d so willingly cast Sam aside—even if only in his thoughts.

  A Bible verse bubbled up, unbidden, into his consciousness:

  Do not forsake your friend or the friend of your parent;

  do not go to the house of your kindred in the day of your calamity.

  Better is a neighbor who is nearby

  than kindred who are far away.

  It was from Proverbs, 27:10, if his memory served, and he knew it did. He’d spent too many Sunday mornings serving as an acolyte to misremember his Bible. The point of the verse—or at least the reason why it had come to mind—was the instruction not to rely on your brother, but to count on your friends. And to be a friend who can be counted on. Sam was a neighbor nearby, a man who shared an outlook with Charlie. Power to the People.

  “I’m not going to leave you in the wind,” he said aloud, even though he had no idea where Sam might be. But he made the promise as sincerely and full-throatedly as he’d done anything in his life.

  25

  Landon slept poorly. He detested being used, and he was fairly certain that’s what was happening here. All night, his dreams had been filled with replays of the scene in the box. Robinson signing. Blank signing. Cesare. He was missing something. Something critical.

  He woke before sunrise. Tired, not rested, but unable to sleep any longer. He stood and prowled around the room.

  Why had Officer Willard insisted on including Sam Blank in the roundup? It made no sense. He wasn’t dangerous—it was beyond dispute, and it was something Craig Willard would’ve known. He was a veteran officer. Until now, Landon would’ve said his judgment was impeccable.

  Some people might have shrugged it off as an error, but not Landon. Whenever a piece of data didn’t fit a pattern as expected, he didn’t disregard it. He analyzed it, picking it apart until he either made it fit or understood why it didn’t.

  In this case, his best tool was the source of the outlying data. He’d simply ask Willard. He should wait until mid-morning, when Kara Diamond would be sure to be gone.

  She’d made it plain that she—and, by extension, Chief Carlson—was unhappy that he hadn’t kept Blank in detention. He sensed that she and the chief would be equally displeased to learn that he was poking at the decision to pick him up in the first place. He wasn’t naïve: Willard would eventually report back to his superiors about his interactions with Landon. But there was no reason not to give himself a head start.

  He drove to the gym, ran five miles on the track in dizzying circles, lifted weights. Then he showered, dressed, guzzled a bottle of water, and checked the time. Twenty past eight. Late enough, he decided.

  He went out to the car and settled himself behind the wheel. Before he pulled out, he connected his phone to his car’s Bluetooth.

  Then he punched in the Milltown Police Department’s main number, started the engine, and waited. The line rang three times, then Paul Holtzman’s distinctive voice crackled in his ear.

  “Milltown PD.”

  “Officer Holtzman?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?” he countered warily.

  “Landon, Landon Lewis.”

  “Oh, Mr. Lewis, hi. You looking for Chief Carlson? I can put you through.”

  “No, actually, I was hoping to chat with Officer Willard.”

  “Craig, uh, Officer Willard’s out in the field, sir.”

  Of course. He’d been so eager to catch Willard when Diamond wasn’t around that he hadn’t considered he might not be at the station.

  “Sho
ot. Could you radio him and have him call me?”

  “Um … well, I could, but it’ll be a while before he’ll be able to get back to you. He’s actually doing crowd control today.”

  “Oh? Another protest?”

  “Yes and no. There’s an open carry group picketing the mayor’s office this morning. But we don’t anticipate any problems from those guys, so we don’t really treat it the same with the riot squad or anything. More like directing traffic, that sort of thing.”

  “I see.”

  “Any chance I could help you?”

  He bit the inside of his check and weighed his options. Why not?

  “Maybe. Did Officer Willard ever bring Sam Blank in—before last night, I mean? Are there any reports, anything that would explain why he identified Blank as a threat and bounced him to the PPC?”

  There was a long, long pause.

  Thinking that Paul either hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood the request, Landon opened his mouth to rephrase it. Just then, Paul said, “You mean Comford, right?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It wasn’t Willard who tagged Sam Blank. It was Brittany Comford.”

  An image of the brunette officer at the front desk crystallized. Her name badge flashed in his mind’s eye. “Comford? Was she the duty officer last night?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re positive? She’s the one who fingered Blank?”

  “Yeah, sure. I was there when they accessed the traffic camera. I heard her. She said he was a bad dude.” The faint clacking of keys sounded through the line. Paul was looking something up on his computer. “But … um … I don’t see any old reports in the system that indicate she had any previous encounters with him. How could she, really? She hasn’t even been here a month.”

  “Oh?”

  Paul lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Helluva thing, her being in an officer-involved shooting her first shift. She’s been riding a desk ever since.”