The Hate Crime

by Rachel Sinclair

  “Yeah. When did he transition into Adele? Do you know the answer to that question?”

  “Let’s see…” She took a deep breath. “I don’t really know the answer to that question. I only know that Adele was the same person as William Page, because Beck told me this. To tell you the truth, I was as surprised as anybody when he told me about William becoming Adele. It was kind of odd, because he acted as if it was some kind of big secret. He got drunk one night, and came over to my house, and you know, we kinda shot the shit. He’s my half-brother, after all. He liked to hang around with me, because he felt I didn’t judge him. Anyhow, he got really drunk, and he told me that Adele was the same person as William Page. I was really surprised, because I knew Adele, and she looked nothing at all like William Page. I mean, nothing at all like him.”

  This was getting odder and odder. What I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, was that Beck was lying to me about not knowing Adele before going to the bar with her that night. He clearly knew her, and, what’s more, he knew her former identity as William Page. And, apparently the fact that she used to be William Page was something which was not widely known. Why it wasn’t widely known was an open question.

  “Did Beck tell you that you weren’t supposed to know that Adele was the same person as William Page?”

  “Actually, now that you mention it, yes. He did tell me that it was something I wasn’t necessarily supposed to know. I forget why it was that he did tell me about William Page being Adele, though. We somehow got on the topic of Adele, I think he was here when he brought her up, and he told me about her being known as William Page back in the day. It’s like he wanted to surprise me. You know, ‘you remember that guy in high school? Well, look at him now!’ That kind of thing.”

  “Did you later bring up the subject of Adele, and ask him about her being known as William Page back in high school?”

  “Yeah, I did. I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. Not to me anyways. It was kind of funny, if nothing else. I just brought it up to him one day, when we were hanging out again, a few months later. You know, I brought it up casually – ‘it’s so funny what you told me about Adele.’”

  “And what was his reaction when you brought it up to him again?”

  “Nothing much. He did what he could to change the subject, and chuckled a little bit. He acted kind of weird about it, so I didn’t really bring it up to him anymore.”

  “By kinda weird, what do you mean by that?” I was starting to understand what had happened, but I didn’t really know why it happened. There was some reason why William Page became Adele, and I had a feeling it had nothing to do with him being transgendered at all. In fact, I had a feeling that William Page became Adele through a process that is known as ghosting - taking a dead person’s identity and “becoming” them. I just had to try to see if I could get ahold of Anna and see if she could possibly find out if there was an actual Adele Whittier who existed. At the moment, however, I was trying to ask Charity these questions, because I was interested in seeing how much Beck knew about the transition between William Page and Adele. If I could figure out that, I might, just might, be able to figure out why it was that William Page became somebody new.

  Somebody completely new.

  “Oh, he said that I wasn’t supposed to know about that. And then he got real serious. He said that I wasn’t supposed to know about that. I mean, he repeated himself. And then he apologized. He said that he told me something that I wasn’t supposed to know. And I was to keep my mouth shut about it.”

  As Charity spoke, I was getting the picture on what was going on with William/Adele. If he actually did become a different person, why? Why would he do something like that? That was a big if, however. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, until I actually got a hold of Anna, and asked her to do a background check on Adele Whittier. I was starting to assume that there was an actual Adele Whittier who lived and that this William Page took her identity. It was just a theory that I had put in my head. But, once I figured that out, I hopefully would be able to get one step closer to finding out who killed her.

  “What else can you tell me about William?”

  “As I said, I didn’t know him all that well. I mean, I went to high school with him and everything, but he wasn’t part of a group. He was just somebody I saw around school. I did get to know Adele, however. Once he became Adele, I did get to know her.”

  “And Adele, as far as you know, was she into drug dealing?”

  “No, not that I know about. I assumed that when William became Adele that he decided that he wasn’t going to live the kind of life that he led before. But then again, I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I knew Adele well enough, but she could definitely have led a double life that I didn’t know about. That’s possible.”

  “Well, thank you. You’ve really helped me.”

  “I hope that I did. I mean, I know that my half-brother Beck has had a lot of problems in his life. But I don’t think he would’ve killed Adele. He had nothing against her. They were friends.”

  And yet Beck told me that he didn’t even know her until they were at the bar. That he met her right there that night. That was a lie that Beck was telling me, and I had no idea why he would lie to me like that.

  I had no idea why he would tell me a lie about his relationship with Adele, but I was going to find out.

  And the first person I was going to have to talk to was going to be Anna.

  Chapter 18

  Anna was Harper’s hacker. She didn’t hack computers and things like that for bad reasons, but rather, she hacked them to get information about people. She was invaluable when we needed to get any kind of information about somebody that wasn’t open to the public. In this case, I was going to see if she could possibly find out more information about Adele Whittier. Not William Page, necessarily, but Adele Whittier.

  Anna was a gorgeous woman, in her way. She was heavily tattooed, wore her hair short, and she was a bit of a tomboy. That was the best way to explain it – she was a tomboy. She wore high top sneakers, tank tops, and blue jeans. But, with her high cheekbones, her big blue eyes and freckles, she was a looker. Not that she really cared that she was a looker. She never wore makeup, and she just wore her hair in the easiest style that she could muster, because she was a no-fuss girl. She was definitely somebody I found attractive, however.

  “Hi Anna,” I said to her when I called her. “I have an assignment for you. I’ll pay the usual rates. I just need for you to track down some information about a woman by the name of Adele Whittier. I don’t really have any information about her, other than her name and her approximate age, which was 25 or 26. Also, she was a nurse. I hope that you can find something about her. I have to assume that she’s dead. She most likely died around two years ago.”

  William Page became Adele around two years ago, so I had to assume that was when the actual Adele Whittier died. I hoped that this piece of information would narrow down Anna’s search enough. Thank God “Adele Whittier” wasn’t an overly common name, like John Smith or something like that. If she had a really common name, I would have had to have done more work, specifically file a motion with the judge to inquire with her employers about her social security number, but hopefully it wouldn’t come down to all that.

  “Sure, Damien,” she said. “What do you need to know about her?”

  “Anything you can tell me about her. Anything at all.”

  “Okay. Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  I got off the phone with Anna, and I started to think about this whole crazy scenario. Again, it was only a hunch I had. It was just unusual that William not only became a woman, but he became a woman who looked nothing like what he used to look like. His features were completely different when he became Adele Whittier. That was the first clue that I had that there was something amiss.

  I also wondered about Heather. When she first came to me, she told me that Adele was “a transgendered sist
er.” I didn’t ask her how well she knew Adele, or if she knew her at all. I guessed that I was going to have to press Heather on Adele and her relationship with her. There was something that Heather wasn’t telling me about Adele. Or, maybe it was something that Heather wasn’t telling me about William. Not to mention what she wasn’t telling me about Beck.

  That was the weirdest thing about this entire scenario. Beck told me that he didn’t know Adele, yet he did. He did, and I wondered if he knew Adele in her prior life, too. And if he did, why was he keeping these things from me? What was the big mystery? Why was everybody playing games with me? And being so coy?

  Chapter 19

  Anna called me back in a few hours. “I found out some information about Adele Whittier,” she said. “You’re right, she’s dead. She apparently committed suicide about two years ago.The poor girl had no living relatives.”

  “What else can you tell me about her?”

  “She was a nurse, as you said. She got her BA in nursing, at UMass. She got a master’s degree at the same place. She started working at Massachusetts General as an oncology nurse when she got out of graduate school. She got out of graduate school about three years ago and then committed suicide about a year after getting that job.”

  “And how old was she when she died?”

  “She was 26 years old.”

  “Was there anything unusual about her records?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact there was. I looked at her death certificate online, but her last name was misspelled. I actually talked to the clerk who filed the certificate, and I found out that her death certificate was originally filed under the misspelled name, which was Whitter without the extra I. However, somehow, during a routine audit, that mistake came to light, and the death certificate was re-filed under the right name. So, yeah, there was a SNAFU with her records. It got corrected, however.”

  Hmmmmm….. I wondered if the SNAFU with the death certificate being filed in the wrong name was an accident, or was by design. I knew that the ghosting procedure was made more difficult by the fact that when you apply for a new Social Security card, and birth certificate, you run into the issue about the clerks being able to crosscheck your application against death certificates. It was convenient, in this case, that the death certificate was not filed in the correct name. Therefore, when William Page decided to become Adele Whittier, he wouldn’t have run into a problem with crosschecking the death certificate.

  The whole thing just reeked of some kind of set up. It was an extremely lucky coincidence that William Page was taking the identity of somebody who’s death certificate was misfiled.

  Unless there was something more to the story.

  There had to be something more to the story.

  “Anything else you can tell me about Adele?”

  “Well, I can certainly try to get into her background more, if that’s what you’re asking me. I’m skimming right now, because I was only able to find out so much in such a limited period of time. I can find out anything you want about her, however. Just ask me some specific questions, and I’ll try to figure it out.”

  “Let me talk to Heather and Beck. And then I’ll let you know.”

  Chapter 20

  Heather showed up in my office later on that day, after I called her to ask her to come in. There were some questions I wanted to ask her about Adele. Things were rolling around in my mind, but they weren’t gelling. They were just hazy.

  As things became more concrete, I decided to dig into Jordan’s relationship with Adele. I found out that when Adele was William, he apparently ripped him off to the tune of $50,000. I knew what happened when people get sticky fingers with drug dealers, and I had to assume that William would’ve been in trouble with Jordan, no question about it.

  That explained to me why William would have become Adele. He obviously decided that he was in trouble with Jordan Kennedy, a known drug dealer, so he needed to go ahead and change his entire look and become somebody else, complete with a brand-new identity. It was like being in the witness protection program, in a way.

  However, I did some more research, and Anna looked into it. There wasn’t any indication that William Page had entered the witness protection program. Anyhow, I knew something about the witness protection program, and they typically didn’t ghost their clients. What that meant was that people in the program didn’t usually use the identity of a dead person. It would be against the law to do something like that, because Adele Whittier would have eventually started collecting Social Security payments from the government. She was also collecting debt in her name, and, if she had lived, she probably would have eventually bought a house. All in the name of Adele Whittier, who was an actual person at one time. The biggest thing, however, to the government was the fact that she was going to collect Social Security payments one day. Because of that, I knew that it was not legal for the federal government, or any kind of government, to take an actual person’s identity and give it to somebody else. That just wasn’t done.

  Which meant that either William Page had decided to do it on his own, or he got the help of somebody else. If I could figure that out, who did that for him, then I would have another piece of the puzzle. Just a small piece of the puzzle, however, because there were many things that were still not adding up.

  The biggest thing that wasn’t adding up, of course, was the fact that Beck never told me that he was familiar with Adele. And he certainly never told me that he was familiar with the fact that Adele was once a man by the name of William, and that William had taken Adele’s identity. Beck knew all of that. So why didn’t he say something about that to me?

  But the first person I wanted to talk to about this entire situation was Heather.

  So, she came to my office, and sat down. She picked up a paperweight, and her eyes didn’t meet mine. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yeah. I did. Thanks for coming in.” I nodded my head, as I looked at her. I absolutely needed information, but I didn’t know if she was going to be straight with me about any of it. “How well do you know Adele Whittier?”

  Heather shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know her,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that you said that she was a transgendered sister, so I was assuming you knew her. But you didn’t actually know her, then?”

  I was attuned to people who lied. I had done enough cases in my life and I had known enough people in prison to get a read on people’s body language. It was a fine art, and a science, to judge if somebody is lying or not. It was important to be in the room with them so that you could get a read on their eyes, their posture, and whether or not they were fidgeting.

  Heather looked at me like she was trying to decide if she should tell me the truth or not. She finally took a deep breath. “Listen, I know that you need to have all the information you can when you’re defending Beck.”

  “Yeah, I do. Now, would it surprise you to know that Adele was not actually a transgendered woman? That she was only posing as a woman because she was really taking the identity of somebody else? Now, I don’t know enough about William Page, who was Adele’s previous identity, but I did find out something about him. I found out that he stole from a powerful drug dealer by the name of Jordan Kennedy. So what I want to know from you is why it was that you called her your transgendered sister, as if you knew her, and, if you did know her, why it was that you told me that she was transgendered when she clearly wasn’t.”

  Heather shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Okay. Okay. Yes, I knew about Adele’s background as William Page.”

  That was all she said. She leaned back in her chair, and looked at me with a defiant look, as if she was daring me to ask for something else. “So you knew her identity, and why do I think you also knew that Beck and William knew one another back in the day, and that Beck knew the real reason why William Page became Adele?”

  There was, once again, something that Heather was hiding from me, and I couldn’t qu
ite put my finger on it. She so desperately wanted me to take Beck on as a client, and yet she wasn’t telling me things that she knew about his relationship with the victim, and about the victim herself. Actually, it was time to stop calling Adele “her,” because she wasn’t really transgendered. She was simply a man who was posing as a woman because he needed a completely different identity.

  “Listen, I know what you’re thinking. I know that you’re thinking that William Page became Adele because he needed a different identity, and that’s that. But it’s not like that.” She looked nervous. “Listen, I think I might have even said too much.”

  I sighed. “What do you mean, it’s not like that. It’s not like what? What are you trying to say?”

  “I knew Adele. And she was a woman. She really was. It wasn’t just a convenience thing.” She nodded her head. “And that’s all that I’m really going to say to you. I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

  “Okay, so you know what the situation was, right? You know that William Page became Adele? And I’m assuming that you probably also know that Adele Whittier was a woman at one time. She was a living, breathing, person. She died several years ago of an apparent suicide. I’m assuming you know all that, right?”

  “Yeah, I do know all that.” She seemed very nervous. “I know you know about all that stuff, but you really shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t know all that stuff. It’s very dangerous for you to know it. And I can tell you all of that has nothing to do with the reason why she died.”

  Heather wasn’t making any sense. “Heather, I just can’t believe that you would do this to me. You begged me to take his case. You told me that if I didn’t take his case that you were going to be in trouble. Big trouble. You know what’s going to happen if Beck gets convicted. You know that if he’s not acquitted, you’re probably going down for something. And I think that Beck knows more about what happened that night with Reverend Scott then he’s letting on. Yet, you keep a very key piece of information from me, like the fact that Adele Whittier is the ghost name of William Page and nothing more. Don’t you think that there is a distinct possibility that the person who was threatening William Page in the first place, finally caught up to him?”