And I knew, then and there, I’d be a homicide detective. I set my sights on the goal in that moment.
9
Even though the sketch artist drew a likeness of Romeo before Aaron and the rodents did a job on his face, and the street boys confirmed it to look just like him, he was still a John Doe when the case went to trial.
If you know the justice system, you’d know it was two years before Aaron Cook went before a jury of his peers. In those two years, I’d pulled the case file and run Romeo’s DNA through the national database and hadn’t gotten a hit.
I checked on Eli’s name in the NCIC database, and there hadn’t been any hits on him either. Maybe Mission Place had been what he needed.
Aaron Cook’s trial lasted several weeks, and the jury deliberated for only five hours. Aaron was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault on a minor, second degree murder, and several other minor infractions, including resisting arrest. The child Ling Su was carrying would be thirty years old before Aaron would ever see him, as Ling Su wasn’t married to Aaron, and would not be granted visiting rights with a child.
Every few years, I pulled Romeo’s file and checked to see if there’d been progress in identifying him or finding his family. Nothing.
I’d been a homicide detective with the San Francisco Police Department for seven years and had already transferred to the Salinas Police Department when I got a phone call one day.
The call came in to my desk at the police department.
“Detective Christianson?”
It had been years, but I recognized the voice. I couldn’t imagine why she’d be calling me. Even when I was promoted, we never really got along.
“Rhoden,” I said.
“Hey, remember that street kid from way back when?”
“Romeo.” It had been more than a few years since I’d checked the progress on Romeo’s identification.
“We got a hit.”
I was pretty sure my heart stopped. Tears welled in my eyes, and my voice cracked when I said, “A good hit?”
“The DNA matched a kid from Temecula.”
I held my breath.
“I called the family and their story matched.” She sighed before she continued. “Marcus Reilly ran away ten years ago. His mother said he’d been a troubled kid and gotten mixed up with some teens older than him. Then one day, after a particularly nasty fight with his stepdad, he disappeared.”
“Didn’t she go looking for him?” I could feel my blood boiling.
“Calm down. She did. And she talked to everyone he knew. He didn’t even tell his friends. But someone said about three years after he disappeared that they thought they saw him at the Greyhound Bus Station.”
He really was from far away. Half a state away.
“He’d forged her signature on checks and taken about a thousand dollars with him. He called her once. He wanted her to know he was okay. Said he’d call again when he got a chance, but he was never coming home. When she didn’t hear from him, she started to worry. She used what resources she had, as a now single parent, but she had three other kids. She didn’t have much.”
My heart broke for this mother. Teens were difficult at best. I was a horrible teen. Thank goodness for sports, so I stayed mostly on the right path.
“Anyway, someone finally asked her if she had anything with his hair. Something with the root. Luckily, she had packed what was left of his stuff and put it in boxes. She dug through the boxes with the help of her now twenty-two year old daughter. They found a hair. Long story short, once the DNA was processed in the lab, our database found the match.”
I blinked away the ache, trying to maintain my composure as my partner in the Salinas office was now staring at me.
“You’ve kept after it all these years?” I asked.
“It seemed important to you, from the beginning. And after you left, I didn’t think anyone else would check. I wasn’t sure if you’d given up on finding his identity or not.” Her voice was low.
She gave me a few more details about Marcus—about his family, birth date, home life, problems. They were all the problems of a broken family. I wasn’t Marcus, but I didn’t think any of them were reasons to leave home and live on the streets of San Francisco.
I thanked her and hung up the phone.
For me, even though we’d put away the murderer, this had always been a cold case. I put my head in my hands and sighed at the relief of being able to finally close this file.
The day I found out who Romeo was would have been Marcus Reilly’s twenty-fifth birthday.
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