by David Archer
“That’s because they’re terrified of what the abuser will do if he gets out,” I said. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of them do get out. Sometimes it’s on bail, but all too often it’s just because the jail is overcrowded and the courts don’t consider domestic abuse to be that serious a crime.”
“Well, I damn well do. That’s why it pisses me off when the victims fail to even show up at court. I can’t keep them locked up if nobody will testify against them.”
“Next time you run into a case like that,” I said, “you call me. Let me talk to the victim, and I just about guarantee I can get her to show up. They seem to look at me and start to think about just how bad it really can get. That’s why I have such a high success rate.”
“Yeah, I know. Alicia told me I should Google you, so I did. By the time I got done reading, it was a good thing your ex was already dead. I wanted to shoot the bastard myself.”
I couldn’t help it, I chuckled. “And you didn’t even get to read the whole story,” I said. “I Google myself every now and then, so I know what’s out there. There’s a lot more that isn’t public knowledge, but we don’t need to go into that. Now, how can I help?”
THREE
We spent the next two and half hours going through all of my cases, all the way back to when I started working with the Outreach almost a year earlier. Some of the men I had dealt with were what I call “opportunity abusers,” which means they were actually cowards who can only be abusive to someone they consider much weaker than themselves. Unfortunately, most men feel that way about their own wives and girlfriends. Those men, I told Pennington, were highly unlikely to ever have the nerve it would take to try to build and plant a bomb. We made a list of them, anyway, but then we moved on to the ones I considered genuinely dangerous.
That list was smaller. Of the two hundred or so women I had counseled, only about thirty-five of them had abusers that I believed were capable of extreme violence. These men were often psychopaths, with no natural moral compass to guide them. Their actions and decisions were based only on their own desires, and it would never occur to them that beating a woman into submission was wrong.
Don’t misunderstand me, they knew it was against the law. They just didn’t feel that the law should apply to them. After all, such a man would reason, it’s his own wife he’s beating. To him, being “his wife” meant that she was a possession, that he had all rights where she was concerned.
We talked about those men at length, and Pennington asked me to rate just how dangerous I thought each one was on a scale of 1 to 5. When we were finished, he turned the sheet of paper around to me so I could look at it. Of the thirty-five men on the list, I had pegged all but one as being extremely dangerous—number five.
“My question is,” I said at that point, “do you honestly think it was one of these men who planted the bomb? I mean, there were five other counselors in the Outreach. I don’t know about their cases, how dangerous the men might be, but it could have been one of those.”
“Or it could be somebody completely unconnected to any of you,” he said. “It’s quite possible that whoever did this simply doesn’t like the kind of work that you all do. That would be no different than the people who bomb abortion clinics. I can’t say for sure that one of the men on your list is our bomber, but I have to start with those who can be identified as having at least a motive. If it turns out one of these men bought the things necessary to build a bomb, then we look at him a lot more closely.”
“And what kind of things would that be?” I asked.
“Lots of things,” he replied. “One of the most common homemade bombs uses diesel fuel and liquid fertilizer. Others use things like pool cleaners, which contain nitric acid or sulfuric acid. Model airplanes run on a fuel called nitromethane, which is pretty highly explosive itself, but when you mix it with ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer, it can be several times more powerful than TNT. You’d be quite surprised at how easy it is to make an explosive right in your own kitchen. Mothballs, drain cleaner, some aerosol sprays—it’s not that hard to come up with stuff that goes boom if you really want to, especially when you can look up the recipe on the Internet.”
“So, you’re going to look and see if any of these men bought some of those things?”
Pennington nodded. “That’s where we start. If we find that anyone on our suspect list purchased the necessary supplies, that gives us a reason to pull them in for questioning. We dig deeper, and we keep digging until we find evidence of guilt, or of innocence.”
I shook my head. “Well, I’m going to be talking to some of these men myself. I’ve come face-to-face with most of them at one time or another, and they already know they don’t scare me. Some of them even have a hard time looking at me, one of the few advantages you get when you look like Frankenstein.”
“Yeah, Alicia said you’d want to sink your teeth into this. Just do me a favor, and be careful. If you start to get a bad feeling about any of these men, call me in. There’s nothing wrong with asking for backup, you understand me?”
“I understand,” I said. “Don’t worry, I don’t have a death wish. And, I have a secret weapon. My boyfriend, Dexter Tate? I don’t know if you know him, but he has an incredible knack for knowing when somebody is lying. When he was in the Army, his commanding officer used call him the human lie detector. I’ll set up my meetings for after work when I can, so he can go with me.”
“I don’t know if I believe in human lie detectors,” Pennington said, “but if you do, and he indicates somebody is being untruthful about anything connected to this, I want to know it. Okay?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “If I come up with a suspect, you’ll know it as quickly as I can get hold of you.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card that he passed it to me. “My cell number is on the back,” he said. “I don’t care what time it is, if you think you’ve got something, you call me.”
I smiled as I slipped it into my own pocket. “Thank you, Detective,” I said.
“Hey, none of that,” he said. “You might be a private eye, but I’ve heard enough about you to be able to say that we’re both cops. It’s just Jim, all right?”
“Thanks, Jim,” I said. I gave him another smile and got up to leave his office, but then I stopped. “Hey, Jim? Can I have a copy of that list of names?”
When I got out to the car, I took out my phone and called Dex. He answered on the first ring. “Cassie? Anything new?”
“I sat down with Pennington and went over all my cases,” I said. “We got about thirty-five men who I think could possibly be violent enough to do something like this. The trouble is, we don’t have any way to judge how dangerous the men from the other counselors’ cases might be. Pennington says they’re going to go through all of their credit card transactions, see if any of them bought the kind of stuff it takes to make a bomb.”
“I guess that’s a good start,” he said. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“Of course,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“Why don’t you call Alfie and give him those names, let him run the same kind of search? I will guarantee you he can do it a lot faster, and a lot more thoroughly, than the police can.”
“Do you think so? I guess it’s worth a try. I’ll give him a call and see if he’s got time today.”
“He’ll do it for you,” Dex said. “In fact, why don’t you pick up some pizza and just head over there? I can take off for lunch in about fifteen minutes, I’ll meet you there.”
That got me to smile. “Okay, great,” I said. “Alfie likes pepperoni, right?”
“Alfie likes any kind of pizza.”
Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled up at Alfie’s apartment building and made my way inside, carrying two large supreme pizzas. I knocked shave-and-a-haircut, and Alfie answered the door a moment later. He grabbed the pizzas out of my hand and carried them inside, then turned and looked at me.
“I heard what happened,
” he said. “I called Dex as soon as I heard, but he said you were running late and didn’t make it into the office. Do you ever feel like the world’s luckiest bitch?”
“All the time, lately,” I said. “Dex is on the way, he’s going to join us for lunch. You got time to do some computer work for me today?”
“Soon as I heard what happened, I said to myself that you were going to ask that question today. Yeah, come on. Give me what you got.”
I told him about my conversation with Pennington, then showed him the list of the top thirty-five names. It was actually a list of more than two hundred names, but the ones I had identified as potentially dangerous were highlighted in red. The nice thing about that was that it included the name, the address, and even the phone number in most cases.
“Hey, you actually brought me something I can work with this time. Here, read them off to me.” He bounced up onto his stool—Alfie is a dwarf, only three and a half feet tall—and opened the program on one of the many monitors that surrounded him. “Okay, go ahead. Give me the first one. Name and address, both.”
“Okay,” I said. “The first one is Gary Cohen, two fifty-nine Gordon Street, apartment 6 G.”
“Got it,” Alfie said. “Next one.”
“George Davis, fifteen forty-nine Broken Arrow Boulevard.”
“Next.”
I read off all of the names to him, finishing the last one just as Dex knocked on the door. Alfie pointed at the door without moving from his stool. “That’s Dex, let him in.”
I went and opened the door, and Dex grabbed me and pulled me into a hug.
“Mmm, I could do this all day,” he said.
“Not here, you can’t,” Alfie said. “Get a room.”
“You’re just jealous,” Dex said, chuckling. He kissed me quickly, then came in and shut the door behind himself. I handed him the open box of pizza and he grabbed two slices. I took a couple more and sat down on the couch beside him.
“Alfie,” I said, “the pizza will get cold.”
“That’s okay, I like cold pizza,” he said, his eyes intent on the monitor in front of him. “I’ve got my Spybot set to pull down all the Social Security numbers for these guys,” he said. “Soon as I get those, I can find all of their financials and start searching for purchases that could be suspicious.”
He spun the stool around and hopped off, grabbed a slice of pizza, and flopped onto a beanbag. He shoved the pizza into his mouth and took a humongous bite, then struggled to chew it up.
Besides being a dwarf, Alfie is sort of my other boss. In order to get my provisional PI license, I had to be employed as an investigator, and Alfie already had his full private investigator license. He had even set up his own investigation company, Centronic Investigations, Inc. He hired me as an unpaid intern, signed a letter confirming this fact, and sent me off to Oklahoma City. I got my provisional license that day, and I’d been studying for the test for my unlimited license ever since.
Alfie is a professional computer hacker. He got his PI license because he is often hired by attorneys and even government agencies at times to find things that people want to keep hidden. Sometimes, that’s finding the people themselves. Other times, it means finding any assets they may have hidden, or evidence that can be used to prosecute them. In return for my occasional assistance doing legwork, Alfie only charges me half his normal rate for computer work. It’s a symbiotic relationship, Dex says, because we’re each dependent on the other at times.
Personally, I think Alfie is getting the better end of the deal. Even at half rate, it costs me a lot of money when I need him to dig out some information for me.
Usually, it’s just when I need to find out something about my clients or their abusers. Alfie has been instrumental more than once in helping me get orders of protection for my clients, by finding hateful things their abusers had posted online. A couple of times, he even found things that put the men in jail; one of them was doing thirty-five years after Alfie discovered he was running a meth distribution ring.
His computer made a noise, and he bounced up off the beanbag and hopped onto the stool again. “Okay, got their socials. I’m feeding them into the search database now, and we should have their credit cards and bank accounts in a few minutes.” He hopped back down and grabbed another slice of pizza.
Thirty minutes later, he was shaking his head. “None of these guys has purchased anything online that would be even slightly suspicious,” he said, “except for Rodney Kirkman. Rodney has been buying a lot of female type underclothing, but I don’t think it was for his wife. From the sizes, I’d say he’s probably wearing the stuff himself, and he just started buying it after his old lady moved out.”
“Yuck,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I really didn’t need to know that, Alfie.”
“Hey, I’m just giving you my report. That’s the only unusual purchase any of these guys made in the last month or so.” He spun the stool around and looked at me. “Of course, I can only check on what they buy using credit or debit cards. If they pay cash at the local grocery store, there’s not much I can do about that.”
“Well, thanks for trying, anyway,” I said. “It was worth a shot. Unfortunately, it leaves me back at square one. Somebody planted a bomb, and I have no way to figure out who it was.”
“Don’t be so hasty,” Alfie said. “For one thing, we don’t even know what kind of bomb it was, yet. Any idea when the police will get a report back on that?”
I just looked at him. “I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me to ask,” I said. “Why? Does it take a while?”
“It can,” Alfie said. “Depends on how busy the crime lab is. The fire department would have gathered up some of the materials from around where the blast happened, and they might’ve even found pieces of the explosive device. The crime lab can figure out from that kind of junk just what type of bomb it was. If we knew that, it might suggest other searches I can run on these guys. I don’t think you should rule any of them out, but I can’t hand you information right now that definitely proves any of them guilty.”
“I’ll check with Pennington the next time I talk to him,” I said. “Any other suggestions on how I should approach this?”
“Yeah,” Alfie said. “Approach it gun first. I’ll be honest, when I heard about the explosion at St. Mary’s, I thought you were a goner. I called Dex because I figured he’d be falling apart, he said he had already found you okay, so I relaxed a bit.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Dex said. “When he called me, he was crying like a baby.”
“I was not!” Alfie shouted. “I was having sinus problems, that’s all. My allergies were flaring up.”
“Allergies to what?” Dex asked. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but nothing is actually growing outside just yet.”
“It’s a cat, dammit. The lady in the apartment next door has a freaking cat, one of those long-haired things that everybody is allergic to.”
“Oh, shut up and admit it, you big baby,” Dex said. “Cassie, I swear to you, he was crying and couldn’t even talk. He kept saying your name over and over, and I finally had to yell to make him listen when I told him you were okay.”
Alfie glared at him, but then he turned and looked at me. “Okay, okay, so maybe I was a little upset. I don’t have a lot of friends, you know, I really don’t want to lose any.”
“Well, I don’t want you to lose me, either,” I said. “I’m okay, though, and I plan on staying that way.”
FOUR
“I gotta get back to work,” Dex said. “What are you going to do for the rest of the day?”
“I think,” I said, “I’m going to go home and get on my computer, and call all of my current clients. I need to let them know that I’m still around if they need me.” I shook my head. “I don’t think the diocese is going to bother trying to reopen the Outreach, but I don’t want to quit working with these women. Would I have to have any kind of special license to set up my own counseling center?”
&nb
sp; “Nope,” Alfie said. “I anticipated this question, so I looked it up. You can do it one of two ways. You can go into private practice as a counselor and specialize in abuse cases, or you can set it up as a charity organization, a 501(c)3. In private practice, you can charge a fee for your services if you want to.”
“I don’t need to charge anything,” I said. “Is there any advantage to being a charity?”
“Only if you want to take donations to help offset the costs. Otherwise, the paperwork you have to file with the government periodically can be a royal pain in the ass. If you don’t want to take donations, then you can do it as personal pro bono work, and still get a decent tax write off.”
“See?” Dex said. “I told you, Alfie is the man with all the answers.”
I looked at both of them, bouncing my eye from one to the other. “I don’t need anybody else’s money,” I said. “I think what I need is an office. I can combine them, right? Use one office for counseling and for my PI license?”
“Sure you can,” Alfie said. “As soon as you pass that test. Until then, you’re mine, baby, all mine. That temporary license you’ve got can’t be moved from this office.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
Dex left, and I followed a moment later. I went home and let Critter try to trip me at the doorway—that’s her way of saying, “welcome home”—then went into the kitchen and microwaved a cup of the leftover coffee. I carried that back into the living room and sat down on the couch, opening my laptop on the coffee table.
That was when my phone rang, and I picked it up to see that it was my mother calling. It suddenly hit me that she follows all the news from Tulsa, especially since I became a private eye. She probably got a notice about the Outreach being bombed and was on the verge of panic.
I answered quickly, keeping my voice upbeat. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “How’s your day going?”
“Never you mind about my day,” she said. “Oh, God, Cassie! I just needed to hear your voice! I got on the computer a little while ago and the first thing I saw was a notice that the place where you work got bombed this morning. Cassie, are you okay?”
