by JD Jones
*******
Once he got to his desk in the squad room, he discovered the geeks were trying to reach him. He saw the files they had forwarded to him. He searched his office for one of the accordion files he could put them all into. He saw one with a few files spilling out of it on a chair and dumped the contents so he could put all the new files in it. Once accomplished, he set off to meet with the geeks with his files in hand. He had no idea where meetings would lead him and he wanted to go through those files at his earliest convenience.
He arrived in the basement bastion of the computer savvy with no gifts and they looked disappointed. Larry said as much.
“You were running late this morning and we figured you must have stopped off to get us breakfast.” Larry snickered.
“Or lunch,” Sarah pretended to look at her watch.
All the geeks laughed at Sarah's inference. The great detective Finnegan caught being late. Great fun to geeks, he supposed. He let it slide. They were right. He was very late, unusual for him. He did not try to make any excuses or explain it in any way. Besides, he would ride them if he got the chance. He had a feeling, like the rest of the regular police officers in the building that they would never catch the geeks being late. Some suggested they slept there because they were so seldom seen outside their little room.
“Sorry, guys,” Finnegan offered. “I'll get you next time. I'm running a little late this morning. What have you got?”
“The boy's name.”
“It's not Surrow.” Finnegan was thinking of the name the woman had given the morgue attendant.
“No, and that's a story for a psyche paper in itself.” Larry suggested.
Finnegan waited. They had obviously called him down to tell him something that needed telling. He would let them play it their own way as much as he could. This was their part of the investigation. He would never steal another cop's thunder. Even if they were cyber cops. Especially the cyber cops. He always joked it was because they could mess up his finances and credit but they knew it was because he respected the fact that they got so little credit for all the work they did.
The boy's official birth certificate says Surrow, true enough. His father is listed as Edgar Surrow on it. But Edgar Surrow was a very dark skinned black man according to pictures we pulled up from his DMV photos. Did Daniel show any signs of black parentage?” Larry asked.
“No.” Finnegan suspected they already knew the answer to their own question.
“So we dug a little deeper into the mother's background. Seems she had an apartment with a one, Freddy Morgan. Now Freddy is a piece of work. His name lights up every criminal data base from here to California. He was mostly a petty thief but was arrested several times for breaking and entering when nothing was taken. Seems he went in to watch the people who owned the houses sleep. He left fingerprints everywhere, which was how he got caught. Always moved their stuff around, too. Apparently he was pretty good at getting into any house. He never broke anything, just picked the locks and shut off the alarm systems and let himself in.”
“Interesting.” Finnegan acknowledged.
“It gets better. A newspaper report says he had an accomplice who was never identified. The accomplice's fingerprints were never discovered at the scene so they assumed they wore gloves. He went to prison the same year Daniel was born. A few months later, he was stabbed in prison during some riot.”
“His name was Morgan?” Finnegan brought them back to a detail.
“Freddy Morgan,” Larry offered.
“Miss Raposy signed out the body at the morgue as one, Daniel Morgan.” Finnegan apprised them.
“Well, that's like confirmation. The mother lived with Morgan. Morgan had an accomplice, maybe the mother, maybe not. Morgan goes away to prison and Daniel is born to the woman. Morgan dies and the mother gives the name of her current boyfriend to the doctors at the hospital when her child is born. Saves him from having a dead convict as a father.” Larry was on a roll.
“Let's not forget the conviction was for slipping into a house unknown to the occupants and watching them. Sounds a lot like the way the murders were supposedly carried out, doesn't it?” Finnegan led them on.
“Right,” Sarah piped up. Finnegan noted she looked very tired. There were several empty cups of machine vending coffee strewn across her desk.
“Have you guys been home yet?” Finnegan demanded of them.
They looked sheepishly from one to the other. Finnegan took that as a no. Now he felt really bad that he had not brought them breakfast, at least coffee.
“It's almost lunchtime. Call the deli. Tell them it's on me this time.”
Their smiles told him he had scored big. But they were still too animated for a simple lunch offer to keep them this energized. Finnegan figured there must be something else.
“Is there more?”
Melissa smiled her widest smile yet and took center stage.
“I followed the mother's name back from the electrical bill we found with Mr. Morgan. Her name was Brenda Welsh back then. So I followed that name to an article on a Welsh family in Mississippi. The mother killed the father because he raped their thirteen year old daughter. Big story back then. Lots of press. Many of the stories mentioned the little girl's name was Brenda. She was described as a bright, playful child who always wanted to be a scientist according to teachers and fellow students.
Brenda's mom went to prison for the murder even though she plead that she was just protecting her child. Apparently the father was a well respected member of the community and Brenda refused to tell anyone that she had been raped, despite her mother pleading publicly with her several times.
Reports at the time said that no evidence of rape could be found on the child. Brenda talked with a lot of people back then, but she never said anything that would exonerate her mother or back up her story. She seemed to be scared to tell the truth concerning her mother, one article said. By trial time the mother was as good as convicted before the attorneys even took the stage. And here's the good part.”
Melissa was smiling as she unfolded the drama she had uncovered. Finnegan thought that everything she had said was the good part. He could not imagine something being even better than the information they had already gathered.
“At her trial the mother recanted her confession to killing her husband. She said her daughter had told her that her father had raped her and that she had killed him because of it. The mother said she had accepted the blame for her husband's death and expected the jury would understand a mother protecting her child in a case like this. She wanted to spare Brenda any stigma of such an accusation. She said she had expected her daughter to back up the story they contrived for the police to keep Brenda out of it. She had no idea why Brenda was staying silent and wanted to make sure the record showed the true events of that fateful day.”
Melissa looked like the cat who ate the canary. Matter of fact they all did. They knew they had done good. They had spent the whole night doing it because their adrenaline levels were on full. Once they had scented a story buried in the facts he had given them, they could not stop themselves from digging out every last fact that was involved. It was more than dedication. It was an obsession. All good researchers had it. A desire for knowledge that was not readily available to others. The digging it out. That was their obsession. Knowing or believing that some treasure laid buried in the realm of cyber space somewhere, they could not rest until they had dug it up and seen it.
It had been a very productive night. He owed them big time for this. More than just lunch. They had really gone above and beyond this time. He would have to go beyond the norm to thank them for a job done overly well.
“So,” Finnegan tried to boil it down. “Miss Brenda Welsh may have been killing people since she was thirteen?” It was not a question.
“Interesting. We need to keep digging around her to see what else she's hiding. Any friends go missing at school while she was there? Any other relatives turn up dead under
questionable circumstances? Any other boyfriends not accounted for. Maybe store clerks who did her wrong or civil servants that got in her way?”
Finnegan was just throwing out everything now, adding to the wheels already turning in the heads of the geeks.
“Thanks, techs.” They were techs today. They had earned the right to be called anything they wanted today. Heroes was the word that came to Finnegan's mind. If Finnegan was right, they may just have uncovered the most prolific serial killer in the history of the world. And it was a woman.
