Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  But he made no moves back towards the car, and when the deputies had finished interviewing him and began their real work, the work of investigating the most hideous crime to occur in this town in a long, long time, off-duty volunteer fireman Simon Jeffers climbed back into his truck and drove away, not looking back.

  He’d seen enough.

  Chapter 11 - Tuesday,

  September 20

  Jack was feeling great.

  Last night had been good, that was for sure. He laid in his bed at the Motel 6, drinking. He had grabbed four new bottles of Stoli from the house last night on his way out, and now he was plowed.

  He rarely got drunk, but sometimes you just had to splurge. And things were going very well so far for him in Liberty, better than he had expected. The Beaumont boy would hear about his Aunt and come running back, if Jack knew anything about human nature. The only family he had ever known was dead as dirt, and no matter how much the kid wanted to get to California and get away from this town - Jack knew exactly how he felt! - there was no way the kid could resist.

  He would be back, and Jack would find him, and then they would dance. A short, fatal dance, but Jack would arrange it so that it would at least be interesting. Maybe something out on the road where Jack had killed the Sheriff, or maybe back in the woods where Jack had been chased. Or maybe that Mall could be an interesting location…

  Wherever it happened, Jack would be waiting. And after the boy was dead, Jack would go out with a bang, making his mark on this town. He was toying with the idea of holding up a restaurant or something and killing a lot of people - probably with that LPD revolver he had. Maybe leave the gun at the scene, really confuse people. And then he would be on his way, forgetting about the ghosts of this town. Forever.

  The vodka was good, more expensive than the kind he normally got to drink. And it tasted even better because he had popped the first seal as he’d read those files last night, waiting for the woman to die.

  Today would be a relaxing day, he hoped. He hadn’t heard anything about the girl yet, but Jack needed to get out and buy a paper and check anyway. The weekly paper he had been reading on microfiche at the library yesterday had gone to a daily edition somewhere over the intervening years, so it should have the latest news. The Aunt and her friend might be found today but most likely wouldn’t be missed until they were gone at least 24 hours, so Jack guessed they would be found on Thursday. He had plenty of time to wander around town and talk to people before things got hairy.

  But for now, he was just going to lay here in bed and watch the movies on the free HBO. And drink.

  One of the ideas that had appeared on Julie’s initial list of possible uses for the Cray Supercomputer had been an exhaustive search of all unsolved murders that fit into a certain pattern. Of course, the search pattern criteria would have to be pretty specific, and pretty rare - it wouldn’t do any good to come up with a list of all cases involving gunshots or something like that. A list of 50,000 unsolved cases would be no help to anyone. No, she would have to make the search criteria very unique, something that would only turn up a few dozen cases. She’d scratched the idea down along with all her others, but the specific search parameters had eluded her until she’d read that story in the paper on the Metro this morning.

  Evidently, some killers liked to take portions of their victims as trophies or mementos, and they were usually drifters that killed for years without being caught. In the vocabulary of serial killers, they were known as “collectors”, a simple title for such a gruesome obsession.

  Possibly a search of those unsolved killings in which the victim was missing a body part could turn up a pattern.

  She was presenting her list of ideas to Mike Wallace, the man who’d given her the assignment of testing the Cray. There were other options on the list, but her “extremity search” was listed first and it was really what she wanted to do - it was really up to the Team to decide how to test the system, but for now she was the Team. She was the only person assigned with the task of entering the initial test pattern into the Cray’s powerful database search engines - some of the boys in the Computer Center had already run simple, one-field searches to make sure the Cray and its databases were up and running smoothly. Her search would be the first real test of the powerful machine.

  “So, why search for missing body parts when this boy’s leg might’ve been lost in the water?” Mike Wallace asked, glancing back at the article she’d handed him along with her list of ideas.

  “Well, the boy was killed and part of him was missing. I don’t know if he was the victim of a collector or not, but it’s what gave me the idea about the search. I’ve heard of other cases where the victim was missing parts, and I thought it would be a relatively small search.” She was silent for a moment, then continued. “And in this case, what better part for a collector to take than a part no one would suspect? Everyone will just assume the leg was lost in the river, while in fact it might be part on someone’s collection, right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” he answered skeptically. It was good to see the girl using her brain, but the search was pointless and he knew it. There’d be thousands of cases over the last 30 years that would fit the parameters of her search, and she’d be faced with a useless pile of information. But it would give the Cray a good chance to show its stuff, and that was the whole point of this exercise anyway, wasn’t it? That, and for her to get her feet wet before the Team returned from France.

  “Well, unless you narrow the parameters a little, you’re going to get too many returns to make the search useful. Narrow the parameters to a certain extremity and then have the Computer boys plug it in.” He handed her list and article back to her, and he saw that her mind was already working on ways to narrow the search, ways to make the database scan more valuable by looking for hidden patterns in a mountain of facts and isolated pieces of information suspended in the memory of that computer in the basement.

  She stood. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to program the search engine myself. With supervision, of course. I’d like to learn how, and the language they’ve come up with is very easy to use. It looks like a combination of XML and the old Fortran, and I was...”

  Mike Wallace smiled. She was motivated, that was sure. “Okay, but make sure that Cray liaison is there when you do it. Don’t need you crashing a priceless machine, do we?”

  She shook her head and thanked him before heading back to her office.

  What to omit? She had to narrow the search pattern. This was good and bad: it would reduce the number of matches returned by the Cray, but unless a killer followed the exact pattern every time they killed, the narrowed search would eliminate other possibilities. Of course this was all academic anyway, but it was fun to at least pretend she was doing real police work.

  After a half-hour or so in her office on the deserted 4th floor, Julie Noble decided to choose to program the computer to search for just those victims that were missing fingers and toes. Hopefully some kind of pattern would surface, allowing her to look deeper and try to figure out what, if any, connection existed. Printing out her ideas, she headed down to the chilly air-conditioned confines of the Computer Center in the basement of the building.

  Chris Hanson, Cray representative and liaison to the FBI for as long as the Cray remained on their property, had been waiting to hear from her after Mike Wallace had told him that the Team was delayed and that the initial test search would come from the rookie. It never ceased to amaze Chris how the government worked. They almost always seemed to be bent on spending as much money as possible to get the least results, and assigning some woman who had only been on the job for a week to program one of the world’s most powerful computers was just the latest example he knew of.

  Of course she wouldn’t actually be programming it - no, they would leave that to the Cray Corporation as part of the contract. But the girl would be keying in the search parameters, and that made Chris very nervous. The Cray was his baby and he didn’t lik
e anybody else touching it, especially the FBI computer geeks. But he was a contractor and subject to completely different rules, and he wasn’t obliged to disagree with the government people in most cases.

  But this was different.

  “You want me to program it to search for what?” he asked sharply after he read her report and the attached article. “This is disgusting!” He had expected something, but not this.

  She shook her head. “First of all, I want to enter the search pattern. And it’s not disgusting - there are people out there that do that sort of thing, and if your little machine can find a couple, good.”

  He looked up at her angrily. “The Cray Mark IV is not a ‘little machine’, thank you. And what makes you think anything will come back from this search anyway? We might spend six hours searching the database and come up with nothing. Why don’t you do something easy, like all the unsolved bank robberies were the getaway car was painted red, or all the kidnapping cases where the victim was a certain age?” He’d been working up some possible searches in case they asked him to take over the task, but his searches sounded normal - not gross. And this was all about testing the machine, not actual casework. This girl looked like she thought this gross search of hers might actually come up with something. “I figure we’ll get a lot of returns from that one, and then we’ll be sure the database is chugging along fine. Then we’ll actually begin searching, eliminating extraneous information, looking for patterns of some sort.”

  Being a contractor, he was able to push the subject for a while, but that was it. The FBI was paying the contract and he was really just here to oblige them whatever they decided to do, no matter how goofy. He could only shake his head and agree and wonder at where his tax dollars were spent in other parts of the Government - if this was any indication, they were probably just burning it somewhere.

  “Okay, but I still think it’s a pretty gross thing to do with a $1.6 billion dollar computer.”

  She followed him into the IO room, glancing through the thick frosted windows at the Cray unit sitting on its raised vibration-proof pedestal in the sealed room. They kept the whole Computer Center room at around 55 or 60 degrees all year long, and she’d heard that sweaters and jackets were common attire down here even when the DC weather outside climbed into the 100’s. The Cray room, where the actual unit itself was housed, was chilled to a frigid 20 degrees, helping the heat sinks and blowers dissipate some of the vast amounts of heat generated by the Cray.

  Chris Hanson sat down at one of the workstations facing a row of monitors and tapped in his password on the keyboard to access the system. A series of commands brought him to the main screen for a powerful database search program developed by the Cray people after they’d written their own unique programming language. Chris then stood and allowed Julie to sit in his place, walking her through the entering of the search criteria.

  After a few moments of typing, she looked up at the screen to confirm what she had typed:

  SEARCH>ALL UNSOLVED HOMICIDES

  FIND>FILE CONTAINS “FINGER” OR FILE CONTAINS “TOE” OR FILE CONTAINS “DIGIT” AND

  FIND>FILE CONTAINS “MISSING” AND

  FIND>WORDSPACE 15 OR LESS

  “Look good to you?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “Uh-huh.” He felt like an idiot, doing this, but that’s what she wanted. He’d be surprised if she got very many cases at all. The whole idea made him feel queasy. “Hit ENTER.”

  She did, and after a few seconds a series of numbers flashed up on the screen, including a line that read “Results: 341 minutes.”

  “Looks like it’ll take just under six hours to search,” he explained from behind her. “I’ll bring you the printout when it’s generated, okay?” He didn’t really care one way or the other if this worked out, but it felt good to be working on the Cray for real now, even if it was for stupid, make-work searches like this.

  She thanked him and left, heading back to her office.

  Bethany worked, even though she barely had the strength to stand. She was in charge and there was no one here who could take her place, so she stayed. But she sat in the backroom at the long wooden counter, sobbing, and none of the employees bothered her to initial checks or approve refunds or anything stupid like that.

  They were all pretty much in a state of shock and had been ever since the policemen had arrived a little after 11:00 am and given Bethany the news. They had come to tell her in private because she had been the person to make the first report, but after they walked in, they realized that they should just go ahead and inform the entire crew - they’d all known and worked with Lisa Stevens and would find out soon enough.

  One cop had shooed the two customers out - “police business”, he’d told them - while the other quietly informed the crew that Lisa’s body had been discovered early this morning east of town. They could give out no other details, but the news was enough to send Bethany into the backroom crying and the rest of the crew into silent introspection.

  The policemen left a few minutes later and as the customers drifted back in, the employees went back to their jobs, albeit a little more sullen, their minds filled with their own experiences with and memories of Lisa Stevens, a beautiful and lively person. Someone had put a CD of very somber classical music on, and no one had moved to change it yet - it just seemed right.

  After a while, when the initial shock had faded a little, the other employees also commented among themselves that Bethany must be going crazy - she was dealing with a lot. Boyfriend dumps her and moves away, her parents go on an extended Alaskan cruise and leave her on her own, and now the worst thing any of them could imagine - her best friend found dead.

  Oblivious to these thoughts of her and her predicament, Bethany sat against the wooden counter in the backroom, flipping aimlessly through a coverless copy of Rolling Stone, not even really seeing the words or the pictures of the music industry’s elite. She’d taken the magazine from a stack of them in the break area; it was missing its cover because the cover had been torn off and sent back to the company for credit. A coverless magazine could not legally be sold, and therefore could be trashed or a taken home by the employees, and the company still got return credit for just returning the cover. It saved a lot on postage, not having to return the entire magazine for credit.

  But the legality of her reading material did not concern her at all. She glanced at the phone hanging by the door out to the sales floor and suddenly she wanted to talk to David more than anything else in the world. He was gone, she knew, but she felt like everyone who meant anything to her had suddenly abandoned her, deserted her. She needed to talk to someone, to get her questions and her grief out there, out of her heart, but as she stared at the beige handset of the phone, willing him to call. But the phone just hung there on the wall.

  David wasn’t going to call her, not now, not ever. She was on her own with her grief. No one would call, no one would talk to her and let her tell them about Lisa, to pass along all her stories about the great times that they’d shared together. No one wanted to hear all the stories about how nice a person Lisa had been.

  Bethany wanted to tell someone who cared, but nobody wanted to listen.

  Liberty, Virginia didn’t have a press corps, not really, so Simon Jeffers knew that most of these men and women with their microphones and their shoulder-mounted cameras had to be from out of town. He saw colorful logos from Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Washington D.C. television stations, and print reporters from a score of other smaller towns in the area. He could tell the print reporters - they were dressed more casually, used to doing their reporting in front of a computer screen instead of in front of a camera.

  The press had assembled in the Sheriff’s station for a noon press conference where the Sheriff was going to answer questions about the case of Lisa Stevens. Word had gotten out quickly, and the news had been too much to resist for many of the local stations.

  Jeffers fidgeted behind the slightly elevated podium,
anxious to be out of here. Sheriff Jes Brown would come out of his office any moment now and officially begin the press conference, and then Brown would introduce volunteer fireman Simon Jeffers, and then he’d be expected to stand up there in front of all of these people and their lights and cameras and talk about finding the girl.

  Simon was terrified.

  He’d always hated speaking in front of people, always hated the way their eyes laid on him, expectantly, like they were just waiting for his pounding heart to come bursting right out of his chest and spray blood all over the first two rows. Back in school he’d arranged to only take one English class that required public speaking and oral speeches, and he’d barely managed to eke his way through it.

  But this was different - all of these people! What would he say when they asked him questions? Brown had told him what he could and couldn’t talk about, so what if they asked him something he wasn’t supposed to comment on? Would they know? Of course they’d know - these people were used to questioning politicians and actors and experienced public leaders. Simon fidgeted, his stomach roiling, and he wished he could be just about anywhere else in the world except right here.

  The door to Brown’s office opened suddenly and the man came out, waddling more than walking, followed by several deputies and Councilman Simons of the City Council. The police station had no official press conference facilities, and so the raised platform and podium area that Jeffers now stood on had been set up on one side of the glass-and-metal enclosed lobby of the station. It was sunny outside and the light streamed in through the greenish glass of the large windows, providing an excellently lit stage.

  Sheriff Brown climbed carefully up to the platform, stepped up to the podium and raised his big hands to quiet the members of the press, savoring the power that the unfortunate girls’ death had handed him for a long moment, dragging out the silence until Simon thought he might just explode.