The Collector

by Scott Wittenburg

Alan arose at 7:00 AM and headed for the kitchen to brew a pot of strong coffee. He sat down at the kitchen table long enough to down an English muffin and a glass of OJ before taking his coffee out with him to the patio. With a shiver, he sat down on one of the canvas-backed chairs and surveyed the backyard.

  It had been a little over two years since he had lost Julie. He recalled how they had strolled these grounds of their new Clintonville home on a morning much like this one, planning out how they would be landscaping the spacious yard in the spring. Alan felt a lump come to his throat.

  Would he ever get over losing her?

  No, he would not.

  Never in a million years.

  He sipped his coffee and recalled how they had first met. They were in the same art history class and Julie had smiled at him when he entered the classroom on the first day of class. She looked absolutely stunning with long blonde hair, blue eyes and a perfect figure. The stuff that dreams are made of.

  His pragmatic mind told him to promptly forget trying to get anything going with her. She was much too beautiful for him to have any kind of shot. An untouchable was what they used to call girls like her. So he did what his instincts told him to do and chose a seat as far away as possible from her. After all, there was no sense in letting some unattainable beauty distract him from taking his notes.

  Shortly after the lecture commenced, Julie had turned around and glanced at him a couple of times. She smiled sweetly, leaving him simultaneously confused and excited. Surely this girl wasn’t really interested in him! Don’t even give it a single thought.

  When the class ended, Alan had purposely stalled getting his books and notes collected in order to give the girl time to leave. She stalled, too. Finally he picked up his stuff and headed for the door, taking the furthest path possible from her. He made a beeline through the hall, out the door and trekked halfway across the oval before turning around to steal a glance.

  There she was, three steps behind him.

  “Are you trying to avoid me?” she asked, a little breathless from keeping up with Alan’s brisk pace.

  Alan was at a loss for words. “Uh, no, why do you ask?”

  “You could have fooled me! I mean, I feel like a leper or something the way you have obviously gone out of your way to maintain the maximum mean distance between the two of us. Lucky for you I’m persistent and your actions have only encouraged me to want to bug you all that much more!”

  Alan stopped dead in his tracks and stared into her lovely eyes. He knew that he had to be dreaming because things like this just didn’t happen in his life.

  “Girl, you can bug me all you want to,” he said. “If I’ve seemed elusive, it’s only because I’m trying to avoid the inevitable.”

  “And that would be?”

  “If I spend any more time standing here with you, I’m going to become hopelessly smitten. And once that happens, I’ll be totally at your mercy. Then after you’ve told me that you’re already spoken for, I’ll become a hopeless drunk and eventually kill myself to put an end to my miserable existence.”

  The girl laughed hard—so hard that Alan cracked up too.

  She said, “I’m glad you have everything all figured out, Mr. Swansea. So I guess that means I should just be moseying along now, right?”

  Her quip caught him off guard. “Only if I’m right. Am I right?”

  She held out her left hand, her fingers splayed. “Do you see a ring on my finger?”

  “Uh, no, can’t say as I do.”

  “I guess you’re wrong then.”

  Thus beginning the very best six years of his life.

  Alan drained his coffee and momentarily closed his eyes. He would never be able to shake off the loss of the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. He had asked himself countless times why things had to end the way they had. Why had such a kind, loving incredible person been taken away from this earth? What had she done to deserve such an unfair end? And what had he done to justify having his whole world ripped out from under him?

  The pain of losing Julie and the relentless self-pity he felt had been inescapable for the first year. Only after a lot of soul searching and many lonely drunken nights had he finally been able to get himself halfway back on track. And it was still a fragile situation indeed.

  He heard the phone ring and ran inside. He noted the caller ID and pressed the talk button.

  “Hey Charlie, thanks for getting back to me.”

  “I was out late last night and let my damn Blackberry go dead. So what’s up?”

  “I need you to trace a an IP address for me if you could. I have a feeling that this site is blocked since I couldn’t get anywhere using conventional means. I also need an e-mail address ID’d.”

  “Sure, no problem. Are you getting back into the investigating game again?”

  “Nah, I’ve given that up for good. I’m sticking with website design for a living—much better hours and certainly a lot safer.”

  “Alan, I’ve known you for over ten years now—you aren’t paying me big bucks for a hack job on account of some client you’re designing a website for! This is Charlie you’re talking to here, not some cracked-out cyber-punk!”

  Alan grinned. Charlie Ling’s dry sense of humor was just one of the reasons he liked the nerdy guy so much. “Okay, I confess I might be doing a little snooping around but it’s just a favor for an old friend I happen to know. No big deal.”

  “I hear you. And this old friend doesn’t happen to be female, does she?”

  Jesus, Alan thought. Either the guy is psychic or just plain annoying. “Actually, she does happen to be female. So what difference does that make?”

  “Come on, Alan, we just had this same conversation a few weeks ago! Ever since you lost Julie, you’ve been a nut job—we both agreed to that. And like I said before, what you need is to move on with your life and find some babe so you can be normal again. I guess I was just sort of hoping you’d finally decided to listen to my advice. I mean, it’s not my business of course, I just get tired of hearing you bitch all the time about how boring your life is to be real honest.”

  Alan laughed. “Jesus, Charlie, you sound like my mother! I appreciate the concern but I’m doing just fine, thank you. If I really felt I needed to ‘find some babe,’

  I’d just by god go out and do it—I wouldn’t need to be coaxed. I just don’t feel that vibe right now, as I’ve said before. Besides, I’ve never really had any luck looking for girls. They always seem to find me—and usually when I least expect it.”

  “Alright, I’ll get off your case. But I really am tired of hearing you bitch about your boring life.”

  This from a man who does nothing but sit in front of his computer playing video games and hacking 24/7? Alan thought. “I’d rather be bored in real time than live my life in virtual non-existence like someone I know, thank you.”

  “One hour of Halo and you wouldn’t be saying that,” Charlie challenged.

  “Yeah, right, whatever. Anyway, I’ll shoot you the URL and e-mail address in a few minutes or so. How long you think it’ll take to track 'em down?”

  “Depends. The technology for blocking online sites and network data is getting more and more sophisticated every day. It took me nearly a week to trace one site a while back, and that was only after purchasing some rather expensive software I’d heard about. People and corporations are finally wising up and taking ultra-serious measures to protect their identities and sensitive data. Good for them but bad for folks like me just trying to make an honest living.”

  Alan wondered how computer hacking could be considered an honest living. “Well, just give this an honest attempt and get back to me once you’ve figured it out. Are your rates still the same or have they also grown along with the technology?” he asked.

  “For you my friend, same price,” Charlie replied in his finest Asian accent.

  “I’m indeed blessed. Thanks, Charlie.”

  “No problem. Take it easy, m
y man.”

  Alan headed upstairs to his study. He waited for the iMac to boot up and checked his e-mail before sending Charlie the webpage link and e-mail address from Beth’s forwarded message. Fortunately, Charlie hadn’t grilled him on why he was tracing the sources and for that Alan was grateful. It wasn’t that he was trying to keep anything from the computer whiz—he just knew that the less details Charlie Ling was aware of about a case the less likely there would be any repercussions from the authorities in the event that something sensitive was found as a result of his tracings. The last thing Alan wanted was a run-in with the feds.

  He’d seen some of Charlie’s shady-looking clients on occasion and suspected that not all of the services rendered for them were legal. In fact, Charlie had once boasted that if he wanted to, he could clean out an entire savings bank via his computer with just one evening of work. Ever since he told him that, Alan had adopted a sort of “need to know” relationship with Charlie Ling.

  Alan read the mysterious e-mail from Beth again. Having had time to sleep on it, he was now convinced that there had to be some validity to this Ellen woman’s plea. He wasn’t exactly sure why he felt that way but common sense told him that the message was genuine. First of all, why would some woman write such a vague, disjointed message unless her intentions were sincere? Someone bored out of his tree or just looking for kicks on Beth’s website would most likely write something much more direct or outrageous—like “My sister has been kidnapped, raped and tortured by some sicko pervert! You’ve go to save her before she’s dead meat!”

  Secondly, why in the world would a prankster include a link to a web page that was a virtual dead-end street for all intent and purposes? The page depicting the pseudo-paintings in which the sister/victim may be pictured hardly seems like the work of some joker looking for a good time. The sheer strangeness and innocuous nature of the webpage only served to support the likelihood of validity.

  He deduced that there had been mitigating circumstances prompting Ellen to send such a cryptic message to Beth Lindsay. It was more than apparent by the scarcity of content that the woman had had very little time to type it. Like maybe she had slipped away from somebody just long enough to type these few words and the link before she got caught. And who could that somebody have been?

  Her request for Beth not to reply to the e-mail was even more telling. For some reason, Ellen did not want to risk being found out that she had sent the correspondence. This implied that the e-mail address she had sent the message from was not her own; otherwise, what difference would a reply have made? Unless she shared an account with someone, which seemed very unlikely.

  But the link to the odd webpage was the most baffling aspect of all. Why had Ellen pointed Beth to this particular page in the first place? Thinking that she could show Beth what her sister looked like seemed like an exercise in futility. There were no less than four different girls shown in the photos on the page and what good would it have done even if she was able to figure out which girl was her sister? The site gives absolutely no clue as to where or when the pictures were taken or by whom.

  All of these questions taunted him and Alan now felt that all too familiar impulse to get some answers. One of the biggest reasons he had decided to become a private investigator was to satisfy his innate curiosity. As a child, he was constantly wondering what made things work and why things were the way they are. He could often be found in his bedroom taking things apart and putting them back together again in an effort to find out what made them tick.

  He also had a voracious appetite for research—gathering information had always been one of his favorite pastimes. His most beloved Christmas gift had been his very first camera. Being able to wander around and document things pictorially fascinated him. Nothing thrilled him more than shooting a roll of film, developing it and then poring over the photos. His love for photography had in fact inspired him to major in art in college then specialize in surveillance photography as a private investigator.

  But there had been another reason for his decision to become a PI: Julie. Not long after they had begun dating, Julie confided to him that someone was stalking her. She told Alan that it had been going on for nearly six months and that she was clueless who the man was except that he might be a student at the university. She had reported the matter to the police but was told that since she didn’t know the identity of the stalker there wasn’t much they could do.

  This had infuriated Alan. He couldn’t believe the cops hadn’t offered to put surveillance on her apartment or at least made an effort to investigate the matter further. His first impulse was to call the cops and give them a piece of his mind but he suddenly had an epiphany: he would take on the case himself.

  Despite Julie’s protests, Alan started tailing her covertly everywhere she went and hiding out across the street from her apartment at night in an attempt to catch the stalker. He had also rigged up a recorder on her telephone in case the man called so he could get his voice on tape. After two weeks of this, Alan had finally conceded that none of these attempts to nail down the stalker were working—it was as though the guy knew that he was on to him so had decided to back off for the time being.

  Alan eventually realized that he was going about everything all wrong. Instead of waiting around for the stalker to show up or make some kind of move, he needed to approach the matter in a more intelligent way—to think like an investigator. So one evening he sat Julie down and asked her a battery of questions relevant to the case: when exactly was the first time the stalker had approached her and where had she been? What did he look like and what exactly had he said? What was he wearing and what kind of car did he drive? How long after the first incident did she see him again and where had it been? How many times had she seen him all told and where had she been all of those times? How many times had he called her at home and what time of day had it been? And so on and so on . . .

  Alan had gone home later that night and analyzed all of the information Julie had given him. Then he made his move. The next morning, he headed down to the university and paid a visit to the office of admissions. Afterwards, he tracked down one of the professors in the math building and asked him a couple of questions. Then he traversed the college green to Talbot hall and located the bulletin board located on the first floor. It took him only a couple of minutes to spot the ad for a used Dell computer among all of the handbills.

  The owner of the computer for sale was Julie’s stalker. All Alan had to do at that point was trace the phone number and ID the guy, which he did.

  It had seemed almost too easy. Alan nevertheless was ecstatic that he had solved his first case but wasn’t sure where to go from there. What could he do, legally speaking, to nail this guy? He contacted a lawyer friend to get some answers and received unsettling news: the state of Ohio considered stalking a punishable offense only if the person being stalked believed that the offender would cause serious physical harm or mental distress to the victim or a member of the victim’s immediate family. The man hadn’t actually threatened Julie—he’d only hit on her several times basically—and since mental distress was defined as any mental illness or condition that involved temporary substantial incapacity that would require psychiatric treatment, none of the criteria for stalking was met. And even if they had been met, Alan learned that stalking was only considered a first-degree misdemeanor.

  So in a nutshell, the guy had only been harassing Julie and there wasn’t a damn thing on God’s green earth she could do about it legally.

  Alan was appalled by the ineptness of the law. So he did the only thing he could think of: he called the guy, whose name was Paul Shraft, and told him that if he ever came within 100 yards of Julie Turner again, he would be dead meat.

  The guy had simply laughed hysterically and hung up on him.

  Alan knew it was indeed a laughable situation because the guy was a six-foot-eight-inch jock that could pulverize him if given half a chance.

  But the good news was t
hat Paul Shraft never harassed Julie again.

  Although justice may not have been served in a legal sense, this experience had a lasting effect on Alan and planted a seed in his mind to become a private investigator. Besides feeling a natural affinity for investigation, he thought he could be doing something good for society by aiding people in need of his services. As he had already learned, folks couldn’t always rely on law enforcement to resolve an injustice. By using his skills and analytical mind, he could help those victims of criminal activity that law enforcement either wouldn’t or couldn’t get involved with for one reason or another.

  Not long after the stalking incident, he researched the requirements for a private investigator’s license online and enrolled at a highly accredited school specializing in PI training. He quickly discovered that most PI's were retired cops with a lot of experience in crime investigation but that didn't stop him from pursuing his goal. Two years later he opened up his office downtown. And although the phone didn’t exactly ring off the hook the first year, he pursued his new career with a passion and eventually became fairly adept at it. Once he started turning a profit, he and Julie were married and lived in absolute marital bliss. Julie became a certified teacher and taught English at a suburban high school while earning her masters degree. When she was only two months from getting her PhD, they got the devastating news: Julie was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.

  Three months later, she was dead.