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Back in his office, a dirty little space piled high with files and the paraphernalia of a busy detective's work load, Finnegan felt at home. He powered up his computer and determined to get to the bottom of this. Now that he had some names to work with, he had a place to start. Then he had a thought. The people in research would be able to focus better if he gave them the names of Brenda Raposy and her son, too. He made the phone call. Then he made a mental note to get Daniel's last name, too. Miss Raposy would have to give it to the morgue in order to claim the body.
Then he started clicking away on his keyboard. He went to the newspaper listings first. He wanted to read the old stories about the murder trial of a fourteen year old boy. He wanted to check the woman's story.
In minutes he was looking at several stories about a young boy accused of three heinous crimes against his stepfathers. Mention of the mother was usually a sentence or two that described her as questionable of character, mentally unbalanced, abused by her husbands and abusive towards her son or all three. A typical dysfunctional family description was given about the household and the child's upbringing and things associated with any background the reporters could uncover. The one thing that stood out was the comments from other children. None of them knew Daniel was being abused. None of them described him as a violent boy. Most of them said he was always quiet and very shy. The picture the reports painted was of a very private boy who said nothing and did less.
The DA Charged the kid with one count of murder. Finnegan made himself a note to get the file from the Alabama DA if he could. News accounts said the other murders were too old and not handled as homicides so there was no evidence against the boy. The only thing he found in the newspaper reports was a reference to a confession the boy had made concerning the other step dads. He wanted to see that confession, too.
Apparently the decision of the judge to remand the boy into the custody of his mother after a three month psychiatric evaluation did not raise much of a stir. Reports of the decision made the papers but there were no strong outbursts against it, no questioning articles. Well, it was thirty five years ago when people thought more highly of their authority figures, especially in the deep south of Alabama.
On a whim Finnegan ran a check of Brenda Raposy through the police data base. What he got back was the consummate picture of the battered wife. Several visits to the hospital resulted in an equal number of arrests against her husband of the time. All three men were listed as accused wife batterers. Each time she dropped the charges and took them back apparently. None of them ever went to jail. A forgiving soul maybe? Finnegan guessed it might be more like the battered wife syndrome he was used to seeing. Woman gets beaten. She's embarrassed by the situation and when the bum begs her to take them back with promises of never again, she does it. Typical violent household for a child to grow up in. A few of her statements during these incidents included her desire to protect her son from the men beating him. So, Daniel was not just a bystander. He had participated, albeit without his consent.
Finnegan had forgotten about lunch and then supper and was still avidly pursuing his quarry through cyber space when his phone rang. He checked his watch. Something told him it was late. Maybe it was the mostly empty squad room beyond his office door. Seven fifteen. Not too bad. He picked up the phone.
“Finnegan?” a voice asked.
“You called me.” Finnegan gave his usual you-got-that-big-L-thing-going-on-your-forehead answer. People around the station had learned long ago that he meant nothing by it. It was just his way of saying I like and respect you but don't expect a big hug from me. He kept everyone at a distance. It was a cop thing.
“Yeah, well... I didn't know if I would catch you in still.” The voice.
“Where else would I be?” Another well known characteristic of Finnegan was that he didn't go home with any loose ends left on a case.
“Well, I think you're going to want to see this stuff we're getting on the Daniel Surrow investigation.”
“Surrow?” Finnegan asked.
“Oh, yeah. The body brought in. We took Brenda Raposy's information and backtracked to a birth certificate for a son, Daniel Christian Surrow. Since then we have been tracking information about him and his mother as well as searching for anything related to murders in the categories the letter suggested we look. But you better get down here. Too much to tell over the phone.”
Without another word, Finnegan hung up the phone and headed for the basement where the geeks were kept.
The geeks were the computer experts who searched everything cyber space for police needs. They had access to official and unofficial data bases. They mined everything with all the latest techniques and programming. The set up was state of the art and a large feather in the cap of Atlanta Law Enforcement. The fact that it was housed in the very building where Finnegan worked only made his job easier. He not only could talk to the techs, as they liked to be called, but he had established a rapport with the geeks, as he liked to call them. His relationship with them allowed him to get the information he needed in as quick a manner as anyone on the force.
When he reached the ground floor of the precinct house, he stopped at the snack machines and loaded up. He never went to see the geeks without gifts. And all the geeks were junk food junkies. They operated on sugar and a desire to discover all things undiscovered as best Finnegan could determine.
When he arrived bearing his treasures, there was a mild flurry of activity from the three techs working on his stuff. They swarmed the pile of goodies on the desk where Finnegan laid them noting with amusement how quickly he backed away. It always amazed Finnegan how fast they could make the stuff disappear.
As the flurry died down, the leader of the group, a man named Larry, took a large swallow of his coke and smiled at Finnegan. He wiped his hands on his pants, a gesture which Finnegan hated but overlooked. When his hands felt clean enough Larry typed a few strokes on his keyboard and swung the monitor towards Finnegan.
“Check out the number of items listed in the lower left hand corner to my query about suspicious murders involving people killed in their own houses by knives with children left alive.” Larry smiled as he sat back and allowed the detective to look.
Finnegan leaned forward to see better. There was a time when he could have read the screen from across the room. Not any more. He squinted to make the numbers more clear. He had no idea why that helped but it did.
“463”
Finnegan moved closer and squinted harder.
Still 463.
“What's that mean?” Finnegan had a pretty good idea what he was looking at.
“We found four hundred sixty three separate listings for suspicious murders involving adults with children on the premises who were all killed by knife attacks.”
“Separate?”
“We filtered out all the items that were linked to give us one listing per event and location. Then we told the computer to search the entire news data base of the southeast for events that lined up with key subjects or words as defined by the letter you gave us.”
“So... each of these four hundred sixty three... events, as you call them, is a real, separate incident of murder under suspicious circumstances that match, or possibly match our boy's description of his life?”
Finnegan was struggling to cope with the number. 463? How could that be? Could they possibly be related? Are they really the murders described in Daniel's letter? How could 463 murders that could be found in a computer data base and linked not have been linked by real police personnel before this? There had to be another explanation. Finnegan struggled to see one.
“Four hundred and sixty three,” Larry smiled. “With another thirty five possibles that didn't match on one or two criteria but otherwise fit the scenario.
Thirty five? That would make it four hundred ninety eight. Daniel's letter guessed it was about five hundred. Finnegan was getting that old familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. A sick f
eeling. A feeling of helplessness. A feeling that something needed to be done. A sense that he was on the outside of something looking in and someone had covered the windows. It worried him because he did not know what was going to happen next. Would there be more murders? Daniel was dead. Were the others really linked. Could he find evidence linking them? Was it even a case?
“Anything else?” Finnegan was always thorough.
Sarah stepped up to the plate to take the lead now. She was one of the top researchers in the business. So Finnegan had been told. She was not like the other geeks. She looked normal. About thirty, Finnegan guessed, tall, thin but nicely shaped. She was the more gregarious of the group Finnegan dealt with. The others were more reserved, more private or shy. Sarah seemed to be the more normal anyway, until she opened her mouth and started talking about her work. Then she was all geek. He liked to imagine that her dates all started out with the poor guy having great hopes and then ended with a miserable resignation of the fact that the guy was simply not up to her level of education and interests.
“I've been running searches on the mother and the son relating to locations and times of residency as compared to the locations of the murders Larry found.” Sarah paused for effect. Too long a pause for Finnegan.
“And...” he prompted her.
Sarah smiled when she realized her sense of drama had pushed one of Finnegan's buttons. He had so many.
“There is a less than forty mile proximity to the residency of the mother and son with regard to each of the four hundred sixty three murders we discovered and a window of opportunity associated with the times of residency.”
“Meaning?” Finnegan understood but he knew the geeks liked it when he made them boil it down to stupid people talk.
“They lived within forty miles of everyone of the murders at the exact time of each one being committed.”
“And just so you understand the odds of that happening,” Melissa started. “It's about seven hundred, eighty million to one.”
780,000,000 to 1.
Finnegan was still trying to process the number the third geek had given him.
“Here's the kicker.” Larry jumped back in.
Finnegan waited. He let Larry be in charge. Down here in the basement, he was.
“The boy has never been diagnosed as crazy or anything like that. He has never been listed as having violent tendencies. Matter of fact, several of the doctors associated with the case are on record as saying the boy could not have done it because he has never once shown any aggressive behavior.”
“Meaning?” Finnegan was reading between the lines.
“It seems likely someone else did the killing and somehow got the boy to confess to the murders of the step dads.” Larry was direct about what he believed the information suggested. It was not lost on Finnegan that he got just the same sense of the case while talking to the woman earlier.
“The mother.” Sarah suggested.
A silence filled the room except for the other techs going abut their business. Mostly the clicking of keys from their keyboards.
“Let's go back a few more years and see if the mother is linked to anything earlier than the murder of the three husbands. Let's find out what happened to the real father of the boy, also. Get me these reports with your personal notes attached, too. I want to go over them myself and see what feel I get from all this. Besides, I think I am going to have to contact a few police departments before this thing is through.” Finnegan organized the next step of his investigation.
They all nodded, happy to be of service. Finnegan always asked for their personal notes, meaning he was interested in what they thought the information meant. Very few of the detectives gave them that. A sense of belonging to the investigation. They liked that. Being crammed up down in the basement all day made them feel forgotten sometimes. Especially when a detective only wanted their research findings and didn't want them to be involved. Finnegan had even named them all as part of the team that had broken open a case once. They had been famous for weeks, if only with their friends and family. It had been great. They liked working with him. He acknowledged them as part of the police team and did not treat them like lesser humans relegated to underground dwelling.
“I'm headed home now, so first thing in the morning will be okay for the reports you already have. The rest can wait until lunch time if you need the time. If you get anything earth shattering, as always, call me on my cell immediately.” Finnegan spurred the troops and left the dim confines of the computer environment.
He was not headed home however. At least not directly. He had an address for the Raposy woman and he wanted to go by the morgue to make sure she had identified the body in a proper manner.
The morgue attendant was not on duty when the woman had arrived. He looked up the entry in the visitor's log book and found the file associated with body number 15789. the body was gone. Picked up by a mortuary attendant two hours ago. The body had been identified as Daniel Morgan. Finnegan thought it was odd that Daniel had been born Daniel Surrow and was now being claimed as Daniel Morgan. None of the three stepfathers had been named Morgan so when had the name change taken effect? He made a mental note to investigate the name Morgan in connection with this strange family.
He also got a look at the address the woman gave as her place of residency. It did not jive with the address he had from her DMV information. Another anomaly in a long list of out of place occurrences. Maybe she had moved and not changed it on her license yet. People did that more than anyone knew.
Finnegan thanked the attendant and made his way out of the hospital. Once, when he was turning a corner in the vast maze of hallways, he thought he caught sight of a gray haired woman watching him from a waiting room. When it registered on his brain, he turned back to see if it was the woman from earlier in the day. When he got to the waiting room there was no one there at all. He stood a moment and looked around but there was nothing to see. He chalked it up to nerves and an overactive imagination. He needed rest. Next stop, home. A good meal and then some sleep.
A bachelor for life, Robert Finnegan owned his own home just outside of Atlanta. The trip took thirty minutes on foot and an hour in the car. Traffic on Peach Tree St. was horrendous no matter what time of day it was. And he needed to travel a good distance of the way on Peach Tree. Side roads were no better. Long ago everyone had started using them until authorities had lowered the speed limits so far down that kids on bicycles were passing motorists doing the speed limit. Atlanta was a city in transition. Unfortunately, it had been in transition since the civil war and had not yet decided what it was going to be.
As he drove he thought about the woman and her son. He tried to imagine what it was like for the little boy to grow up in such an environment. He was convinced the mother was somehow involved and had forced the boy to take the blame for her. The trick would be proving it. The case was more than thirty years old and the son was dead. He expected the woman was not going to incriminate herself which, he concluded made the case all that much more challenging.
He could not imagine the kind of life the little boy had. It was beyond even his scope of imagination having seen the degradation of society as he had seen it. He tried to imagine what a mother could use to force a son to confess to a murder. He tried to understand a mother who would incriminate her son like that. He reminded himself that it was all just a theory until he had some proof. He hoped the geeks would save the day on this one. There had to be something that made this all make sense. That was Finnegan's role in life. Not justice. Courts were fickle. Not right or wrong. People proved exceptions to rules every day. But it had to make sense. Foolish mistakes were made. That was inevitable. Bad choices were made. Understandable. But at the end of the day Finnegan was resolved to make everything answerable to the big question of why. If why could be answered, then no matter how bad the situation or the crime, the thing made sense. There were evil people out there. He knew that. He had seen their handy work and put a few of t
hem behind bars. But whatever they did had to have a reason that, while maybe not normal or understandable by regular standards, still made sense somehow to the perpetrator. That was his job. Make it make sense. Then, get a good night's sleep so he could start again in the morning.