17:00: Back at his desk, Ryan went to work. It
was a simple matter for the service provider to grant the name of the phone’s owner
if the DA could wrangle the approval of Judge West. However, this would take a
couple of hours. Pinheads in Congress had only approved the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) a few years before but it had some areas
within which teams of lawyers could forge loopholes and dodges in the interpretation. Getting warrants often took time, thus
frustrating investigators already burdened with legal hurdles. In extreme cases
Ryan used a simpler resource, Teresa Sokolovsky, who was a grad student at the UCSB (Computer Science & Creative Studies) lab, and worked as an intern at the PD helping to set up the
new computer fraud division. She knew how to, though not necessarily violate
the law, but to skirt it under the guise that it was all public airways
regardless of the law. Besides, he didn’t want to tap the phone, but to simply
get information on where and who the hell was using it.
Ryan had consulted Teresa about GPS on a case
once before. She wasn’t at the desk she kept in a corner of the small dispatch room.
The Station had been built in 1959 and was sorely in need of an update afforded
the communications department. He knew that she would probably be home in her
condo by the SBHS on Rinconada Road not far from the SBPD if she wasn’t at the
media lab at UCSB. Ryan was struck by Teresa’s appearance, though her
appearance was hardly striking at all. At twenty-two, she maintained the look of
the Old Maid’s of the card game, complete with red hair tied back tight in a
bun, a stern-freckled-face, and six-foot-tall gangling frame. When he looked beyond
her unkempt exterior, he could see delicate features attractive enough to grace
the covers of Vogue and a body that was skinny enough for the runways of Paris
and New York. Teresa was a genius once she sat down at a desk with her long-thin-fingers
flying across the keys; eyes fixed on the monitor screen, zipping through
passwords as though they were her own. Ryan was not up to date on the
technology and barely understood how to set the timer on his VCR that he never
used. Even now, he kept the DVD player his daughter, Phoebe had given him his
last birthday in its box. He held this new generation of nerds in high esteem
because there was no telling how far into secured sites any one of them could
plunder if so inclined.
Ryan arrived at Teresa’s door unannounced; she hadn’t
answered his calls but that wasn’t out of character for her. The door was
slightly ajar and as he tapped on it lightly, it opened enough for him to get a
glimpse of her at her desk. The Spanish Colonial condo complex of clean
architectural exterior lines contrasted sharply with what was inside for her
interior decor was an incongruous semi-circle of three hollow-core doors on saw
horses holding an array of monitors and keyboards connected by snaking bundles of
tangles of wires to a row of towers on the floor under the tables.
“Knock-knock,” he announced.
“Not a knock-knock joke.” She didn’t look away
from the screen, “The coffee is fresh in the kitchen.”
Ryan walked past her to the kitchen and rinsed
out a used styro-foam cup and filled it to the brim. It slopped to the floor as
he crossed the room and pulled up a chair behind her tossing the cell phone
next to the notebook she used for a mouse pad. It slid across the table and
would have fallen over the side had she not been so quick to reach over and
stop its progress.
“What’s this… let me guess… you need to know
who owns it, who is he calling…”
“She…”
“Okay, she… a detail, who is calling him… easy
enough, eh?”
“Location…maybe, where was she calling from?
Can you do that?”
“Sure, take a seat and don’t hover over me.
I’ll let you know.”
“These are disposable,” she opened the back of
it and fiddled, “hard to say what can be gleaned from it... maybe hack into
Verizon.”
Ryan’s
eyes scanned the room as detectives always do. They stopped at a short poem
like string of words posted on the corkboard above Teresa’s desk:
“I believed in God.
I believed in justice.
Like a child, I trusted that the universe was
kind but,
in spite of my faith, I found myself in a camp
where justice, mercy, and love were burned
in the incinerators of hatred.
There I stood at the fence, garbed in striped
attire,
clothed in discarded childish beliefs. It was
then,
standing on the dark side of the barbed wire
fence of despair,
that the American army restored my faith in
humanity with
the simple gesture of a chocolate bar...”
–
anonymous
Twenty minutes later Teresa shouted out to
Ryan, “Got it. Nick Baker! Call from Adrienne Baker. From the cell-tower
covering the area around West Mountain Drive.”
“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
“I’m not. My Great Grandfather was in
Auschwitz,” she answered, as though it was a tired subject. “Poles went there
too... lots of them. My great-grandmother and grandmother were sent to
Buchenwald.”
‘Really. I hadn’t thought of that.” Ryan saw so
much depth in this young woman that he admired.
“So, West Mountain Drive,” she returned to the
subject at hand.
“Great, I owe you.”
Nick had been swamping through the Sycamore
creek-bed for fifteen minutes before he came to a good spot under the Mason
Street Bridge at Sycamore; more to think than to rest. These bridges in town
along the creek beds were good places for junkies to shoot-up or gang-bangers
to hide out. The creeks were dry nine or ten months of the year and were
excellent passageways, useful for getting from one end of the town to the other
undetected. He slept, curled up under the bridge.
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