A Thin Blue Line

[Kislath]

"Whoa, that's a lot of Marialas. Okay, Lemme narrow it down to Georgia Summers Mariala Rodrigues, and thank goodness for those long Mexican names."

Before running that search, I'll go ahead and check out the articles getting all those hits in google. Maybe it's the same girl.

[D.KnightSpider]

I hastily scribbled a Post-It note about my findings and added it to the growing pile of paperwork on my desk. Since Thaddeus was back, I bought myself a moment to think by swiping a slice of pizza and, pardon the expression, wolfing it.

"So who's Georgia Summers Mariala Rodrigues and why do we care?" I asked in response to Thaddeus' outburst.

I hit a couple of keys on my workstation, clearing the search fields and prepping a new list. I had an idea of who was doing the complaining, now it was time to see about what they were complaining. I ran a search to index the complaint type and see what came of it.

As the computer ground its gears, I found my eyes drifting to the phone. Curious as I was about Rodrick's undercover activities, now wasn't the time to make calls asking. Leaving one task half-finished to start another was a bad way to do business.

[Reltzik]

OOC: Argh more typos. It's Mariela Rodriguez. Because the spelling I typed is NOT common and would be a really easy Google search, so it actually is plot-critical. I suck. /OOC

Thad basically gets nothing for "Georgia Summers Mariela Rodriguez". Or, rather, he gets a lot, but nothing pointing to a single person with that name. Just the normal array of search engine false hits. Mostly lists of names in other contexts (board members for organizations, Facebook friend lists, etc) that happen to have a Summers here and a Rodriguez there.

It's pretty easy to find out about the case from 18 years ago. It made a big splash in the state news and Thad vaguely recalls it. Herman would have been 12 at the time. 17-year-old Mariela Rodriguez didn't show up to school one day. Police first suspected truancy, then that she was a runaway, and were slow to launch an investigation. In fact, she'd been kidnapped. Her captor, an Eric Ingers, raped her several times a day for almost a week and then, when the police came to his home following a tip that she'd been pulled into his van, he killed her and two other kidnapped children with a handgun before turning the weapon on himself. He survived his suicide attempt, was arrested, tried, convicted, put on death row, and exhausted his appeals just after the state imposed its moratorium on the death penalty eleven years ago. He's still alive and, technically, awaiting execution, though that doesn't look likely to happen any time soon. Thad quickly finds himself staring at Mariela's picture, and can't shake the feeling that he's seen her recently.

Lara's refined search turns up different types of complaints. There's a wide range of them. A lot of people who got arrested accusing cops of planting evidence (not an uncommon complaint), many complaints of police brutality and harassment, some about police stealing merchandise or demanding bribes, some about police abusing their powers to sexual ends. All the accusations are for some bad stuff, but police often attract false charges of those natures simply by people trying to get them in trouble. There's no real pattern to them, they look like the normal complaints that aggrieved citizens (and, especially, aggrieved criminals and their lawyers) file against cops. ... on the other hand, they also look like the sort of complaints that Thad's "dirty cops" scenario might have trailing in its wake.

[Kislath]

"Hmm? Oh! Rodrick had her name tattooed on himself, one of those memorial type tats for a dead loved one. About all I can find is a girl who got killed by some creep on death row for it. Eric Ingers. Any Ingerses on the list?
Thing is..I've seen her somewhere, maybe. Well, obviously not, but somebody who looks an awful lot like her. It'll come to me."

Was it La Loba's sidekick? Maybe one of Herman's drawings? I'll have to doublecheck.

"So whatcha got there, anyway? On the printout, I mean. Any smoking guns?"

[D.KnightSpider]

"More like a needle in a smouldering haystack." I said. "It's like Rodrick printed out anything to do with IA back when The Surge went into effect. Thus far I've learned that just about everyone was complaining to IA about something-- the people reporting incidents on this list weren't exclusively Wolfpack. The types of offenses range from planting evidence to sexual harassment. About the only common factor is that most of the complaints were handled by one guy: Ian Sloduski-- that's with an 'i' not a 'y' and no 'w'. But I'm only half done. I've still got to look into who had the complaints lodged against them and then examine these dates in more depth."

As I'm talking, I'm also scribbling more notes on my findings. I also added a note about Georgia Summers Mariala Rodrigues. Then I add a note to the note to do some digging on the gal and check her off against the information on Rodrick I'll eventually request.

"I'd be curious to know if there's any connection between Sloduski and Rodrick..." An idea strikes. "... or if there was any rumblings about Sloduski being in the same vein as Adamson. Maybe our boy was checking up on the residential IA officer."

With my notes done, I turn back to my database searches. True to my word, I begin a search for those who had complaints lodged against them. While that runs, I begin building a spreadsheet database to organize my growing piles of information. If anyone were to walk in on this scene, they'd probably wonder if it was income tax season what with the amount of paper scattered everywhere.

[Kislath]

"Sloduski, eh? Betcha he wears glasses. Little pinchy ones. Rodrick drew lots of pictures of some IA guy, but nobody I asked could remember his name."

[Reltzik]

There's no Ingers on Rodrick's list. There's a few repeat badge numbers, but none that really dominate. Is there something more specific that Lara's looking for? Is she pulling their files, or searching for other IA complaints, or just looking for patterns, or something else?

[D.KnightSpider]

I shook my head at Thaddeus' question.

"No dice. Inger was never bright enough to bother complaining about the cops involved in his investigation. Once I get done with this, I'll pull up Sloduski's file and see if we can get a match. I'd doubt it, though. The Surge wasn't that long ago-- If that's supposed to be him, then someone should have remembered him."

I took a sip of coffee and grimaced. It was stone cold by now. At least the pizza was still partially warm.

Now that I was done grousing at the food; I turned my attention back to the task at hand. The computer was having a hissy fit about my search (crazy machines never did work right), so I opted to wipe it clean and try again.

This time I tried to define my parameters better. I was looking for a pattern, repetitive entries, common denominators, anything that showed up regularly. Once I had the data from my searches, I made sure to run it past Rodrick's notes to see if added any context to his scribbles.

(OoC: An IC response to an OoC question? Fun!

EDIT: Let me try to explain what she's doing in less character-flavored dialogue. Lara's presently doing a quick database search of the individual cases, logging the important details, and then washing, rinsing and repeating. Basically, she's rebuilding Herman's list on her own computer, but with concrete information instead of numbers. Then she's cross-referencing that information with Herman's notes, trying to see what interested him.)

[Reltzik]

The only common elements to be found in the list are that they were dismissed complaints against the 23rd precinct, that Sloduski was the person who dismissed most of them, and that the time frame is roughly the first three months of the Surge. A few officers were accused multiple times, but no one so much that they really dominate the list, and a few complainants were filed multiple complaints, but again, they don't really dominate the list. Rodrick's notes don't seem to have anything in common with what the database has to say about the line items he was annotating, save that the dates seem to be in roughly the same neighborhood as the complaints. Whatever he was taking notes off of, it wasn't the police database. The complaints start off slow -- that is, not that many each week -- and then suddenly spike the week after the Surge started, slightly over three years ago. They plateau for about six weeks and then slack off.

Of course, this might not be ALL complaints filed against the 23rd in that time period, and Rodrick might have printed off complaints matching a particular criteria for that time span rather than all of them. But if so, Lara can't identify the criteria. Her search is hindered by the fact that IA doesn't allow regular police (including detectives) to view any of their case files, save those which are dismissed due to insufficient evidence or proof of falsehood. Even those are heavily redacted, to protect whistleblowers.

[D.KnightSpider]

I finished organizing the data and spent a good few moments studying it. Without resorting to Chaos Theory, there wasn't much sense to be made of it. I took another draft of cold coffee (blech, how did people drink that iced coffee stuff?) and pondered it for a moment.

"I think that this pours cold water on our smouldering haystack." I said after passing my findings over to Thaddeus. "I can't determine what Rodrick wanted with this list, either I don't have enough data or the right IA clearance. Take your pick. Short of trawling through Internal Affair's records-- something that I'm just sure that they'd love-- I don't think we can chase this particular clue much farther."

"Maybe you should look into the Summers case and see if there's anything immediately tying Rodrick to it. I'll pull up Sloduski's file, like I promised, see if he wears little pinchy glasses, and look for any obvious connections to Rodrick."

I'll also finally make those calls asking for Rodrick's undercover documentation. I doubt anything would be delivered at this time of night, but at least it'd get the ball rolling again.

[Reltzik]

Lara leaves a message on Captain Anderson's voice mail, requesting documentation of Herman's investigation. She also calls the desk sergeant on the night shift at the 23rd, who after a bit of prompting tells her that information on Rodrick's investigation was kept out of the system for security reasons, and that Captain Anderson is still in the process of reconstituting the data.

Sloduski's file is also redacted, which isn't uncommon. Every cop file that either of you can pull up is partially redacted... Lara doesn't get to know Thad's social security number unless he tells her, for example. IA files are more redacted even than that. But he's been the 23rd's IA adjunct for six years, well before the surge started. His file photo shows a grinning man in his forties, a little overweight, definitely not balding. He's got glasses, but not bifocals, and you wouldn't describe them as pinchy. He doesn't look like the same man that Thad's described. The only obvious connections are that Rodrick worked at the same precinct as Sloduski, and that Sloduski investigated both Rodrick beating up Sergeant Adamson and the allegations of Sergeant Adamson's sexual harassment.

EDIT: Changed a detail or two that was wrong, so reread if you haven't read it since this edit.

[Kislath]

"Oh, well. It was worth a shot. Maybe I'll have better luck."

Alrighty, let's see... I'm reading every scrap I can find about this case with Mariela, looking for anything I can find that suggests she is the one from Rodrick's tattoo and for anything that might show any connection between them.

While I'm at it, I'll also try to check the Prison records where Ingers is held, to see if Rodrick ever contacted him, visited him, or made any inquiries about him. That probably won't work from here, so I'll send an email to the Warden to ask for that info.

Of course, it occurs to me that it's all probably pointless and has nothing whatsoever to do with this case, but you never know.

[D.KnightSpider]

I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and massaged the bridge of my nose. There had to be something here; or maybe there wasn't because we were looking in the wrong place. If that was the case, then it was time to go back to basics.

"Maybe it's time to stop and go back to the beginning, Thaddeus. Maybe if we go over the facts of the case, we'll come up with a direction to go next."

I shrugged. Half of our problem was that it was late. We could ask all of the questions that we wanted, but the answers wouldn't be forthcoming for another dozen hours.

[Reltzik]

Going to give K a quick response. In actuality, both detectives' research has taken them a couple of hours already, and he hasn't been doing as much poking around and she has, so he gets to catch up some, chronologically.

Thad fires off his email, but doesn't expect a prompt response this late in the evening. He then starts digging into the Mariela Rodriguez case, looking for connections to Rodrick. It's a bit difficult, because this was a small upstate town (Clark Station) in the mid-nineties and digitization of records hadn't entirely taken hold. On the plus side, it's a case of some popular interest, and a lot of the records WERE digitized after the fact.

The other two victims were kidnapped months before Mariela. They were minors and their names weren't released to the media, so Thad can't find out much about them. Mariela was well-known because there was a full-on public-awareness campaign to help find her before it was known that she was a rape victim.

Mariela was popular in high school, a cheerleader, with a high GPA and a very nice list of honors classes and good prospects for college. She had exactly two run-ins with the law, one for underage drinking and the other for reckless driving, neither of which were surprising at her age. With every picture Thad sees of her, he's increasingly confident that she's seen her face recently. But maybe it was some retrospective piece on the tube.

The media certainly milked the case for all it was worth, especially the local papers and TV station. They covered the local churches praying for Mariela's safe return and the candlelight vigil. They covered the funeral, the way the entire high school went into mourning, on and on. Clark Station's mayor turned out to give a bunch of speeches, as did the county Sheriff. Five people protested the fire department, for providing the paramedic care that saved Ingers's life, and the media blew that out of proportion.

The pivotal role of the media in the case was a local TV interview with the family. The father, Jose Rodriguez, pleaded with viewers to be on the lookout for her, showing her school picture to the camera. He complained that the police weren't responding and didn't care, that they were just assuming that Mariela was a runaway without even investigating, but that she would never do something like that. He accused the police of racism, of assuming that his family was poor and disfunctional just because they were Hispanic, but explained that he was a citizen, a veteran, and a business-owner in the community.

Whether it was the emotional impact of the interview, or the public response to it, or the accusation of racism, or just the normal course of the investigation, the police began taking the possibility of a kidnapping seriously shortly afterwards. An anonymous tip led them to Ingers' doorstep, and after that the case was pretty much closed.

Thad finds the interview itself online, in the station's archives, preserved because it won some sort of award or another. Jose Rodriguez is sitting in the middle of a couch. A woman, quite possibly his wife, is sitting to his left. She doesn't say much. She's focused mostly on maintaining her composure, and occasionally trying to quell a young boy to HER left, maybe seven years old. That boy is a fidgeter, and seems confused by what's happening. To Jose's right is an older boy, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, dead quiet and looking at the camera with a deep intensity, as if he knows exactly what is going on. He's wearing a Superman t-shirt and dorky glasses, and looks like he could be a young Herman Rodrick.

Thad makes that connection just as Lara makes her suggestion.

[Kislath]

"Whoa! Lookiee here. Looks like Herman grew up in Clark Station, New York, and had a sister? cousin maybe? family friend get murdered. She wasn't the only one, either. This Ingers guys got at least two more, but I can't find their names. A whole lot of people were really mad at the cops and rescue guys for letting him live. With the death penalty suspended, now they're probably even madder.
Check out this picture. Hmmm.. I wonder who the other little boy is?
As for this Mariela girl, I'm telling ya I've seen her around lately. Well, not her, of course, but someone who could be her sister.

Her sister?
Hmmm.. I think I may have just figured out how Herman managed to get in so tight with the Wolfpack. What if this girl did have a sister, and now she's in the Wolfpack? She might have remembered Herman from the old days and vouched for him or something."

OOC-- okay how many women have I seen lately? There was the motorcycle cop, the apartment manager, La Loba, her lawyer, some flunkies with camera phones, and that reporter, Neilsen, from the TV. Do any of them look like Mariela??

[D.KnightSpider]

I left my chair so fast that it ricocheted into the desk. As soon as I arrived at Thaddeus' desk, I glanced at his computer monitor. I involuntarily whistled at the image displayed there.

And in an instant, everything fell into place. I picked up my notepad from way back when and scratched out the first question.

Rodrick's incident with Adamson.
` Need details. Seems like a pretty severe overreaction to a sexist pig.

I wrote down my thoughts as I verbalized them.

"If Little Rodrick is tied to Georgia Summers, then the guy goes through the tension of having a relative vanish, hears his parents constantly screaming about corrupt police. He's just old enough to understand what's transpiring but not enough to have any real world context to it. Then comes the kicker, and they find out about everything that happened to Georgia Summers... poor girl... and Rodrick takes all of that, internalizes it, and carries it throughout his life.

"Then he makes cop-- odd career choice given his background-- and Adamson has the misfortune of accidentally hitting Rodrick right where it hurts. Rodrick snaps and beats him to a pulp. Forget Superman. We've got our own little Batman on our hands."

I pause to grit my teeth. A new thought is emerging, one that I'm not sure that I like. If it was true, then that would mean that Rodrick was far more obsessed than was healthily possible. And it had some very scary side implications.

"We could very well be looking in the wrong place for Pinchy Glasses. How much you want to bet that Pinchy Glasses is the IA officer who handled the investigation of the Georgia Summers case?"

[Reltzik]

Some clarifications: The Mariela case wasn't in New York. It was in this (unspecified, generic) state. "Georgia Summers" doesn't seem to connect to the case in any way, nor is there any indication that Mariela Rodriguez had "Georgia Summers" as part of her name. But then, Lara's getting only partial information from Thad's reporting.

Of the women K listed that Thad's seen recently, none of them really looked like Mariela. Mariela was clearly Hispanic, and that narrows his list down to La Loba, her lawyer, and flunkies with camera phones. None of those have anything like Mariela's facial structure. MAYBE one or two flunkies that Thad didn't get a good look at.

[Kislath]

"Hmmm... well, people around here seem to almost remember him, so I figured him for a local. Still, I think I see a road trip in our future to Clark Station.
Shotgun!
We need to find out who all of these other people are and what happened to them, as well as the other victims and their families.

It wouldn't be fair or sensible for a revenge killer to go after Rodrick in connection to the deaths of any of these girls, but whoever said whacko killers were fair or sensible? We need to rule it out at the very least.

Fresh air, green grass..when's the last time you saw a cow? A trip upstate will be fun. *sigh*... I suppose we should go talk to Ingers, too.

That can all wait a few days, though. Tomorrow I'm sure we're gonna be up to our ears in reports from various labs." *yawn*

[D.KnightSpider]

"A few days is about right. This is an important piece of Rodrick's psyche of which to be aware, but we don't even know if it's relevant to our case-- or if my wild guess about his beat-down with Adamson is correct. Heck, we don't even know if SuperBoy there is even Rodrick in the first place."

I let my gaze turn meaningfully to Rodrick's print-out, which was still lying on my desk. Something about IA had Rodrick's interest. Were I a betting woman, I'd have thrown my money on the past tying into the present in a heartbeat. But I'd been wrong about a lot on this case so far. I couldn't afford to get too attached to a wild theory.

"Regardless," I said, turning back to Thaddeus. "You've put in your time for the day. Feel free to head home at any time. I'll clean up here, do the documentation-- just to make sure that I understand all the facts of the case-- and keep the proper people in the loop whenever you're ready.

"And, hey, who knows? Maybe if you sleep on it, you'll remember where you saw this Summers look-a-like. I hear that tends to happen about three in the morning."

[Kislath]

"Yeah, good idea. I'll see you tomorrow, then."

I go home. I'll read the La Loba file for a couple of hours before going to bed.

[Reltzik]

We'll say that Lara spends a few hours getting caught up on Thad's notes before going home herself, and now knows what he learned over the course of the day.

Thad doesn't get to read the entire file, but skims it and gets the high points. INFODUMP TIME!

La Loba's real name is Guadalupe Almeida, just like her ID said. She grew up in Upper Brookvale.

Her father was an illegal immigrant from Brazil, and was deported when Guadalupe was eleven. His last known location was in a Brazilian prison. Guadalupe's mother (a naturalized refugee from El Salvador) was sent to prison for drug possession when Guadalupe was fifteen. She pissed off the wrong inmate and was dead inside of a week. Guadalupe spent the rest of her childhood with her grandmother, who has since died of cancer. Her older brother, Carlos, died from a knifing during a drug deal gone bad when Guadalupe was sixteen. Not long after, her younger brother, Pedro, died in a car accident, an side-effect of a high-speed-chase on the Expressway. Guadalupe's high school boyfriend, Manuel Valencio, was with fellow gang members when police raided their crib. Manuel just hit the deck and surrendered, but other members of the gang opened fire on the police, and Manuel was killed in the cross-fire. That was when Guadalupe was seventeen.

A week later, Guadalupe approached the leader of the team who'd killed her boyfriend as he was leaving the 23rd Precinct. She shouted pejoratives at him, loudly accused him of murder, declared, "I have something for you," and motioned as if pulling a gun out of her jacket. The officer shot her, though obviously not fatally. The only thing she'd been pulling out was her middle finger. Family court decided that this incident was an attempt at suicide-by-cop and she was committed to a psychiatric institute for juveniles for a month, at the end of which she was pronounced cured. Though her record was sealed at the time, the detectives at the 23rd managed to get a hold of it (though unspecified means) a year ago. Her case workers felt that Guadalupe had developed a pathological hatred of police and other authority figures, and had also become emotionally withdrawn after losing so many people in her life. At the end of her stay, the case-workers were convinced that she'd found a way to channel her passions productively and was again able to establish emotional connections.

Despite this run-in with the law, Guadalupe got a scholarship and attended the University. While there, she was involved in something called "The Anarchy Club", an officially recognized student organization, and held a strong leadership role. Details are thin, but included heavy protesting of military recruitment on campus, and an extended protest against the administration over campus rules that apparently disrupted the University's administration for an entire semester. Somehow she avoided getting expelled and earned a bevy of degrees (econ, math, history, poli-sci), the highest of which was a Master's in Political Science.

After that, she returned to Brookvale. Since then she's had no official employer. Her income tax forms list gambling winnings (in the middle five-digits range) as her only source of income, and the detectives at the 23rd are certain that this is either money laundering or a concealed outside paymaster, though they haven't confirmed either. They are also looking at the possibility that she sidelines as a high-end call-girl. She's well-connected, with known associates including many of the city's upper-crust, including the Governor's oldest son, and the 23rd's detectives think this might be a client list.

Whatever her income, Almeida established a host of shell corporations and charities with herself at the head and began funneling money into Brookvale. It's unknown to the 23rd whether this money is being laundered, or being scammed off of genuine philanthropists. Almeida used it to establish herself as a major power in Upper Brookvale. She took this money meant for charity and doled it out to people in exchange for support, and was soon the go-to-woman for any needs. If you're in Upper Brookvale and need money for medical care, food, rent, whatever, she's the woman you go to. She also holds informal courts when one resident has a complaint against another, and has effectively supplanted the court system. She's immensely popular among Upper Brookvale residents as a result, and that has made finding snitches or penetrating her organization extremely difficult for the 23rd.

Another one of her big successes was uniting the warring gangs of Upper Brooksvale under the umbrella of her organization. The 23rd isn't exactly sure how she did this, but thinks that it had a lot to do with The Surge. She was smart enough to keep her head down when the Surge hit, and the police took out almost all of her competition. Before then she was actively making gang warfare worse, including pushing for something called "suicide hits", which Thad (in his skimming) doesn't find details on. Another big factor was painting the police as the common enemy of the gangs and promising to put a stop to alleged police abuse. It's felt that she's yet to deliver on that promise to the satisfaction of the gangs, and the 23rd thinks that her coalition is on the verge of dissolving if she doesn't do something to strike at the police soon. They're on high alert for anti-cop violence. A third factor is the way that she took control of the drug trade. She maintains a "banned" list and an "approved" list of dealers. No dealers actually answer to her, making it hard to tie her to any arrests. Dealers who contribute to her "charities" go on the approved list, and residents know to solicit them. Dealers who injure their customers or attack other dealers go on the "banned" list, and Almeida gets residents to boycott them, going so far as to buy out their customers' debts, and effectively puts them out of business. The net effect has been a severe reduction in drug-related violence and gang violence... effectively, because she's the only act left in the neighborhood and no one wants to challenge her. She seems utterly uninterested in profit, and is focused almost entirely on territorial control.

After the Surge cleaned up most of the local slumlords, it was a high priority in the 23rd to pick up the spare by knocking down the last pin that Almeida represented, but she proved very cagey and it was impossible to tie her to any crime. Even more frustrating to the cops of the 23rd was that she was organizing a campaign of false complaints against the Precinct. That changed when an officer performing a stop-and-frisk on her found a bag of cocaine, just barely enough to charge her with intent-to-sell. She pled not-guilty, refused to take a deal, offered no real defense in court (save that the cocaine must have been planted on her by the frisking officer), and went to prison for six months. Because of her gang connections, she served that time in solitary confinement.

The brass at the 23rd had hoped that Almeida's organization would disintegrate during her absence, and it almost did. Many of the leaders of the constituent gangs tried to seize power, only to suffer revolts from within their own ranks. The gangbangers underneath them were more loyal to Guadalupe and the new coalition than their nominal leaders. Almeida became transformed into a figure of reverence, known as the "Iron Wolf-B****", and those who declared more loyalty to her than to the individual gangs took to calling themselves the Wolfpack. A mythos arose around her as an unbreakable predator temporarily caged, patiently biding her time until she was inevitably released. At that time, she would turn on the police and destroy them. Her imprisonment was marked with repeated protests for her release, two almost-riots, and a decay in police/public relations in Upper Brookvale to almost toxic levels.

Governor Tutsutato (aka Tootsie) has recently earned the ire of the Police Union and Correction Officers' Union. He's going to term out in three years, and feeling no need to run for reelection he's adopted a soft-on-crime stance. He's reigned in several policies that the police consider most effective in clearing criminals off the street, campaigned hard to reduce or eliminate mandatory criminal sentences, suspended the policy of solitary confinement for gang-affiliated prisoners on the grounds of new research showing that it causes insanity, and famously pardoned over nine-hundred prisoners whom he personally judged either unjustly incarcerated or suffering from overlong sentences. The "Tootsie Thousand", as the number was rounded up to, has become a major point of protest and public backlash. The 23rd thinks that Almeida reached out to her friend, the governor's son, and used that personal connection to get included as one of the Thousand.

That was a year and a half ago. Since then, she's been slipping further and further off the 23rd's radar. She's remained homeless since her release from prison, spending each night in a different location, and holds most meetings online with encryption that Metro hasn't been able to break yet. Her organization had been using cel phones to track police before she went to prison, but the system's been perfected since then, with comprehensive databases and facial recognition software. Every cop, anywhere in Upper Brookvale, is IDed and tracked pretty much anywhere in the neighborhood. Knowing where they are allows Almeida, or pretty much anyone in her organization, to vanish from sight at will, and is almost certainly what allows her to ID undercover cops. Given her repeated promises to put an end to the police "occupation" of Brookvale, and her likely need to make good on that promise soon, the way that she's gone black on such a frequent basis has been extremely alarming to the 23rd.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the 23rd has a number of ancillary sources that allow them to confirm details and acquire minor hints of what's going on, but they've been reduced to a single, unnamed source of information regarding La Loba herself and her inner circle. There's a bit of paranoia at the 23rd that she's planning domestic terrorism against law enforcement, but that's so at ends with her more "peacefully organize and control" methods to date, and there's so little evidence in favor of it, that nothing has really come of the suspicion.

/INFODUMP

We'll say that you reconvene about 9 AM Tuesday morning, at the 8th Precinct's detective pool, and that Thad fills Lara in on the La Loba file, so that we can fastforward past that. The two of you have emails waiting from CSU, the tech weenies Thad gave the camera to, the computer geeks at Metro who are working on the laptop (Subject: "Where the hell did you find this damned thing?"), and an automated notice from the tip line. Also, Thad's got voice mail from "Jezebel", a woman of good repute as far as women of ill-repute go.

[D.KnightSpider]

I listened to Thaddeus' report of the Iron Wolf with a keen ear and the decision that whoever had come up with that ridiculous nickname had done Thatcher, God rest her soul, a great disservice. Still, the story did suggest some shaky connections between Loba and Rodrick.

I leaned over my desk in order to scribble a few more notes to myself. Once that was done, I tapped on the first email in the queue to start the loading process. Then I verbalized my thoughts.

"If our wild guessing is anywhere near accurate, it very well could be that Rodrick's past connections to the Rodriguez case gave him something in common with Guadalupe, enough to get in deep with her. Remember how she accused us of killing Rodrick? Maybe they had a mutual distrust of police operations. I really wish that Shrink would open up to us-- or that that documentation would surface. I need to get inside Rodrick's head for this one."

I shook my head as a new thought emerged. This entire case was getting more bizarre by the moment.

"Strange, though, that someone with repressed emotions and such a pathological hatred of police would get that friendly with an undercover cop."

[Kislath]

ARRRGH!
Now it looks like La Loba might have done it after all...OR.. a rival did it, intending to knock off her inner circle and the top Wolfpackers one by one, with Herman Rodrick being the first.

It also looks like a good bet that SHE is the bunker's mystery renter.

I mention these things to Lara.

"This whole thing stinks. I don't know if she's the perp or the victim.

Hey, I've got mail. Lots of it. Well, I guess I'll check it. Maybe we'll get lucky."

With that, I check the emails. I'll relate the info in them to my partner, and then check the tipline message. Finally, I'll give a call to Jezebel. ( if I can? )

[Reltzik]

Most of those emails are things that you both got sent, so I'll say you split them up.

Lara handles the computer and forensics stuff. There's a few new things on the bunker. Herman's wallet and cel phone were found under the pile of clothes. CSU found a smudged footprint on the toilet tank. It shifted around too much to get a tred from it, but the size is an 8 1/2 man's or 10 woman's and it had a bit of a raised heel, more of a dress shoe or a boot than a sneaker. There's also a few smudges of boot polish around the bunker, but at waist-height, not on the floor. They got a fingerprint off one of the nickels and ran it, and got a hit in the federal employee database, but it was to a retired worker at the US Mint, and their best guess was that the print got on the nickel when it was manufactured. They accounted for every bullet, and they match up with the magazines of Rodrick's weapons exactly. He shot himself dry. Whoever shot him didn't leave any bullets behind. They've drilled a plug out of the armor and think they can trace it, but also think it will take them several days of contacting manufacturers. Whoever did the drilling included an unnecessary formal write-up of the process, which is very professional-looking until one realizes it's all a double-entendre for some very slow, painful, anatomically distasteful process, possibly involving constipation and a colonoscopy. The gist of it was that getting the armor sample was difficult and whoever was stuck with the task is doing some creative venting at the detective who requested it. Finally, two sets of hairs were found at the scene. One seems to belong to Rodrick. The other set of hairs are about two inches long, straight, and gray with hints of dark brown. Genetic testing will, of course, take weeks. (Technically days, but there's always a backlog. You're lucky MPD has its own facilities. The state facilities are months behind on current rape kits alone, and are backlogged for years on cold case materials, so much so that MPD gets a good amount of revenue leasing out their lab time.)

Thad finds four messages on the tip line. Three of them are from various employees of Parks and Recreation, who give their identities. All of them say that they saw the evening news and that the orange "1" was theirs. They give somewhat different accounts of bookkeeping processes and Thad doesn't really follow it, but the gist of it is that they paint orange numbers on trees with alcohol-soluble paint to keep track of pruning requirements. That "1" went on that tree a week and a half ago. All of these came in early in the evening and should have forwarded to you immediately, but there's an old, familiar bug in the system where if a tip comes into the line too quickly after it's set up, the detective doesn't get an alert. The final tip is a bartender who remembers Rodrick getting beat up a couple of weeks ago at his bar ("Monty's Pub") in the Montgomery neighborhood.

Lara next opens up the email from the tech weenies who worked on the cameras. They traced the site that the cameras uploaded to easily enough. The video feed was public-key encrypted, which would normally be an obstacle, but the Department was the one who assigned the encryption keys in the first place and they found the matching key in the database. The site showed a regular pattern of someone visiting to download the video and delete the record. You've only got video for about 35 hours before Thad removed the cameras -- that is, from Sunday morning, apparently the last time whoever-it-was did their download-and-delete routine. There's probably more video stored somewhere else, but not on the site. You get a link to the full video feed, with audio. They say most of it looks boring, but give you the timestamp of Thad's encounter with La Loba and also a meeting that Rodrick had with La Loba on Sunday evening.

Thad listens to Jezebel's message. Alongside some sultry implications that she's got openings in her calendar, she says that word went out on the girls' grapevine last night that someone from Brookvale was offering to pay for information on Detective Thad Tanner. She didn't bite, but she guesses that a few other girls did. He can try calling her back, but knows he'll probably get her voice mail. She doesn't keep morning hours.

According to the email entitled "Where the hell did you find this damned thing?" Herman's laptop has so far proven uncrackable. The password was not actually a BIOS password -- what you can wipe by removing the right battery from the motherboard. It isn't a password at all. The computer's hard drive is partitioned. The boot partition contains the operating system, drivers, and so on. The other partition is private-key-encrypted. The "password" is actually the key needed to decrypt the part of the hard drive that everything of interest is stored on. To make matters more interesting, ten failed attempts causes the hard drive to wipe itself. The good news is that they made backups of the drive before trying to crack it, and have figured out where the counter hides so that they can reset it before it tries that again. They've got it chugging along trying keys at random, but they don't think a brute-force approach like that isn't going to get the key soon. But it doesn't stop there. Apparently there's viruses folded into the encryption, and entering in certain decryption keys -- roughly one in every 65 thousand -- triggers some nasty virus. One tried to overclock the processor to such insane levels that it would have melted in under a minute if they hadn't shut it down, and another succeeded in making the laptop battery explode. They're now emulating the laptop on an old desktop unit nicknamed "Guinea Pig #29", which is kept VERY carefully isolated from the network, but it's still slow going. Appended are the grizzly fates of Guinea Pigs 1-28. Lara isn't sure whether they actually destroyed 28 desktop units, or if they're just logging virtual "kills". Whoever wrote the email seems to be almost cackling in glee at the kill count and extremely energized by the challenge. In short, the laptop was set up and booby-trapped by some skilled programmer (which Metro calls a "gifted amateur" in what might be an overabundance of competitive machismo) who is freakishly paranoid about security and quite willing to destroy the laptop rather than let its data be captured, and while Metro promises that it still has some tricks left in its bag it is increasingly unlikely that you're going to get anything off that laptop without the key.

While Lara's plowing through that, Lieu-Lou comes over to tell Thad that the court order for the cottage-bunker's records were denied. She sounds totally perplexed by this. It should have been a slam-dunk. But apparently someone scrambled fast enough to contest the court order, and said SOMETHING to Judge Davis, and Davis issued an injunction protecting those records and didn't even say why he was doing it. It makes no sense whatsoever and Lieu-Lou thinks it stinks to high heaven, and it's made worse by the injunction's wording. The injunction isn't against the police getting ahold of the records, it's against the 8th precinct's investigation in particular. It can be appealed, but that process will take days or weeks. In theory, Judge Davis could reverse it whenever he wanted, but you'd have to persuade him to. Lieu-Lou seems to think that it's some dirty trick on Captain Adamson's part to take over the investigation, and is about to storm over to the municipal courthouse and give Judge Davis a piece of her mind in person. She's bear-mauling mad.

[D.KnightSpider]

"The investigation's still young, Thaddeus." I said, after listening to his frustration. I could empathize with his feelings, but I wasn't quite as disheartened just yet. "We'll get to the bottom of it; it's just going to take some time to sort through everything and figure out what's relevant and what's not."

While I'm talking, I'm also perusing my email. I make special note of the grey hairs and the shoe polish. What were they doing to make those smudges so high off the ground? I let my fingers drum across the table as I pondered the question. Kickboxing, maybe?

I log details about the laptop as well, and make an extra note to find out how skilled Rodrick was with computers. Whoever programmed that baby definitely did not want the wrong people getting into it. The back of my mind wonders just when the little black book went out of fashion. Those were much easier to crack.

I'd just finished bringing Thaddeus up to speed and vice versa when the chief arrived. I fold my arms as I listen to the story. It's a humdinger, alright.

"Assuming that Adamson is behind this, I think we can safely write off the spirit of mutual cooperation." I muse.

I pause as I sort through our options, decide to deal with the elephant in the back of my mind-- and then smack my forehead in stupidity. Way to lose the game before it even starts, Lara. Well, there's still a way to deal with that particular elephant. It'll just take some more doing than I'd like.

"Well, Thaddeus was actually there at the scene of the bunker. Do you need his help tearing that judge a new one?" I ask, finally.

[Kislath]

"Okay, new theory. Capt Adamson is connected to the bunker, the hair was his, and he's the one tying to keep us from nailing him. What to DO about it?

I'm sorely tempted to let La Loba know about it and let her deal with him, just to see what happens.

Unfortunately, the hair also sounds like it might have come from mister pinchy glasses. We gotta find that guy.

To top it all off, I have a bad feeling that this is all going to wind up being some sort of secret government crap. That laptop is too well encrypted, and Rodrick's killer was reeeeally damm good at taking only one shot and avoiding getting hit. "They" could have also easily set up this bunker and kept it quiet, and it's child's play for them to lean on a Judge and have him kill an investigation.

In fact, I think that's now my #1 theory. All the other sloppiness was just a distraction.
If I'm right, though, then I have no idea what to do about it.
I'm starting to think that it might be time to fight dirty."

[D.KnightSpider]

My gaze sharped into a glare aimed at Thaddeus. Not only had he voiced that ridiculous speech in front of the Good Captain but he was also flat out wrong. It rubbed me the wrong way.

I spoke simply and clearly as I made my reply. This job was one area of my life that was not up for compromise. It was the only thing that I had left and I was not going to let it be sullied. I didn't care who tried to do the sullying.

"No. We're not going to fight dirty. And you are not going to run to the Wolf with any half-baked idea about Adamson being involved in this. Especially, when you admit that it could have been pinchy glasses' hair. Heck, you admitted it could have been Pinchy Glasses two sentences after fingering Adamson. If that doesn't throw up a red flag, then I don't know what will."

I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to add some additional weight to my words. It was hard for me to be imposing or intimidating, but doggoneit if I wasn't going to try. It wasn't that I was trying to impress the Good Captain. That didn't have anything to do with it. There was an error here that I had to oppose.

"If we don't do this clean and above board, if we don't do this by the book, then we're justifying everything that the Wolf and her ilk use to demonize us. We're handing them that district on a silver platter. I, for one, have no intention of letting that happen."

[Kislath]

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I'm just pee-ohed that THEY'RE fighting dirty. I'm about ready to take it to the Chief. To the Mayor, even.

Bah. I gotta check that footage. It's probably just another waste of time, but I wanna know what La Loba and her flunkies were saying while I was outside."

[D.KnightSpider]

It took me a moment to parse through just what Thaddeus meant-- even then I wasn't fully sure if I had his meaning correct. If he meant that he was ticked at the criminals fighting dirty, then, well, what else did he expect to happen? They were criminals, it was a given. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that that wasn't quite what he meant.

"If you're talking about the 23rd, then I may have a litmus test for how reliable they are."

I was referring to the elephant in the back of my mind. The idea had come to me when I'd first heard Thaddeus' recount of his adventures so far. I just hadn't mentioned it because it hadn't really come up in regular discourse yet.

"The Wolfpack tagged you almost as soon as you went up against Guadalupe Almeida. Before that, they didn't care. Now, due to that ridiculous vacation of mine," I intentionally didn't look at the Good Captain while I said those words, but there wasn't really any way I could fully hide the poison in my voice. My feelings on that 'vacation' were well known. "the Wolfpack has never seen me. The 23rd, however, does know I'm on this case because I requested material on Rodrick. I left a message for Adamson and talked to the night dispatcher.

"You see where I'm going with this? If the Wolfpack tags me as soon as I turn up in their space, then we'll know that someone in the 23rd is in Almeida's back pocket."

[Kislath]

"Hey, that's pretty good thinking. You could drive around the 23rd, make a few stops wherever you see a cluster of gangstas, while acting casual, of course, and see if they turn into your own personal paparazzi.
Try not to let the fame go to your head.

Don't use an unmarked unit. They'd spot one of those in half a heartbeat."