Edge of the Heat 3 (11 page)

“Which brings me to what I want to show you.” Coleman opened a folder and pulled out 2 black and white pictures taken from an overhead camera. “I pulled the visitor file for both prisoners. This man visited Keen the day before the attack on Norman, and this man visited Madras the very next day, which was three days before the attack on Keen.” Coleman slid the pictures across the desk to Craig.

Both pictures were Frabrazio, Senator Oberlin’s new friend from the LA mob.

V
ivian pulled her nose out of her book and watched Hawk’s strong back as he bent over the computer. He was working hard as usual, but when she wandered out of her room this morning and said
good morning
he had smiled at her, which was definitely
unusual
. She had made him breakfast and again he had smiled and said thanks. She had sat down on the couch behind him instead of the couch in the other room and he hadn’t protested at all. She could get used to this.

“Hmmm,” he said under his breath.

She wanted to ask what he was working on, but she didn’t want to bother him, so she stayed silent.

“Crap,” he said, a little louder.

“What?” Vivian asked. She grimaced. It had slipped out.

“I’m not finding any record of your birth.”

“You’re looking up my birth records?”

He swiveled around in his chair and faced her. “Yep. I’m trying to find a connection between Norman and Oberlin right now, and your birth seems like it might be our key. But there’s no record of it. Do you have a birth certificate?”

“Yes, but mine has my adoptive parents names on it.”

“Oh.” Hawk’s face fell.

“But I’ve seen Emma’s,” Vivian added quickly.

“Do you remember what it said?”

“It had her name and under father it said unknown and her mother was named
Jane Doe
. Place of birth was Westwood General Hospital.”

Hawk was silent. He chewed slightly on his bottom lip and stared off into space. Vivian stared at his bottom lip, thinking she’d like to chew on it too.

His head turned to her quickly and she jumped a little and blushed.
Quit it! s
he chastised herself.

“So you guys weren’t dropped off somewhere like an orphanage or a church. You were born in the hospital but they didn’t know your mother’s name? How is that possible?”

“My guess is she died in childbirth. Like she came in while in labor and for some reason they didn’t get her name and she died. Or maybe she came in unconscious and we were delivered by c-section and she never came to.”

Vivian felt flat while she said this. She’d thought of her birth mother many times, but never been able to conjure up any emotion for her. She wanted to, but without a name or an image it just didn’t work. Whenever she tried to think of her mother, a picture of her adoptive mother filled her brain. She loved her adoptive mother. The woman still treated her like gold.

Hawk watched her closely. “You OK?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. It doesn’t bother me to talk about it.”

He smiled and spun back to his computer, working the keyboard.

“So, maybe Norman got rid of your birth record in the hospital files. I’ll check death records.”

Vivian sat and waited. She was amazed at what this man could do with a computer and an Internet connection. For a moment she wondered if what he was doing was legal.

“Hmmm, no Jane Doe death records on your birth-date. I’ll go out a few days.”

A few moments later, “Nothing.”

He spun around and rubbed his hands together, with a big grin on his face. She laughed. “You seem happy that you’ve found nothing.”

“I am. Because this means the records have been deleted. And if we can figure out who deleted them and how, we’ve got our first connection. It could have been Norman, but I don’t think it was. I bet he paid someone to do it. This is advanced stuff here and nothing I’ve found on Norman indicates he would know how to do it.”

Hawk spun back around and went to work. She didn’t hear from him again for over an hour. She was in the kitchen, thinking about what to make them for lunch when he let out a whoop in the other room. She ran back in.

“What, what?”

“I found it! I haven’t found an actual record of your births yet, but I bet I’ve found your mom.” He read from the screen. “Jane Doe, died from hemorrhage during labor, September 13th, 1983.”

He read off the description given of her in the chart. “5 foot, 6 inches tall. 142 pounds. Long, curly brown hair, blue eyes. Approximately 16 years old.”

Vivian felt like she’d been punched in the stomach at the last part of that.
16 years old
?

“My mother was 16?”

“That’s how old she looked apparently.”

“How can you be sure this is my mother?” Vivian asked.

“Well, I can’t,” Hawk answered, stretching backwards. “But I’m searching any deleted records in the correct time period because I am assuming that Oberlin had them deleted for some reason. There’s something about this that he doesn’t want anyone to know. And since I actually found a deleted entry, I think it’s a fair connection to make. Why else would anyone delete any of these entries, unless a mistake was made during data entry? From what I can tell, all the records from 1900 to 1985 or so were inputted into their digital database sometime in the year 2000. If they had made a mistake, they would have re-input the information somewhere else. I already searched. This entry is nowhere else. And it wasn’t corrected during data entry, it was deleted later. I can tell because of this.”

He pointed to the screen and Vivian saw this: i./

“I period slash? What is that?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. Just some random characters that were put in the first cell in the row, otherwise the computer wouldn’t let the information be deleted. It’s a failsafe to avoid accidental deletions.”

Vivian frowned. “How can you even read information that has been deleted?”

“There’s several different ways, although none of them work all of the time. In this case, I assumed they made one backup when the initial data entry was done, and I was right. I was able to access the backup file and read what was originally put in there.”

“Wow.” Vivian was impressed. Hawk knew what he was doing.

Hawk smiled at her again and bent back over his keyboard. “Now to try to figure out when it was changed, and with what access, and how.” He squinted at the screen and practically whispered, “I’m on the hunt for a hacker.”

Vivian backed out of the room and went back to thinking about lunch. She had complete faith that Hawk would figure it out.

As she chopped and prepared she thought about her mother. She did some quick math and figured Senator Oberlin would have had to have been at least 40 in 1983, so what was he doing with a 16 year old? She shuddered. God she hated the thought that he was her father.

She prepared two plates of BLT sandwiches with strawberries on the side. When she took them back in to Hawk he was frowning at the screen. She slid a sandwich down next to him and sat down on the couch to eat hers, waiting to hear from him what was upsetting him.

“Well, I haven’t found anything else. This guy covered his tracks really well. We actually were quite lucky he didn’t think of the backup copy or we would have been out of luck.

“Darn. Now what?”

Hawk grabbed a half a sandwich, smelled it, and took a bite that wiped out half of it.
I should have made him two
, Vivian thought.

“Well, the way I see it, we have to figure out two things. Who your mom was, so we can do an investigation about what exactly happened to her. I’m going to check into missing person reports shortly. And we have to find out who the hacker is, so what else we can connect him to and find him and arrest him. My brain is fried right now though. I might need to take a walk or something.”

Vivian nodded. She sat and let the situation run through her brain, idly thinking about it. She grabbed her tablet and typed i./ into Google. The search engine didn’t recognize it. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger, thinking but not thinking.

She typed in iperiod/, i period slash. Nothing that made sense.

Hawk finished his sandwich in three more bites and went back to work. The strawberries disappeared just as quickly.

“The police department’s database is different, he told her over his shoulder. They’ve been computerized since the 1970s, but on Wang computers, which they actually still use for certain functions, even though the company that made them doesn’t even exist anymore. I can get in there and search but the interface is so different than modern databases I don’t know how much luck I’ll have.”

He was quiet for several more minutes. Vivian lay her head back on the couch and closed her eyes, letting her mind run freely. It was the way that she had always thought about difficult things and it worked well for her.

In several moments he spoke again. “Well, there aren’t any missing person reports in Westwood Harbor during that entire year that I can find that match who we are looking for.”

“What about runaways?” Vivian said idly.

“Runaways! Good thinking.” The keyboard sang out his search.

Suddenly, Hawk sucked in his breath. Vivian sat straight up and looked at him. He bolted to his feet, sending his chair backwards.

“I found her! I’ve got a name! Christie Callahan! Vivian we did it!” He ran to Vivian and pulled her to a standing position, grabbing both her hands and pulling her around in a little circle. To Vivian, the whole act seemed in slow motion. She could feel the roughened callousness of his large hands against her skin. She lost herself in it, trying to memorize every sensation. Tonight, when she thought of him, she’d think of this moment.

“We did it! We found her!” His smile split his face practically in two.

Hawk’s exuberant display startled Vivian. She had never seen him act anything like this. She wouldn’t call him surly, but he was always more reserved, quiet even. It turned him from a big, brawny bear of a man to a sweet, innocent boy. She laughed and whirled around with him. When he stopped and stared in her eyes, for just a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. Her breath caught in her throat at the thought. But the moment fled.

Instead, he dropped her hands and started talking a mile a minute, pacing back and forth in front of her. About who Callahan was and how now that they had a name they could find and interview her family. About how this could be the biggest break they’d ever had. About how this might be the piece of evidence that broke everything wide open. If he could put all of this together and plug the pieces in that connected Norman to the Senator, Norman could be convicted, the Senator could be convicted, justice would be served, and Hawk could clear his name and they could go home.

Vivian sat back down and watched him with a smile on her face. She loved seeing him excited. She loved being his confidante. She loved - his phone rang.

Hawk looked at it pressed the pick up button. “Craig, you aren’t going to believe this, man. I’ve got some amazing news!”

Hawk stopped talking, his face screwed up in confusion. “Ok, you go ahead then.”

Vivian watched the excitement slip off his face to be replaced by first anger, then confusion, then anger again. Craig was talking loud enough that she could make out a little bit of what he was saying. Something about Hawk’s truck being searched by the DEA and a prisoner dying.

Craig stopped talking. Hawk made some notations on his notepad. “Ok, I’m going to see if I can get a look at the results of that warrant when it’s filed. What’s your plan now?”

Hawk listened a bit more and then said, “Sounds good. Ready for my news yet?” He listened, then went on. “We’ve got a name on Vivian and Emma’s mother. Christie Callahan. This should take precedence I think. See if you can find her.”

Hawk explained the rest of the story to Craig and hung up, his enthusiasm gone.

He turned to Vivian. “Well, we’ve had a lot of setbacks today, but it doesn’t matter. You know what I need? A really big white board. If we go buy one can I hang it up on one of your walls?”

“Of course.”

They took the car to the town and he filled her in on the details that Craig had shared. But she only listened with half an ear. What she was really thinking about was that one moment when it seemed he might lean his face down and kiss her. That moment that she wanted with all her being.

W
hen they returned, Vivian helped Hawk hang the whiteboard on the long wall of the living room, but instead of using it he mumbled something about “checking something” and darted back to the computer. Curious, Vivian followed.

Hawk stared at the screen and clicked away with his mouse, obviously deep in thought. Vivian sat down and picked up her tablet to read. 

“I just want to see if I can find any more instances of that I period slash. Maybe it does mean something. Maybe the hacker marked his jobs with it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Arrogance. Or just stupidness. It happens a lot more often than you’d think. Usually arrogance.”

Vivian shook her head. That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

45 minutes later he pushed his chair back again. Slowly he turned to her with a huge grin on his face for the second time that day. This one was different though. It didn’t look like a happy grin to her, but more predatory. Like he was a lion closing in on a gazelle. It excited her and scared her at the same time.

“I period slash is not in any of the other city databases that I can find, except for the police incident database. And it’s in there
nineteen
times.”

Vivian put her tablet down and thought about this. “Does that mean-?”

Hawk cut her off. “Yes, it is almost guaranteed that this is what we are looking for. I am positive that we are breathing down Oberlin’s neck right now.”

Hawk pushed out of the chair and strode back to the whiteboard. He wrote
1983
in the upper left hand corner and, beneath it,
Christie Callahan - died in childbirth
, and beneath that,
Senator Oberlin’s children
.