Black Cat Weekly #19

A REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY, by N.M. Cedeño-2

In fact, the only crimes that had increased were confidence schemes. Most of my cases involve protecting the credulous from cons or assisting the gullible in tracking lost assets. All the openness in society seems to encourage people to take too much at face value, leaving the door wide open for fraud and embezzlement. However, most people take these complaints to the police and not to me, so business is slow.

Using the pictures and the data Ms. Kalleigh had provided, it took me twenty minutes to learn that Subject A was a serial philanderer who lived in her neighborhood. He was listed on several relationship web-sites looking for dates without strings attached. His social networking pages showed him to be married with six kids. A quick review of his wife showed she knew of his activities and didn’t care.

Subject B was harder to pin down. License plate data didn’t come up with anything but cars registered to businesses, and the photo got no immediate matches. After trying all my sources, I still had a blank for subject B. That was enough to send up red flags. Nobody hid that well, not without trying.

I got my gear prepared for a day of surveillance and locked up for the night. I decided to start early, be at her apartment by six in the morning. Ms. Kalleigh would leave home for work at seven, and I’d be there and ready to observe.

* * * *

The doorbell rang at five the next morning while I was shaving. I could see the police officers waiting for me to answer the door as clearly as they could see me wiping my face.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” I asked as I opened the door.

“Are you Pete Lincoln?” said the first officer. From his rumpled pants and creased shirt, I guessed he’d been up for a while, probably all night.

“Yes.”

“Did you have a financial transaction with Mara Kalleigh yesterday evening?”

“She came to my business and hired me to do some work for her. Why?” I knew something had happened to her. I could feel it in the tension radiating off the officers. They had to be homicide or major crimes detectives.

“What did she hire you to do?” The first officer, a well-muscled specimen, was doing all the talking. The other, a stony faced individual, seemed to be there to listen.

“That’s confidential. Why do you want to know?” I asked again.

He looked me over slowly before he said, “Ms. Kalleigh was found dead outside her apartment last night.”

“How did she die?” I doubted they’d tell me. Homicide detectives prefer to keep details to themselves.

“We’re investigating her death as a homicide. We expect your cooperation. Withholding information from police regarding an ongoing investigation is a crime punishable with time in jail and hefty fines.” His speech was almost robotic, a monotone that indicated he’d delivered those lines hundreds of times and expected me to take them at face value. He wasn’t making a threat. He was merely stating fact.

Opening the door fully, I motioned for the detectives to come into my sparsely furnished but compulsively organized home. Withholding information was never an option. They’d have a court order in fifteen minutes, and I’d be charged with obstruction and booked in twenty. The officers had probably already accessed my internet search history since that was no longer private either. The larger internet search companies had turned over user information so many times without protest that the courts ruled users no longer had an expectation of privacy. I gave the officers the documents and images from Ms. Kalleigh, my research results, and a summary of the conversation I’d had with her.

“When was she killed?” I asked.

The robotic-voiced officer turned to leave, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Around eight o’clock last night. Good day, sir.”

The officers knew I wasn’t a suspect. When they accessed my internet search history, they would have found that I was still doing research online at the time of Ms. Kalleigh’s death.

Shortly after they left, I headed out as I’d planned. Only instead of doing surveillance, I went to ask questions. The police start with hard facts: details they collect from the web, such as financial data, the nature and extent of personal relationships, family history, medical history, political leanings, religious affiliation, hobbies, and life interests. They liked to leave the unreliable human witnesses with their biases and faulty memories for last. The police might not see Ms. Kalleigh’s neighbors for days, but I’m stuck in my ways. I still think the human version of a story might sometimes be better than the computer version.

I arrived at her address as the sun rose over the horizon, casting the world in a pinkish grey light. Ms. Kalleigh’s apartment complex was as she’d described: older, blue-painted buildings, each with one exterior wall replaced with the energy efficient, transparent Polyvendow. Stately shade trees had grown up in the middle of carefully planned, but generic, shrubbery. Seasonal flowers grew in well-mulched beds edging neat sidewalks. Looking up, I could see people going about their morning activities. I knocked on door after door. After an hour I gave up speaking to Ms. Kalleigh’s neighbors. This time, I thought, maybe the police’s “hard facts first” policy made sense. I hoped the complex manager would give me a less-biased picture of my client. The neighbors’ prejudices were making my skin crawl.

Once upon a time, living in a certain area of the city, having a certain skin tone, and being poor were considered indicators of criminality. We were winning the war against that kind of prejudice, but apparently people needed some new brand of prejudice to replace it. Now, trying to get a little privacy made people fear you and avoid you like you carried an antibiotic resistant disease. All of the neighbors I’d seen felt that they were well rid of Mara Kalleigh and whatever criminal elements with whom she associated. In their eyes, a woman who hung curtains must have been hiding something dangerous, nefarious, or violent. They all considered her death to be proof of their assumptions about her.

One twenty-something woman, her mouth full of toast, was ready to swear that Ms. Kalleigh poisoned her cat. A young married couple who were expecting their first baby had heard rumors that she was responsible for break-ins around the complex. An apartment full of college kids, who were sleeping off a night of drinking when I knocked, suspected Ms. Kalleigh of having addictions ranging from cigarettes, outlawed three years ago, to the newest heroin concoction. On top of that, almost everyone seemed to have been attending a residents’association meeting that ended at about the time of the killing. Then, they all left the meeting in groups, giving everyone an alibi. No one saw or heard anything.

I walked into the apartment management offices, which smelled of fresh-baked cookies. A quick glance located the air sanitizer producing the scent. A slim teenager sat behind a desk applying color bands to her nail tips. She looked up, and I asked her if I could speak to the manager. The teenager closed her manicure equipment with surprising alacrity and vanished into a back office area. In a moment, she returned with a hearty looking woman old enough to be my mother, but considerably more fit. This lady looked like she lifted weights competitively in spite of her slightly blue-grey hair.

She introduced herself as Jeannie, and I explained why I was there.

“Mara was a sweet, shy kid. She wasn’t into anything illegal or dangerous. She liked privacy and a little time away from the prying eyes of the world. I’ll miss her. She liked to share cinnamon rolls with me whenever she baked.” Tears formed in her eyes, and she swiped them away with a tissue hastily snatched from a box on the desk.

“Did you attend the residents’ association meeting last night?” I asked.

“No, we had a water leak reported in one of the units, and I had to take care of it. It looked like Niagara Falls in that bathroom.” Tears began to roll down her cheek. “I can’t believe someone killed her.”

“Ms. Jensen thinks her cat was poisoned by Ms. Kalleigh.”

“What! That cat was sixteen years old. It died of old age. Ms. Jensen knows that, but she’s still in denial. No one killed that cat. Mara Kalleigh was a little old-fashioned. She didn’t like being stared at or watched all the time, and she was kind. She would never have hurt that cat.” She motioned for me to join her on the sofa in the impersonally decorated lobby.

“I heard you had some break-ins recently. Have you had any other trouble?”

The girl at the desk was eavesdropping as expected. I met her eyes, and she didn’t even blink. Her generation had no concept of privacy.

“No, nothing. We had small items of jewelry taken, mostly during the day when people were at work.” Her eyes clouded and worry lines crinkled across her forehead. “I think a resident was involved, though, because whoever did it knew where all the cameras were and how to avoid them. They aren’t all easy to see. You’d have to live here or get the maintenance man to tell you where they were in order to find all the cameras. Who would do that kind of thing? I know the residents, and I’ve questioned the maintenance man. I don’t think he’s told anyone about the camera locations. He seemed genuinely horrified when I asked him about it.”

She paused to take a breath, and I interrupted, “Was Ms. Kalleigh killed in a camera blind spot?”

“Yes. Do you think she surprised the thief, and he killed her?”

“It’s a possibility. I have a picture to show you.” I pulled the picture of Subject B up on my tablet. “Do you know this man?” I watched her face as she looked at the picture.

“No, that is, I know he doesn’t live here. He seems familiar, like I’ve seen him somewhere before, but I don’t know where. Is he a suspect?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I need to identify him and see if he knows anything.” The girl at the desk was now standing to get a look at the photo. Turning to face her, I held it up so she could get a better look.

The girl eyed the picture for a second, “He’s the tech guy for the building operational systems. He’s here every few months to do updates. When equipment dies and needs replacing, they send him out, too.” She sat at the desk again.

“Do you have his name?”

“No, but I have the number I call when something needs fixing,” she said. She read the number to me.

“Thanks, um…” I paused, waiting for her name, but she didn’t supply it. She’d gone back to her nails. “What’s your name?” I asked.

The teenager spoke without looking up at me, “Toria.”

“Thanks, Toria.” Turning back to Jeannie, I asked one last question, “What was the resident meeting about last night?”

“Usually they plan a monthly social event, but they were also going to discuss security measures to take because of the break-ins,” she said.

“Thanks for your help.” I held out my hand, and she shook it daintily for someone so well-muscled.

* * * *

Tracking down the hired hand for January Technical Services took thirty minutes. With one call saying assistance was needed at the apartments, he showed up. Watching him get out of his truck, I compared him to the photograph. He was definitely the right guy.

“Excuse me, sir. Could I ask you a question?” I called out as I approached him. He didn’t run, and he didn’t look defensive. He waited for me.