Ken is on his own for dinner. He doesn’t want to hear about what I did today. Erin and I must make sense of what we copied. He wasn’t happy when I told him that I would be helping Emelina solve the fifty-year-old murder of Antoinette Sorrento Bidwell, but he didn’t stand in my way either. Some spouses might object or worse. We talk with words and not our hands. Neither of us takes the other for granted, and we still genuinely love each other fiercely and show it like the other night. But still, poking around in matters “best handled by the police,” as he is sometimes told by trades people he deals with, makes for awkward conversations, especially after I handle things better than the people who wear a badge. I did promise him that I would sign up for a self-defense class and carry a personal alarm/mace combo sooner rather than later.
I drive to Erin’s house and eat sloppy joes and Tater Tots with her bunch. It’s a weeknight, and she had no time to prepare a nicer meal. Her husband, Darren, gets to do bath time, but the three of us have one child each to read bedtime stories to before she and I get back to the digging.
“The technology has gotten better for optical character recognition, or OCR as it’s called. The archive search site Newspaper Archives is very robust and getting better all the time,” she tells me. “Let’s plug in a name or two and see what pops up.”
I shuffle through my photocopies and proffer, “Herman Kenrick. He was the Chief of Police back then. I have dozens of photos of him handing out awards or swearing in new officers.”
Erin types in his name and filters for twenty years in both directions from 1970. “487 hits. Looks like the last ones are his obituary in Lakeland, Florida in 1979.” She quickly builds an Evernote folder and send the PDFs to document storage software.
“One more,” she says.
“Burgess Bloodstone,” I say.
“Wow! This guy was busy. 1,079 entries from 1937 to 1987, when he died,” she says. Thinking for a moment with her hands poised above the keyboard, she asks, “What was the program that Kate and Marsha used in New Haven? Do you remember? I helped them with finding law school alumni from the late 1990s. It has everything we need to store names and index them. Gives us a timeline too.”
I shake my head. “I will find out.” I retrieve my phone.
“Gwen, how is my favorite amateur sleuth?” my favorite FBI agent, Marsha O’Shea, asks after we exchange hellos on the phone.
“I’ll tell Erin you are asking for her,” I say. Marsha always has a way of making me blush.
“You’ve had some fun since the last time we worked together,” she tells me. “Erin keeps me up to date.”
I give a raised eyebrow to my daughter. “Well, she does contract for the FBI, so I am sure she might have reason or two to chat with you, Special Agent O’Shea.”
“What’s up, Gwen? How can I help?”
“The software you used on the New Haven case, what was it called?”
“CaseSoft.”
“How much is it?” I ask.
She laughs. “I used the company credit card. I got it with all the bells and whistles. I didn’t bother to price it.”
I tell Erin the software name, then she types and whistles. “How serious are you about your hobby, Mom?” Erin shows me the website.
I look at the price. “Ouch. I can’t tell your father I am putting that on our credit card.”
“It’s a business expense,” Marsha says.
“Except I don’t have a business, remember. I need a PI license.”
We sit at the crossroads. I can’t use index cards for a half-century-old murder. What worked on the Stillman case doesn’t apply here, and that is when it hits me.
“I might be able to pull in a favor,” I tell Marsha. “Do you remember that criminal defense attorney you talked to on my behalf?”
“Your first case?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Erin and I talk with her for a few more minutes about the case, and she gives us a few more tips before she asks about Ken and I ask about her Joe, her partner. We ring off.
I type an email to the defense attorney who assisted me on the Stillman case. At the time, we had argued good-naturedly of who was assisting whom, but I refused to be part of her defense of the Stillman brother charged with two homicides.
It’s after nine p.m. and I don’t expect a reply. In the time I tell Erin what I am doing, my phone pings. The reply email reads,
So good to hear from you Gwendolyn. Yes, we use CaseSoft all the time, usually for Federal drug cases when we get tons of phone and wire intercept transcripts. Here is the link. I have restricted access to you only for your own cases. Good luck. Let me know how it turns out. Remember Spencer’s invitation to put you on his license.
I forward the email to Erin. “It’s only for our own stuff, Mom,” she says. “I can’t eyeball any of her cases whatsoever. The Bureau would frown on that.”
“Yes, that is what she said too.”
“We will have to do our own data input. Are you sure you want to go down this route?” she asks.
I think about it. This is way different than Billy and I walking around town and talking to people. Erin and I have to learn Antoinette’s connection around town in the years before her death. Marsha is telling me that we have to find the connections and then the interconnections between the people who knew her. A stranger in town would not know to hide the body in the Devlin mansion. That person would have to have intimate knowledge of the renovations to know that the room was being partitioned off.
I was never one for seat work. I learned to do student evaluations as efficiently as possible. Sitting for hours on end doing data input is not my idea of how to spend a winter’s day. I know the difference between the easy way and the right way.
“How else will we see the forest from the trees, Baby?” I tell Erin. I pick up a photocopy from my stack and pull one from her stack, then for good measure I take one from the high school yearbooks. I lay the three pieces of paper down like pieces to a puzzle. “How will I remember where I learned something, and where do I search for the connection that I saw during the review to know these three pieces of paper are connected?”
She nods. “Better still, with the OCR, some of the connections will be made for you and you don’t have to rely on your memory. We only have to do the input of this paper once, along with all the articles I find in Newspaper Archives.”
“You are offering to help me?” I ask.
“It’s darn cold outside, Mom, what else is there to do? Let’s get all this stuff entered and then we figure out who knew Antoinette and if they are still alive. I can’t imagine there are that many.”
“How much do we involve Emelina?” I ask.
My daughter doesn’t hesitate. “Every step of the way. Before we talk to anybody, we should consult with the Oracle.”
“The Oracle?”
“Greek mythology and The Matrix movies. For our purposes, it’s Emelina. How many small towns have a centenarian who lived there all their life and taught kindergarten to half the population? She knows so much more than we would ever learn from all these newspaper articles, and more importantly, she can make the connections.”
“What do you think are our chances, Erin?” I ask.
“It’s hard to say. A cold case that was never investigated in the first place is not going to be easy. We are going to find out how difficult it will be to recreate her life from fifty years ago.”
“We’ve only scratched the surface and look what we have so far. This is going to be a ton of work,” I say. I look at the CaseSoft program opened on her one screen with over a thousand articles written about just one person, albeit a prominent person in town whose photo is staring at me from her laptop. The three stacks of photocopied articles and yearbook pictures from the library are several inches tall. None of the folks we will be talking with went to kindergarten during my tenure. They will be from my mentor’s era. “I promised Emelina I would look into it for her.”
“When do we get started on this?” she asks.
“I’ll bring Emelina here after yoga tomorrow.” I already kissed and hugged my adorable grandchildren. I thank Darren for giving his wife and me time to sort this out. A new quest is starting. Where it will end up, I haven’t a clue, but I do know that Emelina, Erin, and I are a force to be reckoned with, and Milford better be prepared.
I step outside into the dead still night air. The stars shine brightly overhead. The moon dances in and out of scattered clouds. The Mustang roars to life, and I warm up in about ten minutes as I make my way home, hopefully to a warmer bed and an even warmer embrace.