Online in the Mystical Realms of Everland, Ophelia wasn’t Ophelia Moyer, but Eric the Mage, an elf wizard who had amassed a fortune in griffin’s gold with his famed Worstalk, the magic wand that could both save and destroy.
And Jonas Carvel was Mercenweaver, a cyclops who possessed a mirror shield that could reflect back any spell onto the person casting it.
Ophelia didn’t know about Jonas, but there were many days when she would have preferred being Eric the Mage to being Ophelia.
Eric the Mage and Mercenweaver had begun a tentative friendship, still online but not within the main arena of the game. Gradually they talked a little bit about their real lives and the parallels they shared. Both of them worked daily with crimes, he with computers at the King County District Attorney’s Office, she as a Portland private investigator who specialized in solving crimes against women.
A few weeks ago Ophelia had slipped and revealed that she was actually a girl, an idea that seemed to fascinate Jonas.
When Jonas’s name showed up in a chat bubble a few days ago, Ophelia almost clicked the X to close it. But then she read that he was seeking her help—not as Eric the Mage, but as a PI. A woman he worked with had been murdered, and he was trying to figure out if her death was related to the earlier murder of another co-worker. So far, his search of the office’s database had come up with nothing.
The problem sounded interesting. Ophelia had long wielded her magic, not just in Everland, but also with the Dow Jones. Her uncanny ability to see patterns had made her rich—in money, at least. It had also given her the ability to take on cases solely on the basis of whether they piqued her interest. She told Jonas she would drive up the next day to see if she could help deduce the answer. Just after lunch she met him outside the King County Courthouse.
Jonas turned out not to look anything like his avatar, other than that they were both blond. On the computer his alter ego, Mercenweaver, had biceps as big as barrels and high, chiseled cheekbones. Jonas was altogether softer and rounder, without a single hard edge.
The look he gave her made it clear he was not at all disappointed that she bore no resemblance to Eric the Mage, with his pointed ears and velvet robes. Objectively, Ophelia didn’t believe she was attractive. Yes, she was height-weight proportionate and her face was symmetrical, but those qualities weren’t unusual. She had blond hair, but it was what was known as dishwater blond.
At the main desk Jonas flashed his ID at the security guard. Ophelia had to show her driver’s license and sign her name. “Folks in your office are sure working long hours these days,” the guard said to Jonas as they went through the metal detector. “People are even coming in on weekends.”
“We’re trying to figure out who killed Colleen Miller,” Jonas said, straightening his shoulders. To Ophelia, he seemed to be placing himself in the center of the investigation.
He led her down the hall to what he had called his office, but turned out to be a cubicle. He sat in front of his computer while she leaned down to look over his shoulder.
“I was asked to look for any defendants that Colleen Miller and Stan Slavich had in common,” he said. “I wrote the program so that it checked for misspellings, as well as common nicknames.”
She guessed he was looking for approval, so she nodded. But she was really focused on the code on his screen.
“I also checked for defendants who had connections to the same groups, like the Mob or neo-Nazis. The thinking was that Stan and Colleen had both prosecuted the same defendant or group, which resulted in revenge killings. But I only came up with a handful of matches, and they’re either dead or seem unlikely to be behind this.”
“Well, that’s where you probably made your mistake,” Ophelia said. “Do you mind if I . . . ?” She leaned into his space until he got the hint, got up, and gave her his seat.
Regular people—or neurotypicals, as they were called on the websites Ophelia liked to visit—craved variety. They thought two hundred flavors of ice cream were better than two. They would happily buy something that served the same purpose as an item they already owned, just because it differed in some nonessential way, such as color.
But when it came to computers and databases and information, neurotypicals wanted everything simplified and dumbed down. Ophelia could wear the same thing every day, just as long as it was more or less clean, but when it came to data, the trick was to throw your focus as wide as possible. The people who had asked Jonas to search had done the opposite.
“The program needs to be rewritten to check all the variables. Maybe it’s not the same defendant,” she said, as her fingers flew over the keyboard. “Maybe it’s the same witness. Or the same judge. You had all these factors to work with, but you limited yourself to just one.”
Two hours later Ophelia found a hint. And the more she looked, the more she found.
It wasn’t the same defendant. It wasn’t even the same judge or the same witness.
Jonas brought Ophelia in to meet Mia Quinn, the prosecutor working on the murdered woman’s case, and Charlie Carlson, the homicide detective. Mia had to borrow an extra chair from a co-worker’s office before the four of them could sit around her small round table.
They hadn’t even sat down when Jonas burst out with the answer. “It was the same victim.”
“The same victim?” Charlie echoed.
“Let me explain,” Ophelia said. “I widened the search to look for anything the cases of Colleen Miller and Stan Slavich had in common. Not just the defendant. Anything. Witnesses, judges, charges. There was a lot of overlap, as you can imagine. But eventually this is what I—we”—she corrected herself, mindful that this was important to Jonas—“found. Stan Slavich and Colleen Miller both prosecuted murder cases involving the same victim.”
“So there were co-defendants with separate trials?” Mia asked.
“No.” The words crowded into Ophelia’s brain. She resisted the urge to jiggle her leg. Recently she had learned that this behavior was distracting to others. “Two men charged with the same crime, but the first one was actually innocent. Five years and seven months ago, six-year-old Laura Lynn Childers was found in a park two blocks from her home. Beaten to death. Probably sexually assaulted. Nearly five years ago Stan Slavich prosecuted the girl’s neighbor, eighteen-year-old William—Willy—Mercer for the crime.”
A kid who had dropped out of school in ninth grade, Willy had been considered a weird loner. Ophelia’s mouth had twisted when she read that. If you didn’t fit in, if you weren’t in lockstep, then neurotypicals thought there was something wrong with you.
“No DNA evidence linked him to the crime. All they had to go on was a single witness ID. At night. A block away. But that witness picked Willy out of a lineup.” Ophelia gave in to the need to lecture. Her college professors hadn’t appreciated her tendency to answer other students’ questions before they could. For Ophelia, information could be like a fire hose. Once she opened it, it sprayed out full force. “However, one problem with a lineup is that if the witness doesn’t see the person who was actually there, they will still pick the person who looks most like him. Another is that the cop in charge of this lineup had had a past run-in with Willy, when Willy was charged with being a Peeping Tom. His parents always claimed he had been drawn to the Christmas lights on a tree, but the home owner was convinced that he had been peeping at her. While that case was ultimately dismissed, it still left room for bias when Willy was put into the lineup.”
Ophelia bit her lip so she would stop lecturing, wouldn’t point out that the gold standard was a double-blind lineup, one where the detective conducting the lineup didn’t know who the suspect was or where they were in the lineup so they couldn’t even inadvertently suggest who it was through a micro-expression, tone of voice, or even the way he held his body.
“After his arrest, Willy was interviewed for nearly twelve hours. During that time he did not request a lawyer. He asked several times if he could go home, but the police convinced him he needed to stay to help them.”
Neurotypicals were hardwired to want answers, to see patterns even if they didn’t really exist. But in many cases, evidence never pointed in one direction. There was no clear pattern, no obvious answer. Ophelia was sure that the cops had been convinced that they were right about Willy. Once they believed he was guilty, then they had only recognized evidence that served to confirm this unconscious bias. Evidence that didn’t had been discarded—again unconsciously.
Sometimes people missed details because they weren’t paying attention, but sometimes it was because they were concentrating too hard on something else. In a Harvard experiment that Ophelia found fascinating, neurotypical participants had watched a video of people dressed in either black or white passing a basketball. The subjects were told to count the number of passes made by players in white. During the test, a woman wearing a gorilla suit strolled through the players. About half the people who took the test never even noticed her.
Ophelia had spotted the woman in the gorilla suit the moment she stepped onto the court.
“Look,” Mia said, “you know that in the majority of cases, there’s no DNA. There are no fingerprints. In the real world, the bad guy wears gloves and throws the gun in a river. Yet justice demands that all crimes be prosecuted, not just the easy ones.”
“Does it?” Ophelia asked. “Should Willy really have been charged with kidnapping, rape, and murder if the only evidence linking him to the crime was a single witness?”
“But if there was nothing to contradict the ID, then you could argue that justice for the victim, her family, and the community demanded that Willy be charged,” Mia said. “And I remember a little bit about that case. Didn’t Willy confess?”
Ophelia’s mouth twisted. “If you can call it that.”
Questioned by people who were already half convinced of his guilt, Willy had finally agreed that he must have done it, that he must have gotten angry with Laura Lynn and hurt her without meaning to. One of the officers had hinted that it would all be over if Willy simply agreed. That they could let him go home.
So Willy had said yes. And then obligingly added details. But to an impartial observer, it was clear that the details he used were the same ones the police had inadvertently supplied to him during the long hours of questioning.
“You said Colleen also prosecuted someone for this girl’s murder,” Charlie said. “How is that possible?”
“Two years ago Laura Lynn’s mother divorced her second husband, the girl’s stepfather, and came forward with new evidence implicating him. Colleen then prosecuted him for the same crime Willy had already been convicted of. He’s now serving a life sentence.”
Mia’s mouth opened. “Wait. What happened to Willy?”
“He’s dead.” Ophelia didn’t try to sugarcoat it. In prison, a chi-mo—slang for child molester—was the lowest of the low. “Three weeks after he went to prison he was killed in the yard by a lifer. And less than two days after Willy died, Stan Slavich was murdered.”
“Why didn’t anyone figure that out back then?” Charlie asked.
“At the time no one realized Willy had been wrongfully convicted. They also limited themselves by looking at people who had recently gotten out of prison.” Ophelia pushed her fingernails into her palm so she wouldn’t blurt out that the error was not that different from the one they had made. They both stemmed from looking at a limited data set.
She reminded herself that it was now their turn to talk. Neurotypicals had so many unspoken rules. You weren’t supposed to monopolize the conversation. You weren’t supposed to stand too close. You weren’t supposed to stare. Ophelia worried she might have violated all of those since she entered this room. You also weren’t supposed to talk about death, sex, blood, or anything that happened in the bathroom. Taboos made no logical sense, but neurotypicals were oddly sensitive to them.
“We’ve got to take a look at Willy’s friends and relatives,” Charlie said. “Maybe one of them went after Stan because they thought he was responsible for Willy’s death. And then when Colleen prosecuted the real killer, they may have wondered where she was when Willy was being wrongfully convicted.”
Mia pressed her palms flat on the table. “They could have even believed Colleen was part of a cover-up.”