Mercy

‘Juanita, there was something you said earlier…’

‘Yes?’

‘About the freezer where they found the breast tissue.’

‘What about it?’

‘You said “technically it was his mother’s freezer.”’

‘Well he still lived with his mother.’

‘Were his parents divorced?’

‘No, they were never married. I don’t think they even lived together.’

‘So it couldn’t have been his father who killed Dorothy?’

‘Not unless he suddenly came back into their lives, just long enough to murder a girl that his son clashed with at school.’

She was smiling to soften the blow. But he could see how silly she thought his idea and realized himself that it was he, rather than his client, who was clutching at straws.

‘What about his mother?’

‘What you mean—like, “how dare you be nasty to my son!” kind of thing?’

‘Okay, you’ve made your point,’ Alex replied, embarrassed.

‘No, I’m not saying you should drop it altogether. It might be worth checking her out. Just let’s not put too much hope in a long shot.’

Before Alex could reply, the intercom buzzer sounded.

‘Yes?’ Juanita answered.

‘UPS. We have a special delivery from Sunnyvale.’

Juanita looked up.

‘Dorothy’s laptop,’ she said. Alex nodded. ‘Bring it up,’ she said into the intercom, pressing the buzzer to open the door.

Five minutes later Juanita was looking through the folders and files on the laptop, while Alex was in the other room with Nat.

‘Listen, I was talking to Juanita about Clayton’s mother. I think we should check her out. Clayton lived in the apartment with her and she had access to everything that he had access to.’

‘Like what?’ asked Nat.

‘The knife he kept under his pillow, the floorboards, the freezer.’

‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have had access to Dorothy. She’d’ve had to find her and either kill her and dispose of the body, or force her to some location and then kill her.’

‘Well maybe she did. I mean, we don’t know when or where Dorothy was killed. Or how.’

‘Not to mention the small matter of motive.’

Alex felt like he was facing a wall of resistance on all fronts.

‘The point is, we don’t know enough to rule his mother out a hundred percent! And right now it’s all we’ve got!’

Nat backed off from Alex’s display of frustration.

‘Okay, so how do you want to play it?’

‘I want you to go over there and talk to her.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘San Pablo. The Circle S Mobile Home Park.’

‘The one they’re closing down?’

‘Right.’

‘You sure she hasn’t moved on already?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

‘I’ll get right on it.’

Nat grabbed his keys and jacket and was out the door within five seconds. Alex returned to the reception area to find Juanita pounding at the laptop with an unusual amount of aggression, while peering at the screen with a look of intensity that he didn’t often see in her.

‘Has that computer disrespected your family?’ he asked, putting on his croakiest Brando/Don Corleone accent.

She looked round, her expression a mixture of confusion and anger, to see a puerile grin on his face.

‘Ha fuckin’ ha.’

Alex walked up to see what was going on.

‘There’s something strange about this computer.’

‘Strange?’ he echoed.

‘The hard disk has been wiped.’

Alex looked at the screen. Juanita was using Norton Utilities to inspect the disk content at a raw-data and deleted-file level.

‘So how come it’s still working?’

‘I don’t mean they reformatted it. I mean that all the deleted files have been overwritten. Normally the deleted files remain on the hard drive until the space is needed. It just deletes the directory entry and tells the directory that the space is available. But there are programs that overwrite the deleted files completely—sometimes making several passes with the erase head just to make sure.’

‘And why would anyone do that?’

‘What kind of a chicken-shit question is that?’ She sounded cute when she was angry. ‘To delete any trace of the files and stop them from being recovered!’

‘That implies there was something in them worth deleting.’

‘No shit, Sherlock.’

Alex leaned forward, peering at the screen with growing excitement.

‘Making it all the more important that we recover their contents.’

‘Which would be very nice, except there’s no way we can do that.’

‘Maybe there is.’ The phone was already in his hand by the time he said it. ‘Let’s call David.’

‘David?’

‘My son.’

‘The one at Berkeley?’

‘I only have one son.’

‘How do you know?’ she asked with a cheeky grin. Alex sensed that there was more to Juanita’s displays of impertinence than mere mockery. Melody had been just like that. It was her way of flirting with him. He wondered if it was the same with Juanita. She had certainly given him a few hints. He wondered how much of it was real and how much was just his imagination.

The lawyer in him knew that office romance was a dangerous game at the best of times—especially with a subordinate. If he did decide to go down that road, he’d have to tread carefully. But in any case it was a bit too early: the pain of losing Melody was still too raw…and today was hardly a day to be thinking about that sort of thing.

Juanita pressed the speed dial button and then handed Alex the phone.

‘Hi, Dave…Yes, I am, but I need your help…We have a computer with a hard disk that’s been wiped…No, I don’t mean reformatted, just the deleted files have been overwritten…How many passes?’

Alex looked inquiringly at Juanita. She shook her head.

‘We don’t know. But what I want to know is…it is? Scanning tunneling…’

Juanita mouthed the word ‘microscope’ to show that she understood.

‘You mean only if she just wiped it once? Oh I see. Okay, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’ll courier it over.’

And with that he put the phone down.

‘He can recover the data,’ said Juanita.

‘How d’you know?’

‘When I hear one side of a phone conversation, I can usually figure out the other. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.’ She started walking away.

‘I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the dialogue between Achilles and the Turtle.’

‘Besides—you’re smiling.’

12:20 PDT

‘Mrs Burrow?’ Nat called out nervously through the closed door of the mobile home. No answer. ‘Anyone home?’ Still no answer.

Nat opened the door, tentatively, and gingerly stepped inside. Technically it was trespassing, but the door was unlocked and time was of the essence. He looked round nervously. The living room was a mess. Surveying the ashtrays and half-empty plates with three-day-old, dried-out food encrusted on them, the words ‘trailer trash’ came to mind.

He was about to start looking round when he was shocked to hear the sound of a flushing cistern—and he realized that he was not alone after all. For a few seconds, he waited with some degree of trepidation, looking in the direction of the bathroom and wondering if he was going to be confronted by a Stanley Kowalski type in a wifebeater.

To his relief, the figure that emerged was female, albeit the female equivalent of Stanley Kowalski. Sour-faced and borderline angry, she was closer to her mid-century than her youth. Under her eyes, the bags were noticeable, and although she wasn’t currently smoking, she looked as if she ought to have a cheap cigarette dangling from her lips.

‘Who are you?’ she sneered.

‘My name is Nathaniel Anderson.’

He held out his business card. Her eyes dropped to his outstretched hand, but she made no effort to take the proffered card, or even gave any indication that she was interested in looking at it. He put it away in his breast pocket.

‘Are you Sally Burrow?’

‘Who wants to know?’

He realized that she was just being melodramatic, but a little clarification was called for.

‘I work for a lawyer called Alex Sedaka.’

‘I don’t like lawyers,’ she snarled.

‘Neither do I,’ he replied, trying to sound chummy. ‘But a man’s got to earn a living.’

Her face remained as sour as ever. He debated making a second attempt to break the ice but rejected the idea on the grounds that the humor would probably go over her head.

‘So, are you Sally Burrow?’

‘Last time I checked,’ she said.

‘Mr Sedaka—the man I work for—is representing your son.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Sedaka…Alex Sedaka.’

‘No, I mean, who d’you say he’s representing?’

‘Your son.’

‘I don’t have no son.’

‘Clayton. Your son Clayton.’

‘He ain’t no son of mine!’ she shouted, flopping into a chair. ‘Not anymore.’

Nat looked at her, trying to assess the situation, unsure of how to proceed. He decided to sit down too, taking the fact that she was seated as tacit permission to do likewise.

‘I presume you disowned him after he murd—after he killed Dorothy Olsen.’

‘You can call it murder if you like,’ she said, finally taking out and lighting the cigarette that ought to have been in her mouth all along. ‘I believe in calling a spade a spade.’

Nat realized that Sally Burrow was a lot more astute than he had given her credit for. The fact that she had picked up on his reluctance to use the word ‘murder’ proved that. He realized that he would have to tread carefully and not underestimate her intelligence, or at least her cunning.

‘And that was when you disowned him?’

‘Not immediately.’

‘But that was why you disowned him.’

‘Right.’

‘When did you decide he was guilty?’

‘I don’t really remember. I guess it happened…kind of gradually.’

‘Well what did you think when he was arrested?’

‘I didn’t know what to think.’

‘Did you stand by him during the trial?’

‘I didn’t go to the trial.’

‘So you already thought he was guilty by then.’

‘What else was I supposed to think? With her panties under the floorboards in his bedroom and her blood on them? And his jizz!’

‘You don’t think it could’ve been planted?’

‘Gimme a break!’

‘Okay, so let’s say he’s guilty. That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t stand by him.’

‘Why the fuck should I?’

‘I mean…he is your son.’

‘I already told you. I ain’t got no son.’

‘Did you have one before the murder?’

Sally Burrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I was wondering if maybe you saw the signs of the way your son was going before he killed Dorothy Olsen.’

‘Are you tryin’ to make out that I…knew what he was gonna do? Like I’m some kind of a…accessory to what he done?’

‘No, I’m not suggesting that you knew he was going to kill Dorothy. I was just wondering if there were any early signs of Clayton turning into the sort of person that he eventually turned into…if you see what I mean.’

‘We didn’t talk much. He had his life and I had mine.’

Nat seemed to be having trouble digesting this.

‘Didn’t talk?’ he echoed.

‘Didn’t talk,’ she confirmed, drawing on her cigarette.

What he said next surprised even him.

‘Has it occurred to you that if you’d given him more attention and affection he might not have become the violent person that he became?’

He didn’t know afterward what had possessed him to say it. But in some strange, indefinable way, he was glad that he had.

Sally Burrow looked as if she’d just been poleaxed. Her lower jaw dropped open and the cigarette fell to the floor.

‘You’ve got a fuckin’ nerve comin’ into my home and talking to me like that!’

‘All I meant was—’

‘I don’t need you preachin’ to me! Get the fuck out of here!’

She was on her feet now, lurching toward him, and he noticed that she was not a small woman by any stretch of the imagination. He twisted sideways like a corkscrew as he rose from the seat to avoid her menacing onslaught and sprinted the few steps to the doorway.

She was still chasing him out in the yard when he had opened up a distance of twenty yards between them. Puffing through her smoker’s lungs, to be sure, but still chasing.

He was just glad she didn’t have a gun.

12:31 PDT

The young man sat cross-legged on the floor before the shrine in his apartment in Daly City, his eyes closed. He was trying to remember Dorothy, remembering her kindness toward him even when he was at his lowest ebb. He remembered one time when she had faced particular brutality. He had watched from a safe distance but had been too frightened to say a word. Afterward he had run into her arms crying and it had been she who had comforted him. There were tears in his eyes now as he opened them.

He looked at the clock on the wall. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon he would have closure. In his pocket he had a piece of paper that was most precious to him. It was a spectator’s pass that allowed him to go to San Quentin and witness the execution.

The TV was on in the background. But the sound was turned down. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts until it was time to go to the penitentiary. But at the same time, he wanted to stay in touch, to hear about further developments on the case.

Clayton Burrow had a very savvy and tenacious lawyer, he had heard. And a smart and savvy lawyer wasn’t going to give in until the fat lady sang.

He wondered how Burrow was feeling as he awaited execution. What was going through his mind? Was he afraid? Terrified? Or maybe he was just resigned to it. Maybe he just didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care about others or how much pain he had caused them.

Stop it! he ordered himself.

But he couldn’t stop it. It had been in the news so much these last few days that it was hard to think about anything else.

On the rolling TV news, Dorothy’s face appeared for the umpteenth time. It gave way a few seconds later to that of Martine Yin, with the governor’s San Francisco office as her backdrop. Jonathan would have ignored it, but the words ‘breaking news follow-up’ flashed up, causing him to grab for the remote control. In haste he pressed the button to turn the sound up.

‘So far the governor’s office refuses to confirm even that there is an offer on the table. But we can confirm that Burrow’s lawyer Alex Sedaka visited Burrow in prison right after his meeting with the governor and left the prison less than half an hour later. At this time we have no information on whether Burrow has accepted the offer.’

The young man’s face was dissolving into confusion as he struggled to understand what Martine Yin was saying.

Offer? What offer?

‘Similarly, we have been waiting outside the governor’s office for any word of the outcome from this quarter. One thing we do know is that even if Clayton Burrow were to reveal where he buried the body, they would still have to dig it up and confirm that it was the body of Dorothy Olsen before granting him clemency, but—’

‘No!’ the sound echoed from the young man’s mouth, partly the plaintive whine of a frustrated child, partly the angry roar of a wounded lion. Blinded by rage, he picked up the nearest object and hurled it across the room. The telephone landed against the wall with a smashing sound, and bits of plastic flew off in all directions.

The picture changed to that of the steps of the Federal Supreme Court with a legion of reporters milling about trying to interview a man who looked like he didn’t really want to talk.

‘These latest developments follow on from the valiant efforts of Burrow’s lawyer Alex Sedaka to secure a stay of execution and a re-trial for his client.’

It was recent footage of Alex emerging from the Supreme Court, despondent after his failed attempt to get the original trial verdict overturned.

‘Only a few days ago, Mr Sedaka was in Washington DC, arguing before the Supreme Court that his client didn’t have a fair trial because of differences in two obscure court rulings.’

The lawyer was flanked on one side by his assistant who was holding Alex’s briefcase and looking down in a somewhat bashful, self-effacing manner. Alex was speaking silently, answering the questions as they were thrown at him. But the sound of his voice was absent. Only Martine Yin’s voiceover could be heard.

‘Once these arguments were rejected, Sedaka had no choice but to throw himself upon the mercy of Governor Dusenbury. And Dusenbury’s mercy appears to be carrying a price tag. The question remains: is Clayton Burrow—who has always maintained his innocence—able and willing to meet that price?’

The young man smiled now as an idea flashed into his head.

He walked across the room to the phone and picked it up. No dial tone. The impact with the wall had damaged it. He would just have to find another handset.

12:40 PDT

David Sedaka had to pull strings to leapfrog the queue for the scanning tunneling microscope at the Berkeley lab. But he was an old hand at university politics and he knew which strings to pull. There had been a bit of grumbling about this. One aggrieved PhD student pointed out that Sedaka was a theoretical physicist not an experimental one. Theoretical and experimental physicists regarded each other with mutual disdain: the thinkers and the stinkers was the way the former group liked to describe it.

David was a member of the Joint Particle Theory Group at Berkeley, where he was developing exotic theories on anti-matter and gravity. He had recently published a paper called ‘Unilateral anti-matter decay in an accelerated expansion universe,’ in which he had advanced the revolutionary prediction that anti-matter possessed neither gravity nor anti-gravity but was subject to the gravity of matter and could decay into photons on its own without needing to collide with matter.

In appearance, he was the epitome of a nerd: slightly short, wearing glasses—even though he could afford laser surgery—and with dark hair so curly that it was rumored that he used hot rollers and foil to keep it that way.

He had removed the hard disk from the computer and had carefully separated the platters, removing them from the spindle. Then he had placed the first platter in the chamber under the head of the scanning tunneling microscope.

There was an old and ongoing debate in the computer industry as to whether it was possible to recover overwritten data from a computer hard disk with a scanning tunneling microscope. One of the more common scaremongering rumors was that the data was never deleted completely because the magnetization that overwrote it ‘was not in exactly the same place on the disk as the original bit’ or because the ‘magnetization levels varied.’

There were even rumors that the National Security Agency was routinely recovering erased data in this way. In fact, a number of computer companies had made an awful lot of money, at the expense of gullible and paranoid computer users, by selling them products that promised to overwrite their deleted data with ‘multiple passes’ and offering them ‘military level’ security.

The reality was that it was practically impossible to recover overwritten data from the newer computers, or data that had been overwritten with more than one pass. With older computers, where each ‘bit’ was spread out more than on modern computers, you might be able to recover data that was overwritten with a single pass. But that was about it.

The good news for David Sedaka was that this computer was about ten years old and the hard disk was only five gigabytes and so the bits were spread out over a larger area. The other piece of good news was that the data had been wiped with only one pass, as far as David could determine. That meant that he could recover it—in theory.

The trouble was, there was so much of it. Where to begin? The reality was that data recovery was as much an art as a science. You could start off by looking at the directory and the tables that allocate file space, but they too may have been changed or overwritten. And also, a file that was created and then changed a few times, might be ‘fragmented.’ In other words, different parts of it might be stored on different parts of the disk.

In practice, what this meant was that even if part of the task of recovering data could be automated, a lot of it was a hunt-and-find exercise. And that had to be done painstakingly, using subjective judgement.

David knew that it was going to be a long day.

But as he looked at some of the data he had recovered, he felt as if he might have found something interesting already. He decided to tell his father. The trouble was, he’d had to leave his cell phone outside the lab in case it interfered with the sensitive electronic apparatus. Now he went to get it—and he was walking briskly.

12:46 PDT

While Alex and Juanita waited for Nat to return and David to report back, they sat on opposite sides of her desk looking through the old high school yearbooks. Juanita had already been online, looking at legal records of name changes. And Alex, in desperation, had taken it a stage further by looking at a website describing the meanings of names, in a futile effort to try and work out what Dorothy might have changed her name to. He hadn’t come up with anything plausible—and he knew it was an outlandish idea to begin with—but he was desperate for anything that might help.

Right now, they were looking for anyone who could tell them anything about what was going on when Dorothy disappeared. The trouble was, most of the phone numbers were old and out of date. Of course Alex and Juanita could look up the numbers elsewhere, but some of the numbers were unlisted. In other cases, they were able to find a landline number, but it was daytime, so most of the people were out at work. All they could do was leave messages and hope that the people would call them back while there was still time.

As Alex pored over one of the yearbooks, he realized that he had spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the class photographs, as if hoping to find some clue in the faces of Dorothy or Clayton. Dorothy looked sad, her doleful eyes staring out at the camera, as if her sad life were written into them. In some ways she reminded him of his daughter Debbie. They would have been practically the same age in fact.

Not that Debbie’s life had been sad. Perhaps that was why the eyes stood out as a point of difference. But Alex tried not to think about Debbie’s eyes. They were Melody’s eyes too, and to look into them was to see his late wife resurrected before him. That was why it was so much easier with Debbie living across the other side of the country. The memory of his late wife twisted like a knife inside his gut. But he had to put it out of his mind for now. Today was not the day to dwell on his own misery.

It was then that he noticed something strange.

‘Juanita?’

‘Yes, boss?’ She spoke irritably.

‘Will you stop calling me that?’

‘What do you want me to call you? “Master”?’

‘You don’t have to call me anything.’

‘Are you ever going to tell me what you wanted to say a second ago or are we going to spend the rest of our lives discussing what I should call you?’

He sighed with irritation. The truth of the matter was that they were both in over their heads and feeling the pressure.

‘Take a look at these pictures.’

He slid the two yearbooks across the desk to her. They were both open on the double page spreads of the relevant class photographs, one Dorothy’s junior year, the other her senior.