Willow Glen Heist Read online

  Damian had given thought overnight again as to how he could use her mathematical brain and he thought he might have landed on the appropriate challenge for Lily - task her to design the artificial intelligence of his DNA processor. He’d see what she said when she arrived.

  Ariana worked on her areas of responsibility, ensuring the bills and employees were paid, setting up a process for each team member to manage a budget and order supplies, and developing an offer letter and package for Lily if their meeting worked out to mutual satisfaction. While she was the Chief Operating Officer for Damian’s company, it was really a part-time job and she often did the work from home only venturing into Richmond once a week or so.

  She was almost done with those tasks when Damian called her into his office with a sense of urgency in his voice. She arrived at his door frame and found him looking at the computer screen.

  He looked up and said, “Someone’s approaching your house.”

  She walked quickly do his desk and looked at the monitor. It appeared to Ariana that it was one of the silver sedans she’d suspected the previous day and she said so to Damian.

  “We’ll get images of the license plate, but let’s watch and see what he or she does. I wonder why this person is on your driveway now? They must have quickly discerned that Mrs. Abbott was not you, or perhaps they’ve already confronted her this morning.”

  “I hope she’s fine; scared would be ok, but I’d like her unharmed.”

  “I’ll check that out as soon as we’re done watching this; he should be hitting the pepper spray any moment.”

  No sooner had Damian said that, then the windows were doused in fluid. The driver had been listening for road sounds and therefore got a blast of juice through the driver side window.

  Apparently, one of the driver’s two eyes was hit as they saw a hand go to the face, the car stopped, and then it reversed uphill out of her driveway, after the window had been closed. They could barely see the city road given the angle of her driveway, but it appeared the driver had parked the car and was flushing the one eye with bottled water.

  “Take that you thug!” Ariana said with her hands raised in the air in victory and a smile on her face.

  Just then Angus appeared at the door with Lily in tow and looked quizzically at the pair of them, saying nothing.

  Damian looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, hi Angus and Lily. We’re just watching an intruder being run off from Ariana’s house.”

  “With what?” Angus asked.

  “We blasted pepper juice into the driver side window,” Ariana said. Then she walked over to Lily and said, “Hi, I’m Ariana, Jill of all trades here.”

  “Why is your house under attack? Since you had the pepper spray set-up, you must have expected the intruder.”

  Damian gave Ariana a look that said, ‘see I told you she was smart’.

  “It’s a long story for another day,” Damian said. “Ariana, why don’t you meet with Lily first and I’ll watch the screen. I think he or she is disabled, so it’s just a matter of waiting for the car to leave the vicinity.”

  Ariana hesitated wanting to watch the thug, but Damian said, “Go ahead and chat with Lily. I’m recording this and I’ll give you a shout out if any new action occurs. The thug’s eye irritation should last about four hours.”

  After a few seconds thought, she steered Lily to the second uncompleted floor of the company’s warehouse explaining, “This is for future expansion or maybe manufacturing.”

  Lily nodded and sat down in a little lounge they had set-up. Two minutes into the conversation, she could see why Damian wanted this woman as an employee. In some way, Lily reminded Ariana of Hermione – they both had an easy confidence that came from thinking they could outsmart the world.

  Forty-five minutes later Lily signed an employment contract and confidentiality agreement and agreed to a start date in three weeks. Despite the big salary increase, she wanted to work out her two week notice at the restaurant. Ariana had new found respect for Lily for that attitude. The third week, she'd take as a vacation. Lily had some ideas of her own to discuss with Damian and the team, but she never had the lab to experiment with her ideas and so she was excited to start this new journey of her life.

  When Ariana joined Damian in his office, she found him working on something else rather than watching the camera at her house.

  “Lily has joined the company. Did the thug leave the end of my driveway?”

  “Great and yes the thug left after about twenty minutes. I don’t know how he could see to drive nor could I see anyone arrive to help. It’s nearly impossible to not accidentally transfer pepper juice from one eye to the next so kudos to the man for managing to keep the one eye free.”

  “I hope I don’t accidentally harm the UPS delivery person or postman or just some poor pizza delivery person.”

  “You diverted your mail and deliveries this week, right?” Damian asked.

  “Yes, but accidents happen.”

  We’ll add a sign perhaps ten feet into the driveway that says something ‘Halt, fresh concrete ahead’ and that way if someone ignores the sign and gets hit with the juice they have no one to blame but themselves.”

  “Okay. I liked Lily and I think she’ll fit in with your collection of impossibly smart people.”

  Damian grinned at Ariana’s description and added, “You’re part of that group as well.”

  “Yeah I am. Someday we’ll have to introduce Hermione to Lily. They both have this confidence that they can solve the world’s problems because they’re so smart; I guess they’re rather like you, Damian. Short of hopping a car to the moon, there’s not much you can’t figure out.”

  “Actually it’s been five months and I haven’t figured out who Hermione’s parents are or if they’re dead or alive,” Damian said frustration in his voice.

  “Look at the bright side, the action I’m getting is a sign that something’s going on with her parents.”

  “Yeah I just wish we could catch these guys so we could question them,” Damian said with multiple scenarios running through his head.”

  “Let’s have a social event to introduce Lily and her son to our other staff and their spouses or partners before Lily starts. It’ll be a nice ice breaker.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “Baseball or football game?”

  “Lily’s waitress schedule would be hardest to schedule around, so find her availability and then we’ll see if baseball or football will fit in. I’m going to go tell the others about hiring her and her background and our plan for a sporting event.” Damian said as he stood up and left his office to go chat with Haley, Chris, and Angus.

  The rest of the day was quiet with everyone working on their projects. Damian heard the occasional crash from Haley working on the navigation system. Those crashes were so disruptive yet amusing that he was tempted to have her set up her test track upstairs, but there was a certain camaraderie with the sounds of failure, so he let it go. He and Ariana left in the late afternoon to return across the bay to Ariana’s house and head to school to pick up Hermione. They spent a few moments searching the area that the car had been on her driveway as well as the street. They saw two plastic water bottles that the thug had used to wash his eyes out. Damian used a piece of paper to pick them up and put them in separate paper grocery bags so he could dust them for fingerprints later.

  Chapter 15

  A few hours later, Damian was back in his lab dusting the water bottles for prints. It was a long shot as he was a fingerprint amateur, and surely people had touched the bottle during the manufacturing or shelf stocking process, so he didn’t have high hopes that it would lead anywhere. In fact now that he thought about it, this was his first attempt at fingerprinting. Of course he read up on it and studied some videos. He would have to see if he got a match.

  He practiced once by putting his own prints on a different water bottle hopefully in the position the thug held the bottle. He then sprayed the bottle
with aerosolized superglue. He looked for ridges, whirls, arches, and loops in his own fingerprints. He then did a search to see if his prints matched the national database.

  There was no match. That was either because he knew the database didn’t contain his prints or he did a poor job with his fingerprints. Okay time to move on to the bottle, but then he paused.

  Was he making a mistake by not contacting the police? He seemed to stumble from one clue to another without looking at the entire picture. He reiterated in his mind the statement he’d made to Ariana the day before - it had been five months and he was no closer to figuring out who Hermione’s parents were. Was it time to bring Natalie in to this case? Were the three of them at greater risk because they hadn’t reported things to law enforcement? Would the crime scene techs do a better job with evidence than Damian was doing? The answer to many of the questions was ‘yes’. So why didn’t he pick up the phone and talk to Natalie?

  The answer was that he feared it would take longer for law enforcement to solve the case of Hermione’s parents than the path he was taking. The few cases he worked on with Natalie were delayed on her end by the need to follow the laws of the police and the courts. Damian felt no compunction for walking all over those rules, especially privacy rules, in order to get to the truth. He saw those delays in action in Natalie’s cold cases and he wanted to make sure he didn’t see it in regards to Hermione’s life and future. He felt better for taking a long look at his decision making and reaffirming the direction he was going. He put those thoughts aside and moved on to a summation of Hermione’s situation. The fingerprints were put aside once again.

  Since they met Hermione, various thugs had touched their lives. He reviewed the thugs and events in his head. Any pictures or fingerprints that Damian lifted from their home had proven to have no matches in any system. The first thug, Nico Thomas was the man who inhabited Hermione’s parents’ house just after her parents were kidnapped or killed. Damian had no idea what heritage or race the man represented. The thug had spoken to police officials and they had accepted his explanation, so he must have had a normal accent; one that didn’t make the police suspicious. Perhaps he would go back and study the man’s movement on tape and see what he touched and go back into the house and grab some prints.

  Then there was the group of men in Mexico who had broken into their vacation home. The police in Cozumel seemed to have run out of leads on the men and so that represented a dead end. Then there was the Facebook message written in Chinese, and now there was the thug who attacked Ariana. Who were these people and what or who did they want? Hermione? Or something that Hermione knew? He really wished he could catch one of these guys to question him. Were they Chinese, Mexican, Indonesian, Columbian, or good ole American thugs?

  Finally he returned to the plastic water bottle that he had retrieved form the road near Ariana’s house and prepared the prints by spraying the bottle first with Superglue Spray, then dusted them with black carbon powder using a fine human hair brush. Fingerprints showed up on the main body of the bottle as well as the neck. He concentrated on the main body as that was how he saw the thug holding the bottle at the end of Ariana’s driveway.

  It looked to Damian’s untrained eyes that were four sets of fingerprints on the bottle. He studied them further for loops and arches and thought he saw the same set repeated three or four times on the bottle which was what he would expect if the guy had held the bottle while buying it or placing it into the car cup holder or picking it up to wash his eyes out. He made a copy of the print under good light with his camera and then uploaded to his computer. He then hacked his way into AFIS database to find a match.

  Thirty minutes later, there was no match which meant that the thug had no criminal conviction on record in the United States. He could still be a thug but never caught or just be foreign hoodlum. Or Damian thought, there was a third reason - maybe he was bad at fingerprinting.

  He paused and thought about his processing and the clarity of the print and decided that no it wasn’t in his technique, there simply wasn’t a match. Damian reviewed other places to look for a match but there were too many small databases and some of them contained just thumb prints.

  Damian picked up a plastic bottle; and the thumb print while holding the bottle was different from a thumb print used by many databases.

  He thought about swabbing the bottle for DNA trace but he really didn’t know what he was doing there, and if he couldn’t find the thug’s fingerprints, he was sure there would be no DNA registry that included him. There were more fingerprints on file than DNA records.

  He went back and reviewed the tape and looked at the car license plate. He assumed it was a rental or a stolen plate, but it never hurt to look. Checking into the DMV database, he found the car registered to a car rental agency at the San Francisco Airport. Cool, now he might get somewhere.

  The car was rented for two weeks beginning the previous Monday when Ariana had been attacked the first time. The individual renting it had a passport from Malaysia and the name on it was John Lee. Sure Damian thought, that was like John Doe in America. The individual paid cash for the rental, plus a two-thousand dollar deposit in case of damage to the car. A credit card wasn’t used for the transaction. Damian checked the VISA requirements for Malaysian citizens and none was required although immigration fingerprinted visitors upon entry. He thought about what he would do with those prints; then he realized they were worth obtaining as he could look at how often the man traveled to the United States.

  When he looked up that information, he discovered the man had only visited the U.S. once. Damian thought that was interesting information. Mr. Lee wasn’t part of the original hoodlum group that attacked Hermione’s home. Of course, he could have used a fake name and a different fake passport. Damian felt as though he was spinning in circles; he was discovering new information about the criminals, but at the end of the day he didn’t know what was truthful. It was time to put this aside and move on to the bank heist.

  Damian sat back and thought about what Lily had said about the bank heist. He should probably arrange a meeting between Lily and Natalie as she would eventually hear from her future daughter-in-law, Haley, about Lily’s background. Checking the time, he decided it was beyond polite hours to call her. Instead, Damian emailed a message concerning Lily’s background and comments and ended with a request for her not to tell Haley of Lily’s background. He was sure that Lily would tell the others in time, but he wanted it to be on her timeline and not anyone else’s.

  He got up from his computer to head upstairs to his bedroom for the night, when his cellphone rang. Looking at the caller ID, he saw that it was Natalie.

  “Aren’t you usually asleep at this hour?” he asked.

  “I’m finding in retirement that without an absolute need to wake up at a certain time to start my shift on time, my bedtime hours are much more flexible. So I read your email and had to call you. You have the widest circle of acquaintances I’ve ever met. I wonder if Haley has a secret life, since she seems to be your only employee with a traditional background.”

  “If Haley has a secret life, I haven’t seen it yet although you may not know that she can swear like a sailor. She’s been crashing her drone into fake buildings and letting loose expletives in frustration.”

  “I’d be worried, if she didn’t swear over that activity. I’d like to meet Lily. Can you arrange that tomorrow? You asked most of the questions I would have, but I have a few more. Besides it would be good for my soul to meet a reformed criminal. I don’t know if I have ever met one before let alone an extremely intelligent woman.”

  “I’ll contact her in the morning. You will have to come to Richmond as she’s balancing her time between a waitress job and a twelve year old boy.”

  “I can do that. I’ll head north just after nine in hopes of missing the worst of the traffic. If she can’t meet me until three, can I use some desk space at your warehouse?”

  “Yes, I’ll put
you upstairs so you’re not distracted by Haley’s crashes. She might have more of them with her future mother-in-law in the vicinity,” Damian said, amusement in his voice.

  “That will do. Why is she working as a waitress? I thought she had an engineering background if she’s going to work for you.”

  “She’s quite the stock market genius, so she doesn’t need the income; she works because it is a condition of her parole. She’s working out her two week notice out of respect for her current employer.”

  “Wow. I can’t wait to meet her; she sounds like such a contradiction - a criminal with morals.”

  Chapter 16

  While Damian and Ariana were taking Hermione to school the next morning, he told them about identifying ‘Mr. Lee’ and his rental car. The conversation then turned to the rumors about Mrs. Abbott.

  Hermione said, grinning, “I heard this man grabbed her elbow when she got out of her car at a salon. She screeched so loudly that staff came out of the salon in response. They found her hitting a man with her purse and then the man ran off. She apparently added a massage to her salon appointment to get over the fright of the attack.”