THE BANDIT QUEEN - Chapter 12 continued

Eden held her hand out to the boy and shook his limp hand. The thick metal door in front of them opened slowly and the hum of many machines waited on the other side of the doorframe. Deakin raised his voice slightly and asked,
“Alden, may I bring my friend in with me? She helped me get away from Joey and has been traveling with me.”
A raspy, seldom-used voice called out from the center of the large room. “Did you say ‘she’? Did you bring a girl into my home? You know the rules, Deakin. No girls, well, no real girls, well, no physical girls. Hell, you know what I mean.”
“Alden, she’s not a street girl and she certainly won’t tell anyone about you. She’ll even swear on your operating system, won’t you, Eden?”
“Yes, I swear.”
Two eyes behind the lenses of a pair of black-framed glasses stared over the top of a large computer monitor. Eden stepped away from Deakin and positioned herself in the middle of light coming through the doorway. Then she held her hands together in front of her face and bowed slightly in Alden’s direction.
“Well, she does have a respectful attitude all you others could learn from. Okay, bring her in and shut the door. It’s been open way too long already.”
Deakin took Eden’s hand and led her through the maze of machines. As Eden looked around, she realized the room must contain at least twenty full computer set-ups, if not more than that. Teenaged boys of all sizes and types sat in front of about half the monitors. They each looked out of the corners of their eyes at Eden as she passed by. She smiled at them all and stopped near the center of the room. Deakin dropped into a chair and pushed another one over to Eden. She stopped the chair from rolling into a desk and sat down in it.
A large circle of homemade desks opened out in front of her. The desks seemed to be old doors propped up by various types of small tables. Some of them were held up by sawhorses and some even by cement blocks. A heavy man who looked to be in his mid-twenties sat in front of the largest monitor and watched the data scrolling down the screen. Then he slid his chair to the desk directly behind him and turned around to check the data on that monitor. He would speedily click on the keyboard and then move on to another computer monitor. As he moved around the circle, Eden could imagine him spinning a web. He continued his quick darting slides from keyboard to keyboard as Deakin related the events of the last few days.
At the end of the recital, he looked into Deakin’s face and said, “Some really serious shit going down, Deke. I don’t know what you’re in the middle of but it ain’t good. No way. That data I already sent you is all I’m getting for now. I went back into the government databases and those names have been deleted. The hospital records have been deleted too. The death certificates have gone and so has the police report. I kept a copy of the police report for you. That’s the last piece of real information we’re getting. I didn’t send it to your laptop ‘cos I have some little wigglies nibbling at my toes. Someone’s trying to follow the trail back to me. I’ve been slamming doors and windows as fast as I can to block them. That’s why I haven’t answered you. They haven’t found me yet so it was probably all right for you to come here. Ron and Davy have already moved to the backup house and transferred all our data to the computers there. We’ll blow this place if we have to.”
Eden looked at Deakin to see if he took this man seriously. Deakin obviously did and leaned forward even more to hear what Alden was saying. Eden let them talk on and on about moving to a safer place as she watched both faces. The older man had the pasty look of someone who hadn’t felt the sun on his skin for months, maybe even years. His dark brown eyes peered through the magnifying lenses of his glasses but they never stopped moving. They would fleetingly touch Deakin’s face and then move from monitor to monitor, touch on Eden’s face, and return to Deakin’s. His long dark hair was pulled back and held in place with a rubber band. The ponytail hung halfway down his back and swung back and forth as he slid his chair around. His fingers were in constant motion also, flicking over the keyboards and then touching a mouse before moving on to the next keyboard. A large cardboard box on the other side of the circle was full to the top with empty orange juice bottles and coke cans.
Deakin stared at the copy of the police report while he listened to Alden’s raspy voice. When he’d finished speaking, Deakin asked if he and Eden could stay the night. This time Alden stared directly at Eden for a minute before he answered.
“Yeah, one night but you probably should leave before it gets light in the morning. I’ll work tonight on what you need. I’ll get you everything I can on those people your parents used to work with – you know, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, whatever I can get. And then the two of you can go.”
“Let me settle Eden down and then I’ll be back to help you.”
A mulish look descended on Eden’s face and she shook her head decidedly. “No, you’re not sending me away while you two get to play. I’m playing too or I’m leaving. Take your choice.”
Deakin pushed her chair up to a keyboard and said, “It’s all yours. Just watch the monitor and do what Alden tells you to do. Here’s the police report. Keep it safe for me.”
Eden opened the folded piece of paper and read the bare phrases describing the accident that had killed Deakin’s parents. Alex Kimbrough had been driving on one of the high curving ramps that littered the highway system in Los Angeles. An eighteen-wheeler pulling a load of gasoline had smashed into the back of his car. The two vehicles had run through the guardrail and fallen thirty feet to the road below them. The gasoline ignited on impact and burned Deakin’s parents to death. The driver of the truck had died also.
She looked at Deakin as he peered into the monitor on her left. “Was there any record of the bodies being sent to the medical examiner? You know, ambulance records or records from the morgue, something like that. They might give us another name to check out. Someone must have signed for the bodies.”
Deakin slid over next to her and opened up another window on the computer. He clicked on the keyboard until he’d moved through a maze of different screens. “Here you go, Eden. These are the medical examiner’s files and here’s the date of the accident. Do what you can.”
Eden moved slowly through the unfamiliar files as she searched for the information she wanted. She found nothing under the Kimbrough name and nothing under Rimchova, the name of Deakin’s mother. Then she pulled up the sign-in page for the day of the accident. She worked down the list until she found one man who had been burned to death. She pulled up the information on his autopsy and found another dead end. There was no autopsy filed under that name. She back-tracked again and read the entire list of admissions for that date. There were three bodies listed that had been burned but no autopsies filed for any of them. She printed out the list and marked the names of the three burned bodies. She ran the three names through all the files she could find and came up with nothing. She stared at the screen of the monitor as she tried to imagine the path all the paperwork would take as the body moved through the system. She finally hit on a file that listed funeral homes and crematoriums. This must be the sign-out sheet for the bodies.
Eden worked this list forwards and backwards. She tried to pull out the information using the date of the accident and then she tried the next day and the next. When she finally reached the end of the list, she realized she had matched up the transfers of all the bodies but three. It wasn’t until she found the total transfers of each funeral home that she found the missing bodies. One of the funeral homes had transported three more bodies than it had signed for. It must have picked up two bodies on each run and only signed for one body. She printed out hard copies of the lists and the totals. Junipero Funeral Home and Crematorium of Sausalito. She folded all her pages and slipped them into her pocket with the police report of the accident.
Then, just for fun, she pulled out the police report and entered the names of the officers who had responded to the accident. She wasn’t totally surprised when both their names showed up in the medical examiner’s files. It seemed that even police officers couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths closed unless it was a permanent closure. Just to be thorough, she printed out the files for those officers. One of them had drowned during a picnic at the beach and the other had been shot to death during a drug raid. Eden hoped they’d been paid well for whatever they’d done but somehow she doubted it.
Deakin’s chair slid noiselessly up to hers and he quickly read the screen of the monitor. Eden pulled her pages out and handed them to him. She reached out to close her link to the county records when Deakin’s hand shot out to stop her. His eyes were wide open and one of his fingers stabbed at a page. Eden followed the pointing finger to the name of the driver of the truck. She frowned as she read the name: Daniel Rivers. It sounded vaguely familiar but she couldn’t place it.
“One of the people who worked with my parents. He wouldn’t have been driving a truck. He was a goddamned intellectual. He had doctorate degrees out the ass. What would he have been doing in a gas truck?”
Eden opened more files and searched for the name but she came up with nothing. So far it was just one more piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit anywhere. With a shaking finger, Deakin closed the connection and left the files where they’d found them. Deakin stared at the computer screen blankly for a few minutes and then started Eden on a trek through the files of the police department. She printed out information from the files of the two dead officers. One of the men had been in trouble most of his police career. He’d been censured by the department five times for beating up prisoners and shaking down drug dealers and users. He had been divorced when he disappeared at the beach. His body had never been recovered and identified. So, in reality, he could have been spirited away and living under an assumed name for the last fifteen years. The other officer was a rookie and had definitely died in the shoot-out with the drug dealers. No wife, no children, and a departmental funeral for his elderly parents. Nice finish to a day’s work.