Cold Case 3

The team looked up when Charlie walked in with us. They studied him for a few minutes, like they expected him to exhibit fresh injuries. Then they looked at me for their cue.

"What?" Charlie said, sensing something was amiss.

"No, he wasn't a victim," I informed them.

Charlie whipped his head around to give me a startled look. Apparently it hadn't occurred to him that the team would have been worried about that.

"You can stop walking on eggshells, now," Megan added.

"Good, glad to hear it," Colby said. I barely managed to refrain from snapping "Hey, Granger, worry about your own brother."

Charlie grinned at him, but before he could say anything, I spoke up. "Charlie might be able to get a handle on where the other victims came from," I said.

Nobody questioned this. We were all familiar with how Charlie could take geographic data and wave his mathmagic wand and pull out useful locations.

"Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen," I reminded him. "We have people to talk to and leads to follow. Let's get Charlie some more data to work with."

I had calls to make and meetings to attend, not all of which dealt with Edna's cold case. I was just coming out of one meeting when I saw David pause outside the conference room where Charlie was working and say, "You okay, man?"

Contrary to rumors; I did not knock David on his keister in order to reach Charlie.

Charlie looked green, and his hand trembled a little as he stared at the picture in his hand.

"What?" I said. "Charlie, is that someone you know?"

For an answer, he flipped the picture around so I could see. A nine year old boy with dark curly hair was holding a plastic protractor. He was sitting on the side of an unfinished swimming pool. I could make out a sliding glass door behind him. But there was something strange about the lighting.

I plucked it out of Charlie's fingers and frowned at it. I was distracted from the lighting when I realized that this was Charlie at age nine, maybe ten, considering how small he was.

"It's me again," Charlie explained to the others. "Sitting by the side of an indoor pool."

That was what was wrong with the lighting. The sun was on the opposite side of the glass than I would have expected. I wrote that down, indoor pools aren't as common as outdoor pools in California.

Megan's eyes went wide and she moved over to the chair next to Charlie. She picked up the stack of pictures that Charlie had already gone through and began sorting through them.

"Crap," Edna said from behind me. "It never occurred to me that some of these pictures might be of the same child at different ages."

I looked around. "Colby, tell the computer techs to try matching the pictures against each other. They must have some software that can tell if the pictures are of the same kid at different ages."

Colby moved to his desk and grabbed the phone.

"We might have a lot less than ninety-three victims here," Edna said. She sounded massively relieved and I couldn't blame her. The idea of any child being hurt was sickening, but the idea of there being ninety-three of them had been the stuff of nightmares.

Colby headed off do take care of details. I love being boss, sometimes, but I wasn't thinking about that then. I was worried about the green tinge in my brother's face. "What else? Whose pool was that?"

Charlie nodded and tapped the picture of his younger self. "I remember the pool," he said slowly. "I'm trying to remember… his name." His brow furrowed.

Megan stopped sorting and studied his profile. I pulled a chair between them and sat down.

"It was just before I started high school," Charlie said, looking off at nothing. "You might remember. My last tutor had retired, and Mom and I were having problems finding a replacement."

I nodded, more to keep him talking than because of any clear memory of this. I hadn't been much interested in regular school, and even less interested in Charlie's endless string of tutors.

"It was tricky finding an advanced math tutor for a kid my age. One that is actually willing to spend time with a child, was well versed in the subjects that I was interested in, and that could convince Mom that she could safely leave me in his or her care."

Charlie made a wry face and said to the team. "She was concerned with nutrition, since we math nerds have notoriously poor eating habits and I was easily affected by things like caffeine and sugar."

He shot me a look out of the corner of eye, but I restrained from making any snide comments. "You wound up with that guy who knew Tommy LaSorda, right?" I asked. Of course, that wasn't saying much. Tommy LaSorda was on first name basis with three quarters of the San Fernando Valley.

Charlie nodded. "Yeah, Dr. Lovell. He got us tickets to the Fourth of July game."

I remembered that. It was the few times when I was a kid that I appreciated Charlie's tutors.

"So, how about this guy?" I prodded verbally. I poked Charlie in the arm for good measure.

Something prodded my leg, but I didn't lower myself to glare at Megan.

Charlie's face twitched and he swung his head from side to side. "He was kind of fat, with curly grey and black hair that reminded me of steel wool."

"You must have been introduced," I urged. I thought of several sarcastic comments I could make about his memory for numbers vs. his memory for names, but I refrained. He looked upset enough. Besides, Megan seemed to be going into maternal mode and I was going to need both legs at some point.

Charlie frowned and stopped swinging his head. "He told me to call him "Dr. Maths," he said. "He said that he proof-read text books for a living. He said that he loved teaching, but found it hard to stand for hours at a time because of an old back injury."

I wrote that down, too.

"So, it could be something like 'Math?' Megan mused out loud.

David nodded and typed it into his computer. "Yeah, could be Matthew, Mathews, Mathers..."

"Mathias, Matheson," Colby returned from his phone call in time to add to this conversation.

"And could be first or last name," Megan added. "Like Mathias."

Charlie pursed his lips. "I'm almost sure it was a last name," he said after a few minutes.

"The back injury is why he said he needed an indoor pool, even though he already had a pool in his back yard," Charlie continued. "So he could exercise during the winter. Swimming being the only exercise he could tolerate. And frankly, it didn't look like he did much of it."

The backyard pool was promising. Two pools would have been unusual enough that maybe somebody would remember it, even after all these years.

"Do you remember how far it was from home?" I asked.

"No," Charlie said. That surprised me. Even as a kid, Charlie had a good sense of time and distance. Any type of measurement came easily to him.

"We had car trouble on the way up," Charlie said. "And Mom got lost trying to find a place to get it fixed. We wound up taking a taxi."

I jotted that down. A taxi record that far back? Not likely, but I'm not above a Hail Mary shot.

"We arrived about 12:30," Charlie continued. "I was too excited then to be hungry, but Mom wanted to be sure that I had lunch. I guess Dr. Maths had told her that I'd be fed, because she started in on the food situation when I wanted to talk Eigenvectors."

"Gesundheit," Colby said.

I pretended not to notice when Megan kicked him under the table.

"Mom checked out his kitchen like she was a health inspector. Nothing in the refrigerator but fruit juices, vegetables, milk and some chicken. The cupboards were equally dismal. Health food, cereal, canned vegetables." Charlie sighed just thinking about the boring food. "I was so not interested in eating."

"You memorized the contents of the cupboards and accuse Mom of being nosy?" I blurted.

Charlie grinned sheepishly. "I come by it honestly," he said somewhat defensively.

I ignored Megan's gentle prod with her toe.

David picked up the picture. "This pool is under construction. Did the workers show up while you were there?"

Charlie nodded. "Yeah, they actually got there before Mom left. They were just leaving when Mom returned."

"You mean, you weren't alone with this turd," I said.

Charlie shook his head. "No, and the way that house was set up, you could see everything from the pool area. It was in the center of the house and there were sliding glass doors to all the rooms. At least, all but the bathroom and the garage. It was kind of distracting, though, with the workmen there. I couldn't concentrate on the math."

"That's some distraction," I said. "Man, you could sit in a wind tunnel and work on math."

Charlie flashed me a grin.

"Megan? Why would he invite Charlie there if he knew the workmen would be there?" I asked.

"My guess is the first visit was just a get acquainted visit," Megan said. "Since this scumbag took time to get to know the kids, he'd want to get them to trust him enough to keep a secret for him."

I felt slightly less inclined to be sick at that.

"You remember that day pretty clearly," I said.

Charlie sighed. "I'm trying to remember his name."

"That wasn't mean as a shot," I said. I shot Megan a warning look and she did not kick me.

While I was looking at her.

Charlie continued. "Thing is, I was only there that one time. And only for a couple of hours." He ran his hands through his hair.

"Why's that?" David asked. "Your mother didn't like paying money when you couldn't even study?"

"I'm inclined to think it was lunch," Charlie said dryly.

The team and I exchanged looks.

"The kitchen was full of health food," Charlie explained. "But the rest of the house was Candyland."

"Huh?" Megan said just before I did.

Charlie waved his hands as if to indicate the entire building we were in. "He had junk food stashed all over the house," he said, enthusiastically. "He had coolers in the middle of the house filled with soft drinks, ostensibly for the workers, but I could help myself, too. He had cookies in his desk drawer. Lollypops and peppermint sticks in the medicine cabinets. Tootsie rolls in a vase by the front door."

Charlie laughed. "He even had one of those chest freezers in his spare bedroom that was full of ice cream." He stopped abruptly.

"What?" I said.

Charlie swallowed a couple of times before continuing. "There was… there were red stains in the cooler. Dr. Maths said that he'd spilled Kool-Aid…" He got up abruptly and darted from the room.