Chapter 36
Chapter
36
Michael Saucedo.
I returned to my keyboard and began typing. It didn’t take long to locate a sophomore named Michael J. Saucedo who’d achieved high distinction in mathematics during his freshman year at Oberlin College.
Oberlin, Ohio.
The state where Moe Reed had unearthed two old, cold .308 shootings.
A couple of small-town incidents, assumed to be unsolved hunting accidents. I’d forgotten the names of the towns. Online payment to a nationwide newspaper site pulled up citations in a couple of local weeklies.
Leonard Wiebelhaus, forty-six, a semi-truck tire installer, shot sixteen years ago in Vantage, Ohio.
Rainer Steckel, fifty-six, slain six years later, in Shelter Lake, Ohio.
Moe had described Steckel as a school custodian. The bottom of the page in the Shelter Lake Clarion described him as a caretaker at Oberlin College.
Michael J. Saucedo.
I looked up the distance from both hamlets to the college. Shelter Lake was eighteen miles away, Vantage, twenty-four.
Vicki’s gifted brother had been a toddler during the first shooting, a preteen during the second. So nothing to do with him directly.
But maybe he knew someone else with ties to Oberlin?
Someone with an easy trigger finger in whom Michael had confided about his sister’s brutalization?
A local who’d learned the joys of picking off human targets a long time ago and decided to bring his skills to L.A. to pursue it professionally?
I went back to Michael Saucedo’s Facebook page. No photos, nothing recreational beyond trying to solve some famous math problems. Unsuccessfully so far, but you have to keep trying, it’s all about perseverance.
That was followed by a paragraph in the school paper, The Oberlin Review, that listed him as one of twelve high-honors freshmen.
Below which he’d written: No big deal and can’t take full credit. Professor Thalberg was a six-star teacher and the foundation I got from the inimitable Cameron Flick has proved to be invaluable.
Click, click, click.
Sidney G. Thalberg, an endowed professor of mathematics at Oberlin, was white-haired and emaciated and looked to be in his eighties.
Well past retirement age, he admitted in his faculty bio, but Oberlin has indulged me.
All of which added up to an unlikely sharpshooter.
Cameron Flick, on the other hand, was a young man, blond and bearded, whose website proclaimed him to be a world class math tutor, with a host of first-name testimonials to back that up.
Cameron made all the difference in my getting into Stanford. Melanie.
Cameron makes numbers come alive. Brian.
Cameron’s the bomb with AP calc. Lucas.
He listed his educational credentials as a nine-year-old bachelor’s degree from Oberlin, where he’d studied with the eminent, Weinglass Prize winner, Sidney Thalberg followed by enrollment in the doctoral program in theoretical mathematics at the U.
More important than any of that, Cameron Flick was a familiar face.
The tutor I’d seen with Keisha Boykins the day Milo and I had paid an unannounced visit.
Soon after our arrival, he’d guided Keisha toward the back of the house. No reason, then, to see it as anything more than wanting peace and quiet for his student.
Not anymore. Escape at the sight of the cops seemed a lot more likely.
I returned to Errol Moffett’s memorial page. Yesterday, I’d skimmed the sad repetitive messages, turned away well before reaching the end. This time I gave them a closer look. Found what I was looking for six posts from the bottom.
You were a bright light, E-man. Didn’t deserve this. Cam F.
My heart was beating faster than when I’d woken up, but in a different key: less confusion, more like the aerobic boost you get during a great run.
Next step: digging for info on Jarrod Sterling’s half sibs. Jay Sterling had described his older children as twins, both studying in New York.
NYU and…the New School.
The proud father’s pages gave up those details with glee.
Rhiannon Sterling, a bright-eyed, apple-cheeked brunette, was majoring in economics and business at NYU with an emphasis on econometrics.
Rory Sterling, her morose-looking, shaggy-haired brother, was studying art at one of the New School’s five colleges, the Parsons School of Design.
The twins’ individual pages produced no evidence Rory had enlisted the services of Cameron Flick but Rhiannon cited the math tutor as a huge influence turning me on totally to the beauty of math and encouraging me to go for double-major gold.
Typing manically, I searched for anything I could learn about Cameron Flick.
Nothing beyond the self-promotion of his tutoring business, The Numbers Game.
That was enough.
I texted Milo.
When you wake up, call me. Important.