Chapter 46
Chapter
46
Nothing of interest was found in Flick’s car but for an amoebic stain near the front rim of the driver’s seat and several smaller speckles on the Oberlin floor mat below. All of it fluoresced blue under UV light, the way organic material does. It didn’t take long for the lab to get specific. Semen. Same for the tissue Alicia had retrieved.
Milo said, “Public bathroom, his car. What’s that, a danger thing?”
I said, “Like I said, a sexual component. Also, a mastery thing. The rules don’t apply to me.”
We were in an Italian place two blocks from the station, drinking coffee and eating almond biscotti.
I said, “Maybe that’s why he was driving slow. Timing it so he could finish in front of that house.”
He said, “Everything’s a production with this lunatic. Those people have no idea what they avoided.”
Those people were a family named Streicher, who lived in that house. The parents, city-employed accountants, had a seventeen-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old son, both of whom were enrolled at a prep school in Sherman Oaks.
Neither of the kids was Flick’s client but the girl had been cited as the ringleader of a mean clique that had tormented a junior at the same school named Shania Fellows. Who was a longtime client.
Self-described as proudly introverted, quantitatively aroused, and cerebrally-active, Shania had repeatedly posted about her oppressors on social media. Her parents had complained to the headmaster then griped online that no one seems to care about oppression if you’re sufficiently privileged.
“No one except Sir Cameron,” said Milo. “Someone files a complaint, he starts planning a permanent solution. While he rubs himself. Crazy. Is he?”
“With his level of premeditation?” I said. “Not even close. And even if his lawyer wants to try diminished capacity, I doubt Flick’s ego will allow him to go along with it. He’s heavily invested in being mentally superior.”
He laughed. “How many times did he call me an idiot before the black-and-white arrived?”
I said, “Maybe a dozen. Interspersed with his lawyer lawyer lawyer mantra. Who’s representing him?”
“Lance Guidot, court-appointed, not bad but not brilliant.”
“Then it won’t last long. Flick will downgrade him and want nothing to do with him.”
“He can switch counsel as much as he wants. We’ve got more than enough.”
—
That confidence came from the ballistics match and the treasure trove found at Flick’s home.
The converted garage was an open space kept up neatly and furnished minimally with contemporary pieces, including two wire-framed bookcases filled with math and science books that ranged from junior high to grad school level.
One exception to the minimalistic décor: a seven-and-a-half-foot carved mahogany armoire, ungainly and Victorian, that nudged the ceiling.
The inside rear wall of the oversized cabinet was faced with pegboard and outfitted with movable hooks and braces that supported the two pricey target pistols Flick had registered along with a forty-year-old long-barreled Colt six-shooter, a Glock not unlike Milo’s, a Benelli Super Black Eagle shotgun, and mounted dead center, a .308 Winchester Featherweight bolt-action rifle enhanced by a custom Cerakote camouflage finish. Next to the guns, heavy-duty bolt cutters.
Below the rifle, a matching bipod and carrying case and an infrared nightscope. On the bottom rung, five bladed weapons: a squared-off chopper, a leather-handled Buck, a curved Indonesian fighter, an all-black knuckle knife, and a stiletto. All appeared unused.
Milo said, “What’s that all about?”
I said, “Maybe he takes them to shootings for moral support.”
—
Flick’s computer, unprotected by a password (my answer to Milo’s question: “Overconfidence”), gave up a file on each of his L.A. victims, always headed Ansatz.
Milo said, “Sounds German.”
I looked it up. “Good guess. It’s a word mathematicians use to describe setting the framework for a proof.”
“Wonderful.”
We read the files. Each began with an exposition of “the necessary documentation of offenses” inflicted on Flick’s “followers.”
Rhiannon Sterling, “a crackerjack math-head, especially good with probability theory which will serve her well as a quant and probably make her rich,” had wept to her tutor about the stress her dad was under due to “hateful and unreasonable demands” by his “vicious and asocial ex-girlfriend” and her fear that “never ever seeing baby boy Jarrod will tear my family utterly apart. Essentially cancel him and us.”
Keisha Boykins had been “terrified to the point where her AP calc is suffering right when she needs it to be Harvard-shiny and her IBD is intensifying.” The source of her fear: Jamarcus Parmenter’s “vile, misogynistic doggerel” and the possibility Parmenter would “take out his rage at Mr. B for his quite reasonable dismissal on my brilliant girlK.”
Michael Saucedo was “adjusting to Oberlin gradually (something I can relate to) but like me he’ll triumph due to superior cognitive ability.” Vicki’s brother had expressed “justifiable despair at the unwillingness of law enforcement” to investigate his sister’s “brutal” assault. “Mike admits that inertia on the part of his parents isn’t helpful, either, but he is certain that if a serious attempt had been made to uncover the truth, they would have come around.”
Errol Moffett “is extinct and that’s an outrage and one that was eminently preventable. Remedial measures must and will be taken.”
At the end of each account: QED.
That one I knew from a statistics prof who proclaimed it on the final day of every semester.
“Quod erat demonstrandum. Latin for ‘what was to be demonstrated.’?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The proof is complete.”