Rita, The Computer Forensics Tech

About fifteen minutes later, Christy called me. The TBI had finished the DNA analysis and that analysis proved the DNA from the cartridge cases found on the set matched the DNA Mr. Forbes had left on his fork and glass.

I wasn't expecting a call from Rita, but at about ten thirty my phone buzzed and the number was hers.

"Mack, you need to come see this. I could tell you over the phone but you wouldn't believe me."

Rita was right about that. That laptop had almost enough evidence to convict Mr. Forbes even without fingerprints or DNA.

"His internet search history is full of stuff about forty-four magnum ballistics and bullet and loading data. With that, he generated these graphs."

Those graphs looked like the same graphs Jack had shown me.

Rita clicked a couple keys on the laptop and Google Earth popped up.

"He did the same thing I did to find that clump of trees and bushes and to find out the elevations. If you look on his graphs, he used the elevations to adjust the trajectory of the bullet and his aiming point.

Rita clicked away on the keyboard for a few seconds, then looked at me.

"I found this on his word processor. It's basically a plan for how he was going to kill the officer of Mr. Anderson's re-enactment group."

I couldn't keep myself from smiling when I read the file because it was both a confession and a journal of what he'd done to make sure his plan would work.

His plan was to drive up a back road behind the field before daylight and hide in that group of trees and bushes. He even wrote down the GPS coordinates of the clump of trees and bushes so he could find it in the dark.

He knew Mr. Nelson would be out in front of the troops and on his horse so he'd practiced shooting at standard silhouette targets mounted on stakes five feet off the ground at the range behind his house. He'd written down the aiming points for a hundred yards, a hundred and twenty five yards, and a hundred and fifty yards along with the number of marks on the scope's vertical crosshair a man's body would cover at each range.

His plan said after he'd shot Mr. Nelson, he'd go back home and on his way, stop at a gas station so he'd have an alibi. He was prepared to take a second, third or fourth shot if he had to though. He wrote that he'd have to do that pretty fast because once Mr. Nelson was within about thirty yards of the opposing force, they'd all stop shooting so he'd have to as well.

He also had considered the possibility that he'd shoot someone else, but wrote that it would be almost as good as killing Mr. Nelson. Mr. Nelson would still be embarrassed if not blamed and would have to leave the re-enactment group. His plan for when that happened was to go back to the group meeting and convince them he should he the President of the group.

I was stuck by both the meticulous planning as well as by the ego of the man. He obviously was pretty intelligent because he'd figured out all the trajectories for his bullets and calculated the aiming points at each range. He was also egotistical to the extent it probably bordered on mental illness. At some point, he might claim that's why he tried to kill Mr. Nelson, but I knew what the DA was going to tell the judge. The detail Mr. Forbes had put into his planning indicated this wasn't something that happened just because he snapped one day. His journal indicated he'd been working up to that day for weeks.

I sat Mr. Forbes down in an interrogation room at eleven-thirty and the interrogation was actually pretty anti-climatic. After I read him his rights, I asked if he knew why he'd been arrested. He said yes, but that he hadn't had anything to do with it. I smiled.

"OK, suppose you explain a few things we found in your house and garage then. How about the rifle for starters? From what my firearms guy tells me it was designed for deer hunting so I can see why you might have one. What I don't understand is why you had a scope on it. There aren't many places in Tennessee where you'd be far enough away to need even a low power scope, let alone one that could be dialed up to nine times magnification. My firearms guy said a forty-four magnum wouldn't be much use beyond fifty yards anyway."

He sneered.

"You dumb cop, what makes you think I only hunt in Tennessee? I don't see so good anymore. That's why I have a scope."

"OK, but why didn't you have any off the shelf ammunition in your house, garage, or truck? All we found were bullets that matched the bullet that killed Mr. Anderson."

He thought about that for a few seconds and then said it was a commercial mold anybody could have bought and there was no law against a person experimenting with different bullets.

"Well, that's true, but there is a law that states a convicted felon can't have possession of a firearm."

He raised his voice a little then, a sure sign he'd figured out I knew a lot more than he'd first thought.

"I've never been convicted of anything, not even a parking ticket."

I smiled.

"Well, it's true that Randall Forbes has never been convicted of anything, but that's probably because I couldn't find out anything about Randall Forbes before he got a Tennessee Driver's License a couple years ago. That was about six months after Kendell Forest got out of prison in Kentucky. The fingerprints and DNA you left on the cartridge cases in your garage and on the fork and glass you left at that Denny's match the fingerprints and DNA Kentucky took from Kendell Forest when they arrested him for assaulting his wife. The fingerprints and DNA my techs took off the empty cartridge cases you left in that clump of bushes match Kendell Forest too.

"Oh, and there's that plan you left on your laptop, you know, the plan about how you were going to kill the Commander of the re-enactment group Mr. Anderson belonged to. Care to explain those things? If you can't, you're looking at pre-meditated murder, falsification of ATF form 4473 and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon for each of the firearms we found at your house. You'll probably get out of prison when you're say... a hundred and five."

His answer to that was that he wanted a lawyer.

After he talked to his court-appointed lawyer for a couple hours, the lawyer said since Mr. Forest would admit to changing his name to Randall Forbes, and that he'd caused Mr. Anderson's death. He hadn't intended to kill Mr. Anderson though, so Mr. Forest would agree to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and agree to serve ten years with the possibility of parole if the DA would drop the charges about the 4473 and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

The DA didn't take the bait even though it would have taken Mr. Forest off the streets without the cost and time of a trial. He evidently wanted to send a message to anyone trying anything similar, and probably to the Governor of Tennessee. He told Mr. Forest and his lawyer himself instead of sending one of the Assistant DA's to do it.

"Mr. Forest, you plotted to kill a man, carried out that plot, and tried to do it in a manner that innocent people would be blamed. It doesn't matter to the State of Tennessee if you killed the wrong man. The only deal I'll make is dropping the firearms charges and charging you with second degree murder if you agree to fifty years with no possibility of parole.

You'll have to write a confession right here and now, and then tell the judge exactly what happened as backed up by your written confession and the evidence or there's no deal. You'll go to trial for first degree murder and all the other charges and I'll ask for the death penalty. Even if you don't get the death penalty, you'll still die in your prison cell. I'll give you until Monday morning at ten to decide."

It didn't take Mr. Forest until Monday to decide. His lawyer called the DA about an hour later and said his client would agree to the deal the DA offered. I sat with the DA while Mr. Forest wrote his confession and then escorted him back to a holding cell. The DA had arranged for him to plea on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, Mr. Forest would be wearing an orange jump suit and not turning his back on anybody when he took a shower.

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I felt pretty good about that when I explained the situation to Mr. Anderson's widow. She seemed to accept my explanation and thanked me for solving the case so quickly. Before I left, I told her the final police report would be available to her insurance company by Tuesday or Wednesday and she could file the insurance claim as soon as they had the report.

At about five, I'd finished boxing up all the evidence when Rita walked up to my desk and sat down in my visitor's chair. She handed me a regular DVD.

"I burned everything on his laptop that seemed relevant to this disk. I know the laptop will be held as evidence and I changed his password so anybody can open it now, but it never hurts to have a copy.

"So, how'd we do? Did he confess or will I have to testify at his trial? I've never done that before. It might be fun."

I filled Rita in on what had happened and then told her she wouldn't have to testify unless he appealed and I didn't see how he could do that with the amount of evidence we had.

She grinned.

"Well, I feel like celebrating. Wanna come celebrate with me?"

I smiled.

"Rita, don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think it's a good idea for co-workers to get involved with each other. Beside, I'm quite a bit older than you are."

Rita smiled.

"I didn't ask you to sleep with me. I just thought we might have dinner and then a couple beers, and just so you know, I'm not as young as I look. My grandmother was a Cherokee and for some reason, Native American women don't seem to age like Caucasian women. I got my mama's blonde hair, but I must have gotten Grandma's genes, because I'm thirty- two but I still look about like I did when I was twenty-two. I looked up your personnel file and you're thirty-nine. Seven years isn't so big an age gap."

I said I'd heard that she didn't like men and she grinned.

"Well, I'll be damned. It actually worked. Mack, it's not that I don't like men. It's just that when you look like I look, most men think you're some ditzy broad they can smooth-talk out of her bra and panties and into bed. It was a pain in high school but I got really tired of it when I was a freshman in college. I was in college to study, not to date guys, so I started ignoring guys who asked me out. After a while, the word was that I was a lesbian. That suited me fine. They stopped hitting on me so I never said anything to the contrary.

"You're the only man at the station who hasn't given me some junior high come-on. You just treated me like any other person in the lab. I like you for doing that. So, do you want Italian, Chinese, or steak and potatoes?"

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I drove us past a Logan's Roadhouse, but the line was already out the door so we settled on a little Italian restaurant that didn't have a waiting line, and instead of a couple beers, we had a bottle of wine.

It had been so long since I'd had an actual date, I'd forgotten how nice it was to be sitting across the table from a woman and talking about something other than my latest case. I wasn't thinking of this as an actual date though. It was just two people who happened to work together celebrating a win over the bad guys.

Rita told me a little about herself while we ate. She'd gone to college and majored in Computer Science, and when she graduated had taken a job with a software company in California. She hadn't been happy with that job.

"All it was, was re-write this piece of code to make it faster and use less memory, and when I got that done, I had to do it all over again. The only good part of that job was it paid for my master's degree. After eight years of that, I got fed up and started looking for something where I'd have a challenge once in a while.

"Daddy passed that summer, so I moved back to Tennessee to help Mama. I got a job as the IT person for a bank and it was more boring than my software job. When she passed a year later, I inherited their place. I thought about selling it, but I just couldn't, not when I had so many memories of growing up there. I decided to stay here, but I needed a different job.

"I was watching this crime drama on TV one night and the cops took a computer to the forensics lab and asked the guy if he could break the password so they could find out what was on it. It seemed like that would be a real challenge and a lot more fun than explaining to some bank person why they had to change their password every month. I started looking for an opening in a police department somewhere within a reasonable driving distance.

I applied at the Nashville PD, the TBI office, and the FBI office. The Nashville PD opening happened first, so here I am. It's been more than I ever imagined, and especially when I get to work on a case like yours. I had a lot of fun helping you figure out what really happened."

After that, she seemed to want to find out more about me. About halfway through that conversation I figured she'd be as good at interrogation as she was with computers. She had this way of getting details of my life out of me that I'd never told anyone else.

Before I realized it, I'd told her I'd never been married, but that I'd lived with Cheryl for three years while I was a patrol officer. We intended to get married someday, but before that could happen, Cheryl got tired of us never seeing each other. If I wasn't working, she was, so we never really had much time alone.

"I loved Cheryl, or at least thought I did, but I didn't like her schedule any more than she liked mine. She worked for a company that did financial audits for businesses all over the US. That meant she traveled a lot. About three weeks a month, she'd leave on Sunday afternoon and wouldn't get home until late Friday night. What we ended up having was Saturday together and she usually wanted to rest up from the week before.

"We talked it over on one of those Saturdays. I wasn't going to quit my job because I'd wanted to be a police officer since I got out of the Army. She wasn't going to quit her job because she was next in line for a manager's position. We decided it would be best for us both if we went our separate ways."

Rita grinned.

"You had other girlfriends though, right?"

"Yeah, a couple after I made detective, but they ended the same way. A detective theoretically has a normal schedule, but that schedule goes out the window when somebody gets shot in an alley or the uniforms making a welfare check find somebody stabbed to death in their home. I don't think there are very many women who could put up with their husband staying at work for three or four days straight. I've never met one anyway. It just wasn't worth the arguments about my schedule so I stopped trying."

I'd been taking it easy on the wine since I was driving and I thought Rita was too, but when we were walking back to my car, she stumbled and grabbed me to stop herself from falling down. When she got back on her feet, she chuckled.

"You'd think a woman as old as I am would remember not to drink a whole glass of wine, but apparently not. Mack, I don't think I should probably try to drive tonight. Would it be asking too much for you to take me home? I'd take a cab, but I don't like being in a car with a strange man after dark. I'll call a cab tomorrow so I can get my car."

I'd pulled over a lot of drunk drivers as a patrol officer and Rita didn't seem that bad to me, but I had to give her credit for not wanting to drive. I just asked her to give me directions.

Her house was only about twenty minutes from the city limits, but the country went from suburbs to farmland to untamed woodland in the space of about ten miles. It was dark by then, so I didn't see much except trees until she pointed out a mailbox on the side of the road.

"There we are. Just turn in at the mailbox and follow the lane. It's a little ways into the trees."

That little ways turned out to be almost a quarter of a mile, a quarter of a mile of gravel lane during which I had to stop really fast for three deer that ran across the lane. I'd just gotten started again when I had to slow down to a crawl because of a possum that thought the lane was his own private highway. Rita laughed when she saw the 'possum.

"That's Rufus and he's on his way to get his dinner. I put out some cat food and a couple slices of fruit for him every night. I don't have a dog or a cat because I'm gone so much, and Rufus doesn't need me to take care of him. He'd do just fine without me, but I like him so I feed him. Did you know that they eat ticks? I haven't had a tick on me since Rufus started coming around."

Rufus finally moved over to the side of the lane so I could pass him, and a couple minutes later, I pulled up beside Rita's house. She put her hand on my arm when I shut off the engine.

"Mack, please come in for a cup of coffee. I'll start the pot and feed Rufus while it's brewing, and then we can talk some more."

I'd discovered that I liked Rita. Yes, she was a pretty woman, but that wasn't it. She was a very intelligent woman and she seemed to understand me. I couldn't see any harm in having a cup of coffee with her.

Rita left me in her living room while she went to start the coffeepot. Like any detective, I looked around. We do that when we're in someone's house to get some idea of who the person really is. That person may not want to tell us that, but their house will.

What Rita's house was telling me was that she was a lot different than even Don thought.

On one wall there were two deer mounts, one with the biggest rack of antlers I'd ever seen and the other with just the small antlers of a yearling buck. There were also a few mounted fish there. One of those was a monster catfish and another was a bass I'd have given almost anything to have had on my fishing line. Several were just brim, but they were all on polished wood planks with little brass nameplates.

When I looked at the nameplates I got a surprise. Each had a name and a date. The name on the catfish and bass was the same -- Howard Bailey. The names on the others were all Rita Bailey. The dates went back as far as 1990.

There was a huge fireplace on an outside wall made of rough stones and over that fireplace was a mantle that had to have been cut from a really big tree. On the mantle were several pictures. Those pictures were of a man and a woman I figured were Rita's father and mother. With them in the pictures was a young girl who had to be Rita at different ages from probably four or five up to maybe twenty.

Rita startled me when she spoke.

"That's me with Mama and Daddy over the years. The big one in the middle is the day I graduated from college. They were so proud of me."

I turned and saw she was smiling.

"They'd still be proud of you, Rita. You've done great with your life."

Rita put the tray with two cups of coffee and a creamer and sugar bowl she was carrying on the coffee table in front of her couch and then sat down.

"Grandma always said the Cherokee believe the spirits of those who have passed can still see us and sometimes they talk to us in our dreams. I don't know about the dream part, but I like to think Mama and Daddy are still around, watching what I'm doing. I think they might be proud, though I know they always wanted a grandchild or two. I wanted a couple of kids too, but I never found the right guy."

I walked over to the couch and sat down beside her.

"You will, one of these days. You just have to accept the fact that he's going to be attracted by how you look first. That's how men work. We see a woman we think looks great and we try to get to know her. It's after we know who she really is that we decide if she's the one or not."