The Black Aura - 3. Growing Up

Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many lonely nights in the real world
Too many games that I can't play
Too many windmills in my way
Don't wanna live my life in the real world

Alan Parsons Project - 1985

7

I transferred to the University of Maryland after my sophomore year. I’d known for around 7 or 8 years that my parents would die in an accident, but it wasn’t until I went home for Christmas during that year that I had a better idea when. See, the auras are sort of like a mathematical equation. I know math isn’t everybody’s strong point, so I’ll try not to lose you with a detailed description. Although over the course of my life I have discovered that there is indeed a formula for the darkening of the auras, during my teen years I only knew that light meant a long way off, dark was getting close, and black, well, you have arrived at your final destination. Please disembark at the exit nearest you.

It kind of works as a reverse square of a fraction. When you have a quarter of your life left, your aura is half of the shade it will be at its darkest. When you have a hundredth of your life left, it’s 10 times as dark. So you can see that the darkening happens quickly. So, say you’re around 45, like my parents were, a 90% shade of green means the end is less than six months away. I’d guess they were at around 93% that Christmas. It was March 17th when they stopped being green. Funny, most often people turn green that day.

I had enough money to go to a top Criminal Justice school after getting the life insurance, selling the house, etc. I was an only child so everything my parents had they left to me, minus a little that went to charity. I was set for life. I didn’t need to struggle to make ends meet, had enough to pay off the student loans I’d already accumulated and pay my tuition for the rest of college without loans. I had a couple minor scholarships so the tuition wasn’t as high as it could have been, but back then, college wasn’t cheap.

Hard to think that way now, but a lot of things have changed since 2015 when I transferred. Now, knowledge is implanted over the course of a few sessions, so there’s no overhead for buildings, textbooks, or full-time teachers. Fortunately for me, there is still a need for police investigators. Boys will be boys as they always said. Although crime isn’t limited to those of the male gender. One incident related to my special skill during college can attest to that.

8

UMD was located in College Park, MD, a suburb of Washington DC. At that time, Washington was high on the list of murders per capita. Also high on the list of where college kids would go to get drunk. Those two reasons got tied together, late fall in my senior year. I accompanied a few of my friends to DC for a Friday night out the last weekend before winter break. They were all going home for Christmas. At the time home for me was an apartment in College Park so spending some time out with friends before the lonely month began seemed like a good idea at the time. Hmm, that seems to be a running theme in my younger life. Well, I bet that’s pretty common.

Anyway, we hit a bar on the fringe of the poor side of town, apologies to Johnny Rivers for borrowing the line. It wasn’t too late yet, at least not for 4 college kids, around 11:30, but enough people had left the bar, so the crowd was thinning out. We had a table near the front corner of the room, just sitting around contemplating taking off when there was a bit of a commotion in one of the back corners. Two of us were criminology majors so any sort of ruckus that may lead to a crime was high on our radar. The other two were in school for other reasons, sometimes I felt only to party, but again, I digress.

Bill Farner was the other future criminologist, pre-law he always called it, and we were sitting on the outer seats in the booth, so we had a better view. Bill saw the guy smack the young woman because he was facing the back, I had to turn around so all I saw was a man and a woman, both with red auras, his barely a shade off of being black, hers lighter, although not much, maybe she had a couple weeks to go.

They started yelling at each other, him apparently in a jealous rage, calling her a whore, a slut, and, well, you get the picture. And those were on the nicer side of the words he used. One was actually fairly descriptive and accurate, f'in cu--, as it turned out. She screamed “You don’t own me you fucker,” and the next thing we knew it, there was a loud bang and the fucker hit the floor. Immediately, the blood started spreading from around his head. She had shot him in the neck and apparently hit the carotid artery because there was a LOT of blood, fast. Even if he had owned her, he didn’t own anything anymore.

Cops watched that area of the city pretty closely. Not quite the worst section of town, but close enough to it that sometimes the riffraff overflowed. Not that either party benefited by a cop being within a block of the bar and hearing the shot, but that’s what happened. I think if the cop hadn’t arrived in like four and a half seconds, maybe five, we might have hightailed it out of there to avoid the ensuing mess. But alas, ‘twas not meant to be.

I won’t bore you with all the legal action because aside from us being witnesses it was a pretty pitiful time for us. Over the course of the next few hours and days, we found out that maybe it wasn’t self-defense like it appeared at first. Seems the young woman was one of the guy’s, um, employees. His use of the word whore being quite accurate, not to mention f'in cu--. Think about it, you'll get there. She had been trying to get out from under his thumb for a while and discovered a way to do it. Obviously not a very good way since she spent the next couple weeks in jail before someone stuck her with a shiv and her red aura turned black.

I graduated college in the top 10% of my class, just like high school, I tried just hard enough to succeed but didn’t kill myself getting there. It was good enough to get a decent job just about anywhere I wanted to. At the time, I had to get jobs the same way as everybody else, look like the best prospect to your potential employer if there was even a published opening, or know somebody.

That somebody happened to be the Plattsville Assistant Chief of Police. He was Captain Joseph Davis when Jeffrey killed Mr. Aberson, but he’d been promoted since. He remembered the case and how I was instrumental in the arrest, so it was reasonable to visit him during my job search. Fortunately, East Jersey State Prison had an opening for a corrections officer. Chief Davis put in a good word and my career got its start.

Some jobs serve only to get one experience in their chosen field. That is what being a corrections officer was to me. I spent three years at East Jersey before I was able to land a job as a junior investigator in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Although I saw an awful lot of red in those three years, there wasn’t much cause to use my gift at the prison. OK, none, I guess fortunately for the prisoners. And guards. But that would change shortly after I moved to Cherry Hill.

9

Cherry Hill is a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Just past Camden on the Jersey side. It wasn’t a great hotbed of crime, but it was close enough to Philly and Camden to be a good path for a getaway from those crime centers, and we got our share of the overflow. Although it wasn’t true that the criminals always had a red aura, it was common enough to help build a list of suspects well in advance of their doing anything. Of course, it also acted as a list of potential victims too. When you first ran across somebody, you couldn’t know about their predilection to violence. One list, two related purposes.

Have you ever noticed that job titles are sometimes not at all descriptive of the actual work you’d be doing? Junior investigator turned out to be one of them. Here I thought I’d be like a detective or something, just putting together clues, chasing down suspects, etc. Nope. Junior detective meant cop. No more, no less. Did that deter me? Of course not. I figured you have to get started somewhere in your chosen profession. A lot of others started at the bottom and succeeded. Why couldn’t I?

I spent almost 2 years as an officer with the CHPD before the opportunity arose to be part of “the case.” In police work, there is sometimes one case that would change the course of your career. Oh, I handed out my share of tickets for speeding, reckless driving, and all manner of moving violations. Calmed down a few domestic disturbances, broke up my share of bar fights. Need to go off on another tangent here. Bar fights aren’t always just dangerous, or fatal as we saw before, for the people doing the fighting. Even if you’re carrying a gun, in plain sight, that didn’t mean the thugs were coherent enough to let that bother them. I’ve got a nice scar above my left eyebrow courtesy of one of those thugs in a bar fight. Valuable piece of information for you. Beer bottles hurt!

So, on to “the case.” I’d mentioned before that I’d be coming back to Lee Wilpone and some of his friends. Lee and two more of the most intelligent students from the Plattsville High class of 2013 were top executives in a company based out of Cherry Hill. Lee and two of his friends, Ishaan Gupta and Stan, short for Stanislav – his mom was Slovak, Perez had come up with an idea that they thought would revolutionize the software business. They were a little late for the dot com explosion at the end of the 20th century, but they did come up with something that made a difference in 2018, about a year through my tenure in East Jersey State. I avoided the overcrowded computer science field when I went to college, so I’m not even going to try to explain what their idea was. Suffice to say, it made the creation, testing, and troubleshooting of software programs as easy as 1-2-3, or pie, or something.

One problem with running the company that has THE product everybody wants to get hold of is that not all of those people desiring it are considering only legal ways. When you’re talking about a multi-million-dollar business, some people will even kill to get their hands on a piece of the pie. It didn’t start right out as a murder investigation. An officer nearing the end of his second year wouldn’t have been assigned the case if that were true. But since the beginning was, at the time, thought to be a relatively innocuous break-in, Officer Avery Noonan got dispatched. I suppose having gone to school with the principal owners didn’t hurt either.

Software is considered intellectual property. It’s not exactly valuable physical property, like say jewelry or a car, but it has value, nonetheless. Software companies have a lot of procedures in place to try to protect that value. Firewalls, closed networks, and all manner of security to keep the undesirables out of the system. Only a few people had access to the proprietary source code. You couldn’t just break into the business, pick up a notebook off someone’s desk and walk out with it. I guess not everybody realizes this because that was initially thought what someone tried to do. Most criminals aren’t known for their high IQ.

10

As I walked into L.I.P. Software Consulting’s offices, I was met by an old acquaintance, Stan Perez. Back in high school Stan was always the one involved behind the scenes, coordinating all the work being performed for one activity or another. He ran the school plays, was on the yearbook staff, and was class Vice President. It was no surprise to find out Stan was Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the company. He was good at making sure things got done. Stan went on to help run his father’s limousine business after high school. He may have been the second or third smartest in the class, but he didn’t have a lot of ambition. Not initially anyway. No college for Stan. When his father died suddenly, he sold the limo company and bought into LIP Services, as the company was known by the folks in town who didn’t work there. Ishaan Gupta was the math wizard back in school. He took all the possible math and accounting courses available as electives. I believe he even spent his summers taking higher-level math classes like calculus and differential equations. Ishaan went on to graduate summa cum laude from Cornell University, which at the time was one of the top schools for mathematics in the country. He got the Chief Financial Officer’s (CFO) position. Minoring in pre-law gave him responsibility over the legal department too.

Back in school, Lee Wilpone was always expected to be class valedictorian. Some say his IQ was measured at around 180. He was a smart cookie. But Lee wasn’t like a lot of the nerds, geeks, bookworms, use your favorite term for brainiac. Most of them had their own little cliques. And while the smartest of the smart did pal around together, Lee could also be found helping out one of the students who was struggling academically. We always thought he’d end up being a professor at Harvard, or M-I-T. Or maybe the engineer that perfected the transportation method of the future. Hit that one on the nose. He was one of the richest and most definitely the smartest in school, but you couldn’t tell either unless you got to know him better. He was pretty much one of the guys. We called him a nerd because he was so smart, but for the most part he was a regular guy. He got to be Chief Executive Officer (CEO) by way of perfecting automotive air travel as his senior project at Harvard and selling the patent for a couple hundred million dollars. He had the cash, he started the business, and he ran the business.

But back to my re-introduction to the old gang from school, the gang I didn’t hang out with. Hmmm, now that I think of it, two multi-millionaires and a guy who knew what to do with all that money, maybe I should have hung out with them more. Sorry, I go off on a tangent over the littlest thing. So, Stan showed me around the offices. I got to see their computer lab, which was pretty impressive. I’d had cause to go into a telephone central office once, and I thought they had a lot of computers. Nothing compared to LIP’s setup. He showed me Mahogany Row, where the senior officers had their offices. Also impressive. We finally got around to the back door which essentially was the reason for my visit. To keep people out, there were now a few bars welded across where the door should have been. The perpetrator blew the hinges off and they obviously couldn’t fix it properly yet, being a crime scene and all.

With Stan being my tour guide, I obviously got to ask him the first series of questions. I found out who the best workers were, and more importantly, who were the worst. I figured if you’re among the best in the company, get good raises and bonuses, you wouldn’t want to risk that cash cow by getting too greedy and going for the whole enchilada. That and even the slackers had ready access to the facility. Why would one of them blow off a door to get in?

As I was being introduced to the stars and slackers, sounds like a name for a bad rock band, I decided to make a note of anyone with a hint of red in their aura. There was only a small chance the perpetrator, perp in cop-speak, was an employee, but an accomplice on the inside was a fair possibility. Not all criminals died a violent death. Actually, it was a fairly small percentage. But I had to start somewhere. Somewhere ended up being nowhere. There were 53 people that worked in that location, not a single one of the 52 I saw that day were red. The 53rd? Well, I did imply this would turn into a murder investigation. 52 not red, one previously red, and now dead.

11

Paul Clarke wasn’t scheduled to be at work that day yet. He was on the security staff and worked the graveyard shift. Somewhat prophetic, since he was the first in the company to end up in the graveyard. Software guys are notorious workaholics. The early risers showed up before 7 AM, the night owls didn’t leave until after 9 or 10 PM. Most days there was at least one person still working when Paul arrived for his shift at eleven PM, so there was only the one off-hours security guy. The doors had electronic locks. Access was via key card. There wasn’t a need for the last one out to turn off the lights and lock the doors; all that was automatic. I’d planned on going back a little before eleven that night, so I’d be able to talk to Paul. The break-in happened the previous night, so if anybody heard or saw something, it would have been Paul. Just before I was leaving for the day, or rather, thought I was leaving, Paul’s body was discovered stuffed in a supply cabinet. If he had been alive, his position would have been massively uncomfortable. Seems there was nothing unusual about having a box or two of paper outside the cabinet for ease of refilling the copy machine, so nobody had cause to open it. And since the delivery of copy paper was late in arriving that day, it was the delivery man who had the misfortune of finding Paul. The office area wasn’t that large. Everybody present heard the scream.

It took less than 15 minutes for about half of the CHPD to arrive. Crime scene investigators, homicide detectives, hell, even the chief made an appearance. Well, murders didn’t happen in Cherry Hill every day. Every week maybe, but not every day.

Officer Avery Noonan soon got shuffled to the center field grandstands, barely still in the building. I was lucky enough to be there at the start, so I got the occasional bone during the investigation, going to talk to folks barely related to the investigation, anyone who was not worthy enough for the homicide detectives to waste their time on. It ended up that corporate espionage wasn’t the motive. Nah, that would have been too convenient for the folks who wanted a big bump in their career status, me included. Seems a local firebug who was also a drug addict needed to score his next hit. He made a bomb and blew the door off of what he thought was the rear entrance of the warehouse next door, hoping he could fence some small appliances or something, I guess. But one positive that did come out of my involvement was the discovery of a nuance to my ability. Auras “vibrated.”

Maybe vibrated wasn’t quite the right word with the auras being a visual phenomenon, but it feels right. Maybe shimmered would be better. Writing traffic tickets, breaking up fights, things like that didn’t give me much of an opportunity to notice these vibrations before. But talking with a policeman makes people nervous. Even innocent people stumble and stammer when trying to get out what they’re saying. And believe it or not, some people out and out lie!

And no matter how confident people are in their lying, auras didn’t lie. It almost seemed like the aura wanted to break away from the lie. It’s like you can see it struggling. Well, I could see it struggling. It was a few years after him, but I ended up following Bill Farner to law school.

It was during my time in law school that I met my future wife. I was twenty-eight, soon to be twenty-nine and Lindy Markins was also a first-year law student. We met on the first day of classes in Constitutional law. We hit it off immediately and became partners for any legal exercises that were performed.