Red Rock Island (Damian Green Book 1) by Alec Peche Read Free Book Online

fish for food throughout the day, while he liked one to two for dinner. Sometimes he fished just for the cats when he had beef or chicken or pasta for dinner. On the rare times he left the island, it was dry kibble for the cats, but they hadn’t starved, nor had he found dead birds on his return.
     
    Fishing was also thinking time. He’d worked out many puzzles while catching dinner. He also depended on the wind direction or current, fished from different spots on his little island and the different views never ceased to power his creativity and problem solving. He had so many things going through his head; the anniversary of his family’s murder, inviting Trevor out to the island, Ariana, the cold cases, his wave powered energy unit. He hadn’t had this much on his mind in years. He decided to focus on the cold cases as all the other emotions roiling through his head would hopefully work themselves out in time.
     

Chapter Nine
     
    He’d sent about forty five fingerprint identifications to Natalie, but could he do more for her? Maybe write a program that would search a bunch of databases to say where these people were now, so she'd have an immediate summary of each person without having to research each one. Likely the FBI database was out of date and didn't include every death, or prison stay. As he pulled up the second and final fish for the day, he was anxious to get inside and filet the fish, then get downstairs to his computer lab.
     
    A short time later he was sitting in front of his terminal looking at the results from the first algorithm that he wrote. Sometimes it took several modifications before he hit it right and other times he nailed it the first time and this was one of them. He picked up the phone to call Natalie.
     
    “Hey Damian, thanks for the run,” Natalie said upon answering her cell phone.
     
    “Well, I’ve got something even better, I’ve got two people you need to immediately focus on.”
     
    “What? What did that brilliant brain of yours do?” and Damian could hear the excitement in her voice.
     
    “I thought you needed some help narrowing down the huge list of prints and while I was fishing, I thought of an algorithm to create pulling in a bunch of different databases to create a bio on each person, otherwise you could waste a lot of time researching people with just a random connection to the case.”
     
    “Yes,” and “what did you find?” asked Natalie, impatience in her voice.
     
    “One of the cold cases is for a woman named ‘Debbie Altman’. She disappeared one night in south San Jose in the summer of 1988. Her car was found on the side of the road, but she has never reappeared, so she’s classified as a missing person, not a homicide.”
     
    “Yes, I remember that case,” replied Natalie with growing impatience. Damian could feel her voice urging him to move faster.
     
    “So a fingerprint from that case is connected to other cases that are not on your cold case list. I believe the police lifted prints from her car and her apartment since they never did find Debbie, dead or alive.”
     
    “Who is the person with prints in these two cases?”
     
    “It’s a man named John Avery. He was placed on trial for the murder of another person in 1990 but was acquitted on a technicality.”
     
    “Yes I vaguely remember that case. I was working patrol at the time, but I kept an eye on the detective division as that was where I wanted to end up. He wasn’t tried because of something with paperwork,” Natalie said trying to reach back in her memory to the case.
     
    “He was released because the district attorney filed the case on the 91 st day and the law requires it be done in 90 days. His prints were taken at the time of his arrest, so they were in the system. Besides the run I just did, there was another incident of his prints in an apartment of a woman that went missing from Santa Cruz County. Granted all of the cases are at least twenty years old. What’s