Chapter Fifteen
Seth Crawford couldn’t decide which was worse. He lost a daughter. That was the beginning of his misery. Now sitting in front of the lead detective, who had just updated him about the results of the medical examination and the status of the case, his head ached with throbbing pain. To be informed of the grandchild he will never have, the implication of multiple individuals being identified as partakers in the last sexual encounter and potential crime, and the puzzling aspect about no leads being available…
It was a different experience. None that he had foreseen or prepared himself for… Underlying all these revelations was the disquieting realization that Seth Crawford didn’t know about the life his daughter had been leading away from home.
With all the information that had been available, the police detective had been surprised when Seth asked, and he was later advised a second time by an adviser to Senator McKenzie, to keep the investigation quiet. The more details emerged, the more pressure was put on him to not disclose the gruesome nature of what had transpired.
“Mr. Crawford, I am terribly sorry for your loss,” said the detective, Timothy Sloan. This was the second conversation he was setting to have with the father of the deceased.
“No problem. Thank you for bringing this information to me. My interest remains in protecting my daughter. I am very much interested in getting to the bottom of what happened. But my daughter isn’t going to be a media fodder and be disgraced. Are we still clear on that?” Seth asked sternly. His resolve hadn’t wavered in the two days since he got the terrible call informing him about the tragedy.
“We will do our best, Mr. Crawford. I promise you this. We run a tight ship in my office. You won’t have to worry about us. I had a couple of questions. Can I ask?”
“Sure, is this going to be long?”
“Not at all,” answered Sloan. So much about this case wasn’t adding up. It seemed to him that the father had something to protect. He didn’t want to go as far as assuming he had something to hide, though. He had seen what happens to ordinary people when they are suddenly hit by an unexpected tragedy. In his experience, the wealthier they are, the harder it is to accept as if they had been living in a bubble of invincibility. He hoped that was all there was to it.
“About the house, the apartment? It is officially listed as belonging to a subsidiary company owned by your firm, right?”
“You could say so. It a family home we used from time to time. When my daughter became a junior, she moved there. We still use it when the family is in Boston.”
“Are there any kind of surveillance monitoring in the house?”
“There is. But it showed nothing. The system was disabled the night of…”
“Is it a common occurrence for the system to be disabled?”
“I doubt that it is. It would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” Seth answered with a forced smile.
The truth was the investigation into how the system had been utilized in the past many months had uncovered repeated and deliberate disabling for brief periods of time. He wasn’t informed of this fact. He had given a warning to his security head to get his act together or lose his job. He thought his daughter had grown up and could do without his constant obsession about her well-being. Well, the devastating result of that assumption was proven to be fatal.
“Do we have any method for establishing the record of who was in the house or not?”
“Outside of the surveillance monitoring, no,” Seth answered. He was getting irritated with the line of questioning. The detective was supposed to be working for him not interrogating him about his daughter.
The terrible blind spot for Sloan was that there were no sources outside of the house either. In all the years he had lived in Boston, Sloan rarely set foot on Beacon Hill. Situated across the river from Cambridge, the area was one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the whole of Boston. Not the kind of place someone living on salary could afford to be at. It was one of the original principles of life Sloan lived by. Avoid temptations at all cost. So here he was talking to one of the wealthiest men in the country, sitting inside a five-star hotel he would likely not visit again in the near future. The comedy of life, he thought to himself.
“Do you know if she made a habit of inviting people over to the house? It is a large house, right?”
“If your question is whether she was leading a normal college student life or not, the answer is yes. I never considered it a prime objective of mine to dabble into the life of my children. I seek to bestow upon them a sense of responsibility from a young age. In the four years she has been at Harvard, there hasn’t once been anything that happened that has given us cause for concern.” Seth said, concluding definitively the detective was wasting his time. His daughter will not come back, and he has his own investigative team looking into the issue. They will likely get to the bottom of what happened sooner than these incompetent detectives could, he thought.
“When was the last time she had contacts with the family?” Sloan pressed for more. He knew he was operating on borrowed time.
“We had dinner with her. And… She told us she had a party to get to. We didn’t think much of it. She had a lot of friends graduating this year.”
“Did anyone talk to her afterward?”
“She called me around 11 PM saying how she was having a wonderful time. It was a bit unusual, but I figured she was letting loose and allowing herself to enjoy her youth. She had always been a serious girl. I wasn’t at all upset that she called me that late in the night. If anything, I encouraged her to enjoy herself more in celebration of her graduation.”
“Did she tell you where she was at?”
As soon as the question was uttered, Timothy Sloan knew he had pushed too far. He was making the poor man relive the tragedy.
“No… If you don’t mind…” Seth said, getting up from where he was seated and stretching out his hand. “Keep me posted. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for me to keep this investigation away from the public eye. Whoever did this to my daughter will be found and punished.”
Detective Timothy Sloan put his notebook back into the inner pocket of his jacket and thanked Seth for giving him time. As he was leaving the hotel room, he was sure there were one of three answers to the whole mystery.
One, this may have been an accident, a natural extension of a life of debauchery which the family is trying to not expose to the public. Some kind of voluntary act that had a terrible end. Two, something did happen, and the family is complicit. Three, Seth Crawford had made the calculation that he has nothing to be gained by further exposure of the case and decided to cut his losses and mourn in peace.
None of the evidence on hand could alter the probability for any of those possible situations. He was still left with the improbable death of a girl harassed by multiple people at the same time. And apparently having the time of her life while doing it. If it was an involuntary participation, the perpetrators of the crime would need to work together and coordinate their attack.
The other possibility was, which seemed to make sense given the reservation he noticed in the family, the girl was into crazy sexual escapades. It is much easier for multiple people have a sexual encounter with an individual in a consenting environment. It wouldn’t require the coordination of many people. For it to happen, all that is needed is for consenting adults to be at the same place and at the same time. It probably made sense that there were no damages to the property, and there were no records found on any of the individuals implicated by the DNA evidence.
The only concrete evidence he has to go by are the reluctance of the father to cooperate and an anonymous tip implicating Andre Palermo. He decided he would carefully listen to the voice recording of the caller. He would also need to figure out legal ways he can get DNA test taken on Andre Palermo. It was a wide open case he had little hope of resolving quickly.
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