Cameron Flick listed himself as a doctoral candidate in math at the U. I pulled up the department’s website, which obligingly included a list of graduate students.
Surprisingly long list: a hundred sixty-two names, some for terminal master’s degrees, some for doctorates. None of them Flick’s.
Had his enrollment been a total lie from the beginning or had he been asked to leave? I had no contacts at Math but I did know someone married to a possible source: a geology prof named Llewelyn Greenberg who taught at the old school crosstown where I had a faculty appointment.
I generally avoid faculty functions but Llewelyn and I had sat together at a Kappa Alpha Phi dinner where a student I’d mentored had merited membership in that graduate honor society. Sitting next to Llewelyn was a pleasant, quiet woman he’d introduced as “my considerably better half, Karen’s an expert in topology over in the New World.”
She’d blushed and spent the evening silently doodling formulas on her napkin, then running over to Llewelyn’s, and finally to mine. Thanking me with a sweet smile.
Llewelyn was a bit more outgoing but not by much and by the end of the evening, they both looked exhausted.
More introverts. They don’t make a lot of noise but they often create wonders.
I looked up Llewelyn’s wife. Karen Salzman-Greenberg, Cratchett-Fillmore Professor of Mathematics.
I reached Llewelyn in his office and made my request. No need to explain because, as I’d expected, no curiosity on his part. That likely made asking for confidentiality unnecessary. But you have to be careful.
Llewelyn said, “Of course,” as if I’d stated the obvious, hung up and called me back two hours later.
“That person was there but no longer as of two years and slightly over five months ago.”
He recited the date.
I said, “Any idea why?”
“The usual,” he said. “Floundering. Couldn’t come up with anything original.”
I thanked him and thought about a grad student, taken with his own brilliance, tossed from academia like a piece of detritus.
Shattered. Then angry. A few months later, he deals with it in a tried-and-true manner.
Go get the rifle.
—
I moved on to an image search on Cameron Flick and pulled up five photos of a smiling tutor next to even more broadly beaming high school seniors, each holding up a college acceptance letter.
Plugging in Flick’s address on South Ogden Drive revealed a nondescript, off-white one-story bungalow, tagged by a real estate site at twelve hundred thirty-three square feet on an eighth-acre lot. Four years ago, the property had sold for just over a million and a half dollars. L.A. real estate psychosis.
Four years ago, Flick had still been a grad student and even with a host of clients paying a hundred eighty bucks an hour, that price was a stretch.
A second site included what the first hadn’t: the presence of a three-hundred-square-foot guesthouse. Milo probably knew that already but I included it in my notes and switched to a ten-year-old shooting in Shelter Lake, Ohio.
—
Rainer Steckel’s funeral had been memorialized in the same local paper that had listed his death one month prior. The ceremony had been “well-attended by family, friends, and Oberlin faculty members and students who remembered Rainer with great fondness.”
The dead man’s willingness to help others was emphasized, as were his “love of the outdoors and excellence in building birdhouses that he gave free of charge to neighbors and friends.”
No spouse or children listed. I looked for Steckels in Ohio, found a heating, air-conditioning, and plumbing company in Dayton owned and run by William and Della Steckel.
Nearly five p.m. there but worth a try.
A man answered, “Steckel AC, this is Will, how can I help you?”
“My name’s Alex Delaware and I’m calling from Los Angeles where I work with the police department.”
“Work with? How?”
