Bear the Great – Chapter One-Hundred-Ten.
Eleven years separated the brothers. In that time, the whole world had shifted. On one side of the divide stood DDE and the military-industrial complex. The sound track was Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.” Late night commentary was Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. On the other side? Well, RMN and Watergate, for one. The sound track was Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones belting out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Late night? That was Jay Leno.
Then too there was Vietnam. The older sibling got drafted, served honorably in Southeast Asia, came home, and never once talked about any of it in public. The younger came of age after the draft had ended. But he was much affected as a 10-year-old by events unfolding at Kent State when National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters, killing four.
Not surprisingly, one was a Democrat, the other, a staunch Republican. Both of them had one son and two daughters. One family called Texas home, with a vacation place on Hilton Head. The other lived in Colorado and kept a short-term rental property in California. When they went to the beach, one headed East, the other, West.
Both worked in the same industry: Computer services. And both shared the same upbringing. They had common early experiences, identical core values, and spoke roughly the same dialect. But circumstance had driven them in differing directions, with radically different outcomes. It was a crying shame. They no longer spoke to each other.
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The police got interested in the brother from Dallas after all their other leads had run dry. This was going to be a long shot, but at the moment a long shot was better than no shot. It was, sad to say, about the only thing the cops had left. The lead came to light after a review of Internet data on the deceased’s website – DEWConsulting.net – turned up a curious anomaly. Hosted on the dinosaur platform called “WordPress,” stats on each and every site hit were saved and stored, seemingly forever. Every IP address that had ever visited was recorded, date-time-stamped, and squirrelled away on a server somewhere in San Jose. Score one for the tried and true.
The website had been up for nearly 7 years when DEW got himself conked on the head with a hammer and buried beside South Rim Trail @RoxStatePark. After that point there was complete radio silence of course: No DEW, no posts. By this late date the case went cold and had been shuffled off to the State Police’s Open/Unsolved Unit. That’s right, the same outfit that Michael Connelly’s fictional detective Harry Bosch worked in L.A. after he retired from active duty as a homicide dick. But this was not fiction. And it was also not L.A. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office didn’t have the same resources that a big city police force had. It was probably unfair to say they couldn’t even catch COVID at the height of the pandemic. But maybe it was close?
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The squints at the Open/Unsolved Unit included a lot of recent Computer Science grads from Boulder and DU who were just glad to be employed by a government agency with relatively deep pockets. Well, that along with good health and dental plans. So they were always happy to run their algorithms late into the night on various datasets mined from the deep recesses of the Internet. One such search yielded a finding that raised eyebrows on the DEWConsulting case as it was now known.
The deceased was a blogger who put something out there nearly every day on his site. He also was a smart-ass, posting commentary and memes that some folks found, well, objectionable. In certain instances it was downright offensive. You know the type: Always a wise-crack but never an apology. He was the kind of guy who might tend to get under your skin if you found yourself on opposite sides of a digital divide.
As it turned out, the deceased’s Dallas brother was just such an opposite number. While the deceased was progressive to a fault, his Dallas kin played golf with Dubya back in the day and ended up working for Ross Perot, if you can imagine it. He was employee #66 at EDS. The stock options made him rich. Not Bill Gates or Warren Buffet style rich. But rich enough that he could retire early and enjoy the good life with his buddies down at the local country club.
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The thing that caught everybody’s attention in Open/Unsolved about all this was the fact that the elder brother had stopped regular visits to DEWConsulting.net exactly a week prior to the fateful day when all blogging – and blood-flow – came to an abrupt halt for the unlucky half of the pair. Based on a gut hunch, one particularly enterprising squint pushed his boss to seek a judge’s subpoena to open up the blogger’s email accounts posthumously. To everyone’s surprise, the court order was granted, And that is where they struck paydirt.
DEW posted a long rant on his blog about some unwelcome guests who trashed the Airbnb he owned in California. They actually painted psychedelic murals in fluorescent green and orange on the white interior walls. Worse, they rewired the entire house to install hidden cameras in each of the bedrooms, the better to film pornographic videos for sale on the dark web. What some people won’t do to make a buck, eh?
The elder brother wrote an email to DEW making jokes about “Hunter Biden’s artwork” and “only in California do you get such degenerates.” The blogger took exception, calling his brother “a fat fucking pig wallowing in hogslop.” The Texan said he’d better be careful about the things he said or he just might end up being sorry. The blogger replied that regional and political bias was a very ugly thing… “and so are you.” “Bite me.” “Fuck you.” “I hope you die a painful death.” The discourse went rapidly downhill from there.
“Take me off the distribution list for your daily BLAH-BLAH-BLAH BS. I never wanna hear from you again.”
“Gladly. You will not be missed.”
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As it turned out, the Texas brother was at loose ends. His wife had died unexpectedly during COVID, and his only son had recently fallen over dead of a previously undetected aortic aneurysm at age 32. At the second of the two tightly-spaced funerals, one of the remaining daughters was concerned enough to remark publicly, “Daddy just seems so angry all the time. I’m worried he’s going off the deep end. There’s no telling what he might do next.”
“But why didn’t you tell us she was sick? We only hear about it NOW?”
“Well, we thought she was going to get better.”
More like “It doesn’t comport with your inflated sense of self-regard.” But that part was left unsaid.
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The police ticked off the check-box for “motive.” And a hammer was certainly pretty non-specific as “means” went, readily available at any Ace Hardware. But what of “opportunity?” In a post-9-11 world of TSA checkpoints and tight airport security, this was a sticking point in their theory of the crime. Gone were the days when you could pay cash for an airfare and hop on a plane same-day without providing plenty of traceable ID – and indenturing your firstborn – up front. Absent the air route, it was a very long drive from Dallas to Denver. Maybe you could do it in one long day, but is that what really happened?
Nothing conclusive ever could be proved one way or the other. Certain of the squints had their suspicions of course, but it was never going to be enough for police to make an arrest. So the case would remain Open/Unsolved. Justice for the dear departed would have to be put on hold until a later date. Yeah, sure, “The wheels grind slow” and all that jazz. But this was starting to get ridiculous.