Chapter 38: Gang Related

December 2, 2001, Chicago, Illinois

🎤 Steve

When Kara and I arrived at the hospital, Jessica wasn’t waiting for us, so we went inside to be warm. After five minutes, I went to the ER clerk to check on her.

“She took an MVA up to surgery,” Dominica, the clerk, said. “That was about ten minutes ago. I think normally she would have sent you a text, but she was on the gurney with her hand in the patient’s chest.”

“Would you call up to surgery and see if she’s doing the procedure or if she’s turning the patient over to another surgeon?”

“Sure!”

Dominica made the call and, as I’d suspected, Jessica was going to do the surgery, and had told the scheduler she’d need four hours and help from a cardiovascular surgeon. Kara and I thanked Dominica, then left the ER to head home.

“I’m glad this doesn’t happen too often,” Kara said as we crossed Hyde Park Avenue.

“Same here.”

“I hope she’s not too late. I want to talk about something.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“While you and Sarah were playing, I had coffee with Annette and Don from the Chemistry Department. They’re both moving their kids from Kenwood Academy to the Lab School. Did you know there’s a serious gang problem at the Academy?”

“Jesse hasn’t said anything,” I countered.

“He has his own gang!” Kara said with a soft laugh. “And I can’t imagine anyone giving a six-foot-one Sophomore any grief about anything! Or any of his friends.”

“True. What did they say?”

“There was a drug bust last January.”

“Wow, Honey. A drug bust in a High School. Call the newspapers! Stop the presses!”

“Be serious, please.”

“You know that happened in Milford when we were there!”

“But that wasn’t gangs - that was just kids dealing. This one they sent in an undercover cop who posed as a student.”

Which made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. I wondered if my ‘friend’, Officer Julie, was the one who had made the bust. And Kara was both right and wrong - it wasn’t ‘gangs’ as she meant it at Milford, it was the Mafia, which was, in a way, just a different kind of gang.

“How did I miss this in the newspaper?” I asked.

“Not sure, but I missed it, too. That got the ‘Gang Task Force’ interested in the school as well.”

“And neither Jesse nor his moms said anything, either.”

“Maybe they kept it quiet because it was undercover cops?”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, Annette spoke to someone at the precinct about it, and there have been a number of incidents.”

“Are Annette and Don white?” I asked.

“Yes, why?”

“Because the ratio of students has shifted significantly, such that only about a quarter of the student are Caucasian, and I’m including the Latinos in that, even though the trend is to call them ‘Hispanic’ and make them separate from ‘white’ in demographic numbers. Those changes are what’s led to the hockey team needing to recruit students from private schools. There just aren’t enough black or Hispanic kids who play ice hockey. I’d guess about the time Jesse graduates, they won’t be able to field a team at all, which is sad, because there’s no reason other than culture that more black and Hispanic kids don’t play hockey.”

“You think Don and Annette are racist?”

“I think the demographic mix might influence them, especially if they think there’s a gang problem. What are you suggesting?”

“That our kids go to the Lab School. It’s basically guaranteed admittance because Jessica and I work for UofC, albeit she’s at the hospital.”

“There’s no hockey team, so that rules out Jesse changing, even if he wanted to, which I don’t believe he would. Not to mention I remember reading that they have a ‘no-cut’ policy which means everyone plays, even if they have zero skills. That’s fine for a ‘fun’ league, but they’re in the IHSA and compete. That’s a serious disadvantage to athletes who play team sports and want to play in college.

“As for Albert, he’s already talking about one of the private schools which have JROTC so he can get a leg up on the Academy. There are magnet schools that have it, but those are more difficult to get into because of the lottery. That leaves the three girls, who are all in elementary school, though Birgit will be a Freshman next Fall.”

“The Lab School is pretty much a lock for admittance to an Ivy League school.”

“I think all our kids are locks for that, if they want it! I guess I don’t have a problem with it, so long as it’s for the right reasons.”

“I’d really prefer the girls not be at the Academy with the gang problems.”

“Discuss it with Jessica and I’ll support what the two of you decide for the girls. As I said, in three years, Albert will go to either a magnet or private school with a JROTC program.”

“They could all move to the Lab School in the Fall.”

“You discuss that with them, because I’m not going to do anything to break up the Girl Gang, Fluffle, or Stepsisters!”

“About two-thirds of those kids go to private school.”

“I’d still speak with the girls before I made that kind of decision. And you know Birgit will discuss it with me either way.”

“OK. I’ll speak with Jess and the girls.”

“I’ll mention it to Jen, Josie, and Jesse, just so they aren’t surprised.”

We arrived home, had our family dinner without Jessica, and I placed a phone call to Oguni. I’d written to Sensei Hideki and asked his permission to call Sakurako to wish her a ‘happy birthday’, and he’d granted it. She was surprised and happy, and we had a brief conversation during which she’d thanked me for the gift I’d sent.

Just before 10:00pm, I received a text from Jessica saying she was about to shower and asking if we’d meet her at the hospital, which we did about twenty minutes later.

“I had my finger in a hole in his aorta which I couldn’t stitch without putting him on bypass and fully opening him up. Kelly and I worked on him for four hours. It was touch and go because of the combination of injuries, but he made it.”

“Good job, Babe!”

“I am TOTALLY beat, but I need a sauna.”

“And orgasms?” Kara asked hopefully.

“Not tonight, Dear, I have a headache!” Jessica replied, but her tone was light. “You and Tiger can, if you want.”

“Tiger spent the afternoon fucking a virgin’s brains out!” Kara replied, then mock complained, “And I didn’t even get to watch!”

“Poor baby,” Jessica replied sarcastically.

“Did you speak with Emilee, Jess?” I asked.

“I did what you suggested - mentioned I’d seen the book. We chatted a bit and I encouraged her to see you again if she wanted to discuss the book or delve deeper.”

“Steve ALWAYS delves deep!” Kara declared.

“Tiger, I’ll go to the sauna. You take Miss ‘Horny as a three-peckered billy goat’ upstairs and fuck her, please.”

“Sorry, Jess,” Kara said apologetically.

“I really am totally beat, and just need to relax.”

“Alone?” Kara asked.

“Not if you’re quiet!”

“We’ll join you, Jess,” Kara said.

“Thanks.”

December 3, 2001, Chicago, Illinois

Sarah had shown up on Monday morning, on Kara’s advice, and she and I had spent just over an hour fooling around in the bedroom off the kitchen, before we’d showered and she’d headed to school and I’d headed to the office.

“Good morning!” Noelle said when she came to my office just past 9:00am. “You have me three mornings a week, according to Eve.”

“And you can hit the ground running. We’re going to the data center by McCormick Place to install the NAS. You can install the second unit in the data center near O’Hare on Wednesday morning. Just an FYI, our software engineer starts today.”

“Reed Leonard, right? I set up his workstation and phone on Friday. I take it he’s in orientation today?”

“Yes. He’ll have lunch with us. My treat.”

“Cool.”

“Let’s get going.”

Noelle grabbed her toolkit and we left the NIKA offices and I drove us to the data center where Noelle went through the same security procedures I had the first time, and then we worked with the ‘Smart Hands’ team to get the NAS chassis and drives from storage.

“This is going on a private VLAN,” I said. “There is an ethernet port on the VLAN and it’s cabled to the managed switch.”

“NFS, right?”

“Yes. With ‘hard’ mounts because we need data integrity. The backup code will do checksums, obviously, but I’d rather have the write hang/wait than fail with an error. I’ll set up a watchdog process to alert us to any hangs.”

“OK. I saw your memo about VMWare. You don’t plan to roll that out for production, do you?”

“No way. It’s too new. We’ll use blade servers from Ziatech, well, they’re Intel as of last month. Their Ketris servers route ethernet over the backplane so we won’t need dozens of ethernet ports. For now, we’ll use shared hosting, but if the VMWare server works as advertised, each client will have their own virtual machine.”

“That’s cool! You just have the prototypes running right now?”

“Yes, on those two workstations you provided. The blade chassis had the longest lead times, and they’ll be here on the 17th. That’s when Aisyah starts, and you two will have your work cut out installing those and getting everything configured by the end of the year while Reed and I get everything ready for hosted backups, hosted email, and hosted web servers. That’s for January 1, for beta testing, and February 1 for ‘go live’. The hosted legal software will be available on July 1, though we’ll have three beta customers before then. There is a bit of work to do to allow different customers to share the same server.”

“You don’t think the new software will be available by then?”

“We can’t even install it until January, based on the availability of engineering support from VMWare. And we’ll want to thoroughly test it with email, web hosting, and backups before we put law firms on it! My plan assumes it won’t work, so if it does, it’s a major plus.”

“That makes sense!”

“Eve let me know that you have three weeks’ vacation scheduled in May for your honeymoon. Mind if I ask where you’re going?”

“Italy. Rome, Venice, Florence, and Naples!”

“I’ve never been to Italy. All of my European trips have been in the north.”

“I’ve never been, and neither has Jacob. The only places I’ve been are Canada when I was ten and a Caribbean Cruise with my parents when I was seventeen.”

“I bet that was fun!”

“It was because my parents took full advantage of the entertainment, which meant I could do my own thing, and they had a ton of stuff for teens. It was the best three weeks of my life!”

“I think Italy will top that.”

“Me, too!”

We managed to get the units mounted in the racks and all the disks loaded, as well as configure the management interface before it was time to head back to the office for lunch with Reed. Noelle let me know she felt comfortable doing the install in the second data center on her own, which was what I’d hoped would be the case.

“Noelle Ryan, infrastructure engineer, meet Reed Leonard, software engineer. Reed, Noelle.”

They greeted each other and we left the office to walk to Venice Café where I ordered a salad and they each ordered a calzone. We got to know each other, and I discovered Reed was divorced, and had the typical libertarian leanings of most people in IT, though he was slightly left-libertarian, where most people called me right-libertarian. Sarah’s request about a guy popped into my mind, but the conflicts I’d thought about tempered the idea. I’d also discussed the request with Jessica at breakfast, and she’d had a few ideas, but needed to confirm that the Resident was, indeed, single, before she invited them to the house.

When we finished lunch we went to the first floor for Julia’s Town Hall meeting where she introduced Harper Atkinson, NIKA’s new Assistant CTO. I saw some skepticism on the faces of some of the long-term employees, and made a mental note to talk to my Kitchen Cabinet, or President’s Advisory Council as it was officially called. When the Town Hall concluded, Noelle returned to her internal support duties, and Reed and I sat down to map out our work.

“First, I have a list of additions and modifications for SquirrelMail and CPanel, including rebranding it for NIKA.”

“We’ll release any improvements back to the open-source project, right?”

“Absolutely. Though some of what we’ll be doing isn’t particularly relevant because it’ll be bolting on and integrating some of the control panels we’ll need for the various services we offer. But certainly, anything that would be relevant.”

“Cool. I also had a look at the corporate website and customer portal and think we could make some serious improvements.”

“That’s not directly part of the business unit, but Sam and I do all that work, so we can certainly incorporate it into our plan. Moving it off equipment hosted here is a priority, and it’s our alpha-testing for the hosted services.”

“What’s your position on using tools like Macromedia Flash or Dreamweaver?”

“Don’t?” I replied.

“We’re on the same page. From the specs, I think we can code all of this ourselves without needing any of those toolkits. I’d really prefer to stick to all open-source tools.”

“Same.”

“Cool. I have a meeting in five minutes with Sam.”

“Go. I’ll be here if you need me. I have a bit of work to do for Dave.”

“Regular development?”

“We’re finalizing a move from an in-house installer to InstallShield. There’s a nasty bug that nobody has been able to track down so Dave asked me to take a look at it.”

“Windows? Oh, hell no!”

I nodded, “My sentiments exactly, until I look at our corporate bank balances. We’ve moved to Linux or Unix servers for most clients, but Windows on the desktop is still king. That said, once we roll out the next revision of our legal software, we’ll have full browser support, rather than just being able to query the database. That’s required, obviously, for the hosted version. You and I will end up working on that after the first of the year with a couple of Dave’s engineers.”

“Mac, Windows, and Linux?”

“That’s the plan. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work.”

“Put me in, coach!”

“Go see Sam and we’ll get rolling.”

He left and I went to my workstation, and as usual, checked the news. The markets were roiled by the Enron bankruptcy filing, which had been done on Sunday. That had mostly been priced in, but when the government of Argentina had announced that nearly all bank accounts were effectively frozen, the traders had been spooked, and the DOW was down about a hundred points, or 1%, after having been on a fairly consistent upward trend once things had settled after the September 11 attacks.

In much more important news, the US government announced that one of the Taliban prisoners captured after a prison uprising near Mazār-e Sharīf, Afghanistan, was an American named John Walker Lindh. There was very little detail, but he was already being called ‘The American Taliban’.

I spent several hours on my bug hunt, and eventually found that a file was being placed in the wrong location due to a bug in InstallShield. I found a workaround, and reported that to Dave. Just before 5:00pm, my mobile phone rang.

“Steve, it’s Father Basil.”

“Hello, Father! How are you?”

“Quite well. First, I wanted to make sure Jesse had told you about the first service in the new building on the 16th.”

“He did. I’ll be there, though I’m not sure who else from the family will be with me, as Jessica works in the ER on Sundays.”

“You’re all welcome, of course. The bishop will be with us to consecrate the temple and the altar.”

“OK.”

“The other thing is that Michelle and Alexi had their baby this afternoon. Peter Alexi and mom are doing well.”

“Excellent!” I replied, wondering if Sarah knew.

“I won’t keep you! I’m looking forward to seeing you on the 16th. I miss our lunches.”

“Call me after the first of the year and we can set something up.”

“Great! See you in two weeks!”

We said ‘goodbye’, I snapped my phone shut, then shut down my workstation, grabbed my bag, and headed home.

December 4, 2001, Chicago, Illinois

“Well, this is a surprise,” Officer Julie Richman said when I called her first thing on Tuesday morning.

“Your undercover assignment was at Kenwood Academy, wasn’t it?”

“I can’t discuss that.”

“My son goes to that school, and there was a drug bust there, by an undercover police officer. Then you, an undercover cop, ‘randomly’ target me. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Undercover work can’t be discussed. I’m serious about that.”

“Why did you target me?”

“Exactly why I said - you fit the profile.”

“I simply don’t believe you. What are you investigating, Officer Richman?”

“You know I couldn’t tell you if there was an investigation.”

“Then let me make this perfectly clear - I know I can’t stop your investigation, whatever it might be, but you are under no circumstances to have ANY interaction with anyone in my extended family without my attorney present. And I’m talking about walking down the street and saying ‘Hi’. I’ll have my attorney send you a letter to that effect.”

“You’re blowing this WAY out of proportion.”

“If there is no investigation, tell me.”

“You know I can’t say one way or the other.”

“I know no such thing. You’ll hear from Melanie Spencer shortly. Good day.”

I disconnected the call without waiting for an answer, then dialed Melanie’s number, fortunately catching her in her office. I explained the situation, and what I needed.

“For anyone else, I’d say that’s a stretch and a pretty serious paranoid delusion, but with you? Nothing surprises me. I can send the letter, but it will have no real effect. You need to tell everyone to refuse to say anything beyond ‘I want a lawyer present to speak to you’ to any and all law enforcement.”

“What about undercover cops?”

“There’s not much you can do about that. They can lie about their status with impunity.”

“But they can’t break the law, can they?”

“That depends on what you mean. They can, for example, make controlled drug buys which would be illegal for you or me to do.”

“If Officer Richman was pretending to be sixteen, could she have a romantic relationship with a minor?”

“Even a kiss could be considered sexual assault, but that would probably get a pass. Sex, on the other hand, would be a criminal act and I can’t imagine that being sanctioned by any judge I know.”

“What about naked saunas?”

Melanie laughed, “Similar to demanding someone strip to prove they aren’t wearing a wire?”

“Hypothetically, if Officer Richman, or someone like her, were invited by Jesse and his friends to a sauna, could she participate?”

“I can’t say with absolute certainty, but I would think the undercover cop would have to decline. Being naked in the presence of a minor, and having the minor naked as well, would be seriously problematic.”

“OK. That basically clears all of Jesse’s friends, and there is no way that a police officer could pass for an elementary student. Could an undercover cop have an intimate relationship with an adult?”

“They couldn’t be given that kind of order, but I suppose it’s possible they could voluntarily do it, though it would risk compromising the case. We’re not talking CIA or KGB operations here, which are a very different thing from police work.”