Sigrid stands and brushes herself off.
“There’s no one here. We’ll talk to Lydia’s friends later. Right now I need to rest.”
The Death of Jeffrey Simmons
Thirty minutes later Sigrid is alone behind a closed bedroom door in Melinda’s apartment. The bed is unusually high off the ground due to what Melinda called a “box spring” under a mattress as thick as her forearm is long. There is also a wardrobe and a desk. Everything smells like the inside of a box. The bedspread is a handmade quilt that Melinda’s grandmother had made and presented to her grandfather as a wedding gift and there was more to the story but Sigrid had switched off by then.
“Mi casa es su casa,” Melinda told her.
At the desk Sigrid unpacks a Korean laptop, boots it up, and for fifteen minutes she has to stubbornly refuse to join anything, update anything, or connect to anything. She fights past legal agreements that are in no way a “meeting of the minds” but ultimately has to capitulate; otherwise she can’t use the computer she allegedly owns.
Her first order of business is to plug in the orange hard drive to the USB port. She listens to it spin to life as Melinda turns on some music in the other room—some teenage girl singing about herself.
Sigrid inserts a USB key into the right side of the laptop.
The condition of his home notwithstanding, Marcus has historically been tidy and organized, and the hard drive shows that he hasn’t changed. It contains four folders marked in English rather than Norwegian. It would be interesting to know whether he’s dreaming in English now, after twenty years here.
The files are marked: DEPRESSION, POLICE, JEFFREY, IDEAS. They are sized 103MB, 127MB, 57MB, and 3K respectively. Sigrid immediately copies all four to the USB stick she names Ferdinand for no particular reason. Ejecting the hard drive, she opens the files directly from the USB key so the original files will remain untouched and the casual investigator will not see changes to the dates they were modified.
This way, no one will know where she’s looked, what she’s looked at, or in what order. This all feels more criminal than investigative, but there’s no law against taking precautions.
The DEPRESSION folder consists mainly of PDF files or screen shots from medical and quasi-medical websites, including blogs and letters from people with depression or some related psychological concern. Listing the files from largest to smallest shows that the file sizes are mostly small—500K to 1.5MB. A few exceed 4MB and these are generally short movies he has downloaded. She watches two—each a documentary-style interview about living with depression.
In the other room, Melinda has changed the music to something that reminds Sigrid of the Bangles, though it is unlikely Melinda is old enough to have heard of the Bangles.
She should have been more thorough at Marcus’s house and checked the cabinet for medication, but she knows not to castigate herself too much. No one can see everything the first time. The source of the guilt, though, is the misuse of the term “evidence”; it confuses too many investigators. As Sigrid has discussed with her colleague Petter on more than one occasion—especially when attending conferences conducted in English—the English term evidence isn’t used in Norwegian, or more to the point it was only lately introduced but not in relationship to crime and law. In Norway, the term is bevis, derived from the German beweiss, for proof. Still, though, the term doesn’t quite translate. It is not proof as the Americans or British mean it. As you search a home or other crime site, an English-speaking investigator does not look for “proof,” because proof is that which proves a theory to be true. But when an investigator is wandering around a crime scene the first time, it’s imperative not to have a theory in mind and be looking for ways to prove it. Proof is the last thing a professional should be looking for. He or she should be collecting information that might eventually allow a defensible claim to be made—both logically and legally.
It takes time, and effort, and the application of reason to the range of facts to craft a plausible explanation—to craft a story. How can one possibly get it right on the first pass? That bloodied knife sticking out of the butler is likely to be important. But what about that piece of half-eaten toast? Or that the dishwasher is full? Or that it’s empty?
The trouble is that few of the youngsters want to hear it. It’s dull. They develop a far-away look when she explains that investigation is an iterative process of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. That it isn’t magic. That it isn’t easy, or sexy, or based on their unique intuition, and that building a reasoned argument isn’t for amateurs. “Facts are not evidence,” she says. “Facts become evidence when they are mobilized in support of an argument.”
Those who survive the lecture might survive the career.
It is the Bangles. Melinda is playing “Manic Monday.” How can she possibly know that song?
The POLICE folder contains more complicated and varied documents than the DEPRESSION folder—not that she has read it all. This has images, videos, legal documents, policies, articles from newspapers and magazines, reports from nonprofit organizations and hospitals as well as church, civic, and youth groups. Photos of dead children; a black man with a thick neck and little hair with bruises all over his face and neck and shoulders; statements by police insisting that they had to protect themselves; statements from communities saying the police showed up pumped and ready to kill; gun ownership debates and arguments about the need for black men to defend themselves against the police because of a culture-wide presumption about guilt and violence that makes them all marked men.
Marcus had collected newspaper accounts from across the nation as well as academic studies and policy documents. How any of this relates to Marcus, though, is still eluding her.
The
