Death of the Ayn Rand Scholar by Gray Cavender (classic literature list txt) 📕

appeared in novels and on TV before Jillian was born, which made doing some of this catch-up reading even more fun. Carolyn had loaned her a few DVDs of old TV shows, and she checked-out several novels from the library. Her dad kidded her that she was getting to read detective novels and watch old TV shows as research. Jillian wondered if he would be critical of this research because he tended to read more ‘serious fiction.’ Instead, he told her about debates in the literature as to whether some famous novels by ‘serious’ authors could be categorized as being in the crime genre.

Working with Carolyn on the book was a first…it made Jillian feel like a real graduate student. And when the word got out that she was assisting Carolyn, her status went up among the other grad students, even the PhD students. Mainly, she learned how hard it was to do that sort of work, a lesson that was reinforced when she started writing her own MS project…and revised it…a lot of times. By the time they got to the Fem Crim article, although that was if anything even more demanding, as least Jillian was used to the work.

Jillian looked up from the book. Maybe Wes was right about pursuing a PhD. On the other hand, she enjoyed being a detective. She honestly felt that she brought about justice…sometimes.

As she passed a mirror in the hall as she headed to the kitchen to put something together for dinner, she smiled at her reflection: she was wearing her Veronica Mars T shirt, a gift she’d received for contributing to the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter campaign. She smiled again because, in the movie, Veronica also had a tough time figuring what career she wanted to pursue: lawyer or private detective.

Jillian had a new frozen pizza that she wanted to try…a cauliflower crust that she’d gotten from TJ’s. While she heated the oven, she diced and sliced vegies: she essentially ‘built’ this pizza herself. She cleaned out her crisper: miniature yellow and red peppers, the rest of a red onion, a few broccoli crowns, some fresh tomatoes, a can of tomatoes for the sauce (diced and ‘no salt added’), some mozzarella, a handful of fresh spinach…the pizza would be a full meal.

As she sautéed some of these ingredients and steamed others, Jillian thought about being a kid and the fun she had cooking with Mom…learning how to put a meal together from seemingly nothing. Dad always said that her mom had a secret drawer in the fridge where she stashed the ingredients for a meal that she could whip-up from ‘out of the blue.’

Jillian thought that maybe this was one of the reasons she liked to cook, not elaborate planned-in-advance meals, rather ones that came from the equivalent of Mom’s secret drawer. She also put a bottle of French Pinot Noir in the fridge to give it a little chill…compliments of Mom, too.

She set the timer, and while the pizza baked, Jillian thought about Clay Neely…for the first time in a while. She wondered if he popped into her mind because Ersula had asked about him earlier, or because she’d gone to judo class.

Clay Neely happened when Jillian had been working in the Research Division for not-yet a year. She was assigned to a work-group that was focusing on ‘intelligence led policing.’ The hope was that collecting and analyzing crime data could help the police administration better understand crime patterns and deploy resources where they were needed the most…maybe even in a preventive way. Jillian had taken workshops in GIS and had become proficient in her work. And, that’s when she saw it.

‘It’ being an almost textbook case of data collection, predictive modelling, and analysis. There had been a string of armed robberies at liquor stores in Tempe. Any armed robbery is a dangerous event—after all, the criminal has a weapon, probably a gun—but these were particularly bad because the robber was so threatening…two of the victims said the guy was so over the top that they had been afraid for their lives. Five robberies in, Jillian saw what she thought was a pattern. Lt. Timms, her division director, was out on maternity leave so, as they’d planned, she went directly to the detective who headed the investigation into these robberies: Sergeant Larry Gruber. Sgt. Gruber was very ‘old school.’ It was almost as if Sergeant was his first name. He was the sort of stereotype that Jillian had thrown up to Professor Billy Gilroy when she explained that detectives came in a variety of types.

Jillian had met with Sgt. Gruber and presented her data…summarized, of course, so that he could understand her analysis. She explained the patterns that her analysis predicted. In response, he derided her analysis and said that “real police work didn’t involve ‘thingies’ on a computer screen,” and then literally shewed Jillian out of his office.

A few days later, another armed robbery confirmed the pattern that she’d seen in her models. She ran more models, saw what she was looking for, and again went to Sgt. Gruber. He’d again poo-pooed her observations. He said that they had good intel about the armed robber’s identity, and that they were closing-in. Sgt. Gruber again dismissed Jillian and this time he actually called her “girlie,” and suggested that she and her “little nerd friends should get back to their Candy Crush games or whatever it is that you people do over there.”

She didn’t know what to do: the lieutenant was out for several more weeks and Tim Hughes, Jillian’s immediate supervisor, was brand new—literally his second week on the job—and reluctant to take on Sgt. Gruber. Although they had a nice esprit d’ corps, everyone on their team had had it drilled-in that they were not to antagonize the ‘the cops on the ground.’

So, what to do? Jillian’s follow-up work was a combination of more simulated models with a dollop of common sense, augmented by some high-level computer work…she googled