If You Really Loved Me Part 13

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David Brown, with only an eighth-grade education, scored well above seniors in a sample of 38,773 high schools in America. He was not a runaway genius, according to the GED tests, but he was smart. David wanted to be a computer technician and the WIN program agreed to send him to the Control Data Inst.i.tute in Los Angeles. He had to wait almost a year before he actually began training at Control Data, and in the meantime, he applied for a number of jobs in the computer field. The rejection letters were all the same: "We do not have an opening commensurate with your background."

Despite insistence that he was in failing health, David was cla.s.sified 1-A by the Selective Service, Local Board 127, in Long Beach in July 1971. He requested a hearing in August, and whatever he told them worked. He never served in the military.

Brenda, David, and Cinnamon moved from the little upstairs Magnolia Avenue apartment in Long Beach to a larger one at 2162 Canton Street. David worked part-time pumping gas in a Mohawk station and commuted to work on a motorcycle. Later, he bought an older yellow Ford Galaxy from Arthur for $75. On a WIN form, he listed his last three jobs as a "materials handler" for a foam company, a carpenter/mason for a Lawndale builder, and a nonpaid data processor for a computer company.

"We went to Gold Key and bought furniture for the apartment on Canton Street," Brenda remembered. "I was the one who ended up paying it off. I liked that apartment. Later, David's mother borrowed the bedroom set, and I haven't seen it since, except for one chest I needed later."

The marriage was relatively happy, although David seemed determined to keep Brenda dependent upon him. They were much happier when she trusted only in him. He didn't even want her to have a driver's license. "He thought I was a dummy," Brenda said. "I asked a neighbor to teach me how to drive, and David was mad when I surprised him and showed him my license."

David wasn't physically violent with Brendaa"not for a long time, and then only once. While they were living on Canton Street in Long Beach, he did beat her. She called her father-in-law. "I told Art and Art came over and told David, 'You lay a hand on her again, and I'll beat you up!'"

Arthur Brown's wrath had a significant effect on David.

They moved yet again, this time to a two-bedroom apartment on Juno Avenue in Anaheim. Their marriage was destined to be short, howevera"an estimation of its actual length depended on whether Brenda or David related the story. She said they were married about three years and David recalled it was five, although he admitted to an abysmal memory for dates, times, anniversaries. Since David was married to someone else by 1974, Brenda's recall appeared more accurate.

Brenda characterized David as totally, constantly consumed with womena"all women. "He was overs.e.xed. That's the only way I can say it. He was always leaning out of the car or turning around to look at women. He knew it made me mad, but he was obsessed. It didn't matter if they were young or old, or whatever. . . . I just couldn't stand it." David, in turn, accused Brenda of infidelity and said she was violent and psychologically abused him.

Even though she and David had s.e.x three times a day, she said he wasn't satisfied. "He still wanted more. He came to me and told me that he thought he'd gotten married too young and hadn't had enough s.e.xual experience. He asked my permission to go out with a woman he'd met at work at Cal Comp in Anaheim. She was older and had two kids. I really tried to understand him, and his argument kind of made sense, so I said okay."

After that, there were trips overnight. David told his wife that he was going "deer hunting" with a male friend. She wasn't duped. "I knew it was a woman."

At the same time, David was still jealously possessive of Brenda. He forbade her to go to lunch with her coworkers and when she defied him, accused her of infidelity. Brenda recalled her shock one day in 1974 as she stood frozen at the entry to a local cafe. Her husband was sitting in a booth, his hands caressing another woman. It was the first time she had actually seen him with someone else, and it hurt her badly.

Her name was Lori. "She was a plain girla"slender," Brenda said. "I asked him about it and he said he was working." She knew he was lying.

Soon after, when Brenda was working a Sat.u.r.day s.h.i.+ft in her office job and David was taking care of Cinnamon, he brought the child in and plopped her down, saying, "You take hera"I'm busy." Brenda asked Cinnamon what they had been doing. "She told me she'd been riding on a motorcycle with 'Daddy and a girl.' I thought she meant one of her little friends, but she said, 'No a big girla"for Daddy.' It was Lori."

Shortly after that, David brought Lori home to the apartment he shared with Brenda. He had divorce papers in his hand. He gave them to Brenda and announced he wanted custody of Cinnamon. "He introduced Lori to me by saying, 'This is the woman I'm going to marry.'" Brenda refused to divorce David, thinking that he would tire of Lori.

David, of course, remembered a different scenario. He insisted that he met Lori Carpenter at work at Century Data. She was an a.s.sembler on the line, "just a friend" who comforted him when Brenda was unfaithful to him. "My sister caught her cheating on me. I just packed my clothes and took the car and left everything to her. That divorce really tore me up."

Whichever version was true, the brief marriage was clearly in its death throes, and at some point as their relations.h.i.+p unraveled, Brenda became eerily afraid of David. "I don't know why, but I had this terrible fear that he was going to smother me to death with a pillow while I was asleep. He never tried it as far as I remember, but I used to wake up unable to breathe, dreaming, maybe, that he had covered my face with a pillow." She lay awake, long after David seemed to be asleep, watching shadows slide down the wall, afraid to close her eyes.

Brenda finally got up the nerve to leave David, enlisting her boss's help to move her furniture out. When David came home that evening, he walked into a completely empty apartment. The landlady was there, checking it over. David told her that he must be in the wrong apartment. She a.s.sured him that he was in the correct apartment, but that his wife and child were gone. "They took everything when they left."

David was enraged.

"David came to where I worked and held a gun up against my head and said that if he couldn't have me, n.o.body could," Brenda remembered. "I just didn't care. I told him to go ahead and shoot me, because he'd never get away. The police would lock him up forever. I was just so tired of fighting him. He finally dropped the gun and walked away."

Brenda had moved to a smaller apartment, also on Juno Avenue. There was a briefa"one weeka"reconciliation when she let David move in with her. She came home after work to find him calling Lori on her phone. "That was it. I heard him telling Lori he loved her. I chased him out."

A day or so later, he came back to get his rifle. Brenda was afraid to let him have it. That was when they struggled over the rifle and David hit Brenda with his car.

Brenda didn't dislike Lori and felt more relieved than anything when David left her. "No more colon cancer talk all the time. No more other women." But Brenda was terrified that David would win custody of Cinnamon, because Lori's father was an attorney. "I didn't have any idea how to get a lawyer, and I didn't have any money. I looked up some lawyer's name in the phone book, and I went to the California Building on Euclid and rode up on the elevator and walked right into his office. I told him, 'I need help and don't have any money.' He said we could work that out in time payments. I didn't want any alimony. I just wanted child support."

David was astounded. The fourteen-year-old girl he had protected was now twenty-one and able to take care of herself.

Brendaa"the young Brendaa"was the prototype, David's s.e.xual ideal, and she always would be. His image of the ideal s.e.x object did not mature as he aged. He would continue to fixate on teenage girls. After his first divorce, he was still in his early twenties and there was only a slight discrepancy in age between himself and p.u.b.escent girls. As he grew older, that discrepancy grew larger.

Girls in their teens gave David more respect and listened raptly to his stories of his accomplishments. They appreciated the gifts he gave them. Their skin was smooth and soft, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and bellies unmarred by stretch marks, their legs long and coltish. They seldom drew back in shock when David told them his s.e.xual preferences; they were still malleable and suggestiblea"unlike grown women.

Brenda and David's parting was most a.s.suredly not a friendly divorce, but the bitter feelings eased after the decree was handed down. Brenda was given custody of Cinnamon and raised her with the help of sitters. David had weekend custody. Cinnamon was her daddy's girl, according to David. "She was the perfect child. Well mannered . . . polite. After the divorce, she flipped from that to a withdrawn child who didn't like to be held and was nervous, fidgety, and constantly drifting off."

David didn't do well after the divorce either. Young as he was when he began with Brenda, he had fallen easily into the pattern that would define all his relations.h.i.+ps with women. He had to be in charge. Brenda had belonged to him, and she had looked up to him. Her defection took the spine out of his self-confidence. He remembered the first gun incident and described how he placed the rifle to Brenda's head with the firm intention of killing her and then himself. But she had proved stronger and gutsier than he. She had shown disdaina"not feara"even with the immediate threat of the gun against her flesh.

After his divorce from Brenda, David's episodes of overwhelming depression exacerbated. His s.e.xual appet.i.tes waxed and waneda"either causing (or caused by) his depressions. At times, he felt tremendous s.e.xual drive. Conversely, he periodically suffered from a complete loss of interest in anything s.e.xual. Since his libido approached satyriasis, this diminution of desire left him a hollow man. s.e.xual performance and fulfillment were central to his existence; he was a man consumed by s.e.x. It was during this ten-year period when his s.e.xual performance and outlet were sporadically blunted that David was hospitalized three times for depression and suicidal thoughts.

But then, like the phoenix itself, he always pulled himself together and rebounded. He now had his technical degree from the Control Data Inst.i.tute. However much he tended to embroider and pad his resume, to boast of his accomplishments, one thing was immutable. David Brown proved remarkably adept in the burgeoning computer industry.

After working for Century Data in Anaheim, he moved steadily upward over the next five or six years, employed by a half dozen other computer companies. "I doubled my salary. In this business, they'll bid for you if you're gooda" and I am good."

He saw a way to become wealthy and respected.

iMlore than most people, David had lived his life in clearly defined phases, the demarcation points generally determined by the beginnings and endings of his marriages. He was thirty-two, and there had been five of them, so many in such a relatively short time frame that his confusion with dates might have been expected. Each wife changed his life, but he had long since forgotten the dates of his many weddings and divorces.

Records show that David married Lori Carpenter on October 4, 1974, in Yorba Linda, and then moved into a rental house on Randolph Street in Riverside. It was a drab house and so was the street it sat on. David could not recall how old he was or how old Lori was, beyond his impression that she was "a couple of years younger than I was." He was actually twenty-two and she was nineteen, a bit older than he preferred. Lori loved four-year-old Cinnamon, and Cinny visited them regularly on weekends.

"My dad was fun," Cinnamon remembered. "He played with me, tickling me and acting silly, or he'd build things like a railroad track. He included me in the things he did ... or shared enough to please me. That was when I'd visit him on the weekends after my parents divorced. I got attention from him that my mom didn'ta"couldn't give me because of work."

Brenda worried. One weekend, she had a nightmare that Cinnamon was drowning. "It was so real that I called David and asked him to check on Cinny. He just got mad and said I was stupid." Cinnamon, however, remembered that she had almost drowned. "It was in a pool by his and Lori's house.

That day, my father was playing 'shark' with me, and I remember being so frightened.... Sometimes my dad would keep playing even after I was frightened already."

Although Lori had accepted Cinnamon eagerly, David's second marriage foundered in four years. They separated on October 13,1978. David cited "incompatibility." It was not surprising that they were incompatible or that Lori left him. Her husband had long since found someone else.

David encountered Linda Bailey for the first time while he still lived with Lori. His attraction to her was immediate, much as it had been when he was first drawn to Brenda. The fact that he had grown older mattered not at all.

Linda Bailey was only thirteen or fourteen when she caught the eye of the man who lived two houses down the street. She was pretty and blond and sweet. It was as if David had found Brenda againa"the Brenda who thought he was G.o.d a long time ago and had laughingly come to call him "King David."

Like Brenda, Linda Bailey was one of eleven brothers and sisters in a home held together only tenuously by a single mother. From oldest to youngest, the Baileys were Sheri, Rick, Jeff, Tom, Pam, Linda, Alan, Randy, Larry, Ralph, and Patti. Ethel Bailey, born Ethel Anderson in Nebraska and trapped now in Riverside, California, was forty-two years old and overwhelmed by the emotional and financial responsibility for a near-dozen offspring. Like Brenda's family, Linda's family lived on welfare payments.

"There were seven little kids at home, living on noodles, rice, and Kool-Aid," David said. "No meat. Ethel spent her check on beer and cigarettes. I gave them a turkey and a large ham for Christmas." n.o.body recalled exactly when David Brown began to visit the Bailey household in Riverside, but once he entered their lives, he became a familiar face, and he seemed at first like a G.o.dsend.

Ethel Bailey said that David came to her and explained that he was dying of colon cancer; he wondered if her teenage daughters might help out with cleaning his house-a" for a wage, of course. The doctors had told him that he probably wouldn't live more than six months. His marriage was disintegrating, his house was a mess, and he desperately needed help.

Ethel Bailey accepted David Brown at face value. A sick man who needed helpa"but who was also willing to help others. "How do you say no to a dying man? I had no reason to doubt hima"then." Beyond that, David had the ability to stay cheerful, despite his grim prognosis. He had a great sense of humor and he was a pleasure to have around. It seemed rather brave of him to go off to work each day, with the death sentence hanging over his head.

Ethel Bailey didn't know that David Brown was playing f.a.gin to several of her daughters. He delighted in persuading them that it would be a "trip" to see if they could steal tools that careless owners had left lying around in the backs of pickup trucks. They grew quite adept at lifting things. David made it a game. He could make anything sound reasonable and doable. Later, he would urge Cinnamon to steal small items.

The months pa.s.sed and David didn't diea"nor did he seem to be getting worse. He couldn't explain his miraculous remission. He still complained of pain and rectal bleeding, but it looked as if he wasn't going to die soon, after all.

David first began to date Pam Bailey, a girl in her midteens, almost ten years younger than he was. He became a fixture at the Bailey house, his eye really fastened on thirteen-year-old Linda. If he dropped in and saw the young Baileys were eating com flakes for supper, he simply headed down to McDonald's or to a pizza place and brought back food for everybody. Or he would pile two or three of the kids in the car and take them along. Because they were so dirt-poor that there seemed no way out, so young and poor that schoolmates' gibes about clothes cut to the heart, David Brown had an enormous impact on the Bailey childrena" particularly Linda, who soon supplanted her older sister as his special friend. David was Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and their savior. With no father in the home, or even in contact, with a mother who blunted her misery with alcohol, the younger Baileys quickly learned to depend on David.

He was making good money working with computers, and he spent a good deal of it on the Baileys. "I bought those kids the first store-bought clothes they ever had. I bought them clothes, toys. ... I took the whole stinkin' family to Disneyland and Magic Mountain. Yeah ... I'm a horrible man," he later said sarcastically. "The older kids didn't care that the younger ones had no Christmas."

Linda Bailey was barely budding into p.u.b.erty when David first saw her, and he was cautious in his infatuation with her. She was slender and fresh faced, so compliant and so impressed with everything David Brown said or did. She hung around him and gazed at him with adoring eyes. There was little doubt that she loved him, quite literally, until the day she died.

Linda was the seventh of Ethel Bailey's eleven children, a twin; one of the last half dozen fathered by one Clyde Dalrymple of Pennsylvaniaa"a man long gone from her life. She told David she was miserable at home. He was a most sympathetic listener. Linda confided her problems and her fears to David, grateful that, at last, she could tell someone.

He was the first hope she had of getting out.

Still legally married, David finally began to date Linda. She was no more than fifteen at the time. A mature fifteen, but still a young teenager. He was twenty-four. Then David announced one day that a miracle had occurred; he had beaten the cancer. The doctors were cautiousa"but it looked as if he might be around a little longer than they had originally estimated.

Linda went to her brother Rick's wife, Mary, and explained that she wanted to be s.e.xually active. She asked about birth control. Mary tried to dissuade her, but when she realized Linda was determined to sleep with David, she advised her to go down to the free clinic and get birth control pills. When Ethel Bailey heard about Linda's plans, she was furious. There was an argument, and neither mother nor daughter would back down.

Linda left home and moved in with Rick and Mary. "She was quite a basket case when she first came to us," Mary recalled. "She felt bad about splitting with her mom. She lived with us for about two years. Then she decided she was going to marry David."

Six months later, when Linda was seventeen, Ethel Bailey finally gave her consent, and Linda and David, accompanied by Ethel and Linda's twin brother, Alan, drove to Las Vegas where they were married on June 21, 1979.

David was working as "the youngest manager of a worldwide customer-service department" for Memorex and making good money. For the first time in her life, Linda Bailey Brown had the home she had longed for. The man so s.e.xually attracted to her was her husband, and she welcomed his attentions. Even so, David's third marriage ended even sooner than the first two, despite his avowed infatuation with his young bride. Maybe Linda was too young for marriage. After living together only one month and twenty-four days, they separated on August 14, 1979. On September 18, David sued Linda for divorce.

"David kicked her out of his house and divorced her," Mary Bailey remembered. "She moved back in with us. She dated other guys, and I would have chosen any one of them over David."

Mary Bailey, a robust, take-charge woman, was relieved that Linda's marriage had ended. She didn't like David Brown, found him "weird," and thought that Linda should be dating boys closer to her own agea"not living with some man who was nine years older than she was, had already had two wives, and always had an eye out for other women. Mary Bailey felt she had his number. "Linda had other boyfriends, lots of them," she said. "It wasn't as if David was the only one who wanted her. But he had some kind of hold over hera"she just never really wanted anyone but David. Don't ask me why."

David insisted that the marriage foundered because of Linda's immaturity and her lifestyle. "We were married, for, I think it was like several months. And I found out that, uh, I'm not even positive if it was alcohol or drugs, but she knew that I was against both very strongly, and, uh, she couldn't break it, so we got a divorce and I immediately bounced to a girl that worked for me, while I was manager at Memorex. Cindy."

David was married again, for the fourth time, almost immediately. He was twenty-seven, and in his own words, "on the rebound." But true to form, he could not recall his age or Cindy's age, or their wedding date or where they got married. The wedding date of record was May 24, 1980. They separated on Christmas Eve of the same year, and David sued Cindy for divorce on January 28, 1981.

David described Cindy as "a gorgeous one" and sounded slightly guilty at the way he had deceived his fourth wife. He had never truly let go of Linda. "I was cheating on Cindya" Linda and I kept seeing each other while I was married to Cindy." But David also complained that, although Cindy was absolutely beautiful, she had a "limited intellectual capacity," and while they had a steamy s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p, they had had little in common beyond that. Cindy also had two children for whom David felt no affinity.

Despite his many intervening marriages, David asked his first wife, Brenda, to baby-sit for Cindy's kids often, and she usually acquiesced. "He told me he and Cindy could never go out because of the kids." Brenda also stayed on good terms with David's second wife, Lori. "Lori was good to Cinnamon. Even after David divorced her, she still came and got Cinnamon and bought her clothes."

Cindy, wife number four, had been impressed with David's job, but proved to be a little too acquisitive for her bridegroom's taste. "She wanted everythinga"monetarily a"and I was unable to keep up with her demands." David was doing well at Memorexa"$36,000 a yeara"but he had hinted to Cindy that he made more than that; it was one of his failings, that self-aggrandizement.

Whatever the true reason for his fourth divorce, David returned to his third wife, his teenage love. David said he had left Linda the first time because she took drugs or drank too much; he couldn't exactly remember which. No one else remembered that Linda had a problem with either drugs or alcohol during her first marriage to David. Years later, David's memory of Linda's fall from grace was more precise. He said that she had been using cocaine. It was a moot point. Linda was dead by then.

David's courts.h.i.+p of his thirda"and soon-to-be fiftha" wife accelerated. He showered Linda with presents and overwhelmed her with promises that this time things would be different. He told her that he realized he loved her, and he always would. Their s.e.x life had been a powerful part of their relations.h.i.+p, pa.s.sionate and innovative. Both of them had missed that. David bragged to anyone who would listen that they made love at least once a day, and never the same way twice.

Around Christmas of 1980, Linda moved out of Mary and Rick Bailey's homea"and back in with David, almost before the door had shut behind Cindy. She was older when she moved in with David again. This time, she believed they would make a go of their relations.h.i.+p.

It should have been a happy ending, two young people who loved each other so much they could not stay apart. Even so, Linda's return to David alienated her from her family. "We considered him a user," Mary Bailey said bluntly. "We didn't want her to go back. But she wouldn't listen to anyone.. . . David could make women feel important. Just the way he talked. His voice could convince you or persuade you. He could turn it on."

The estrangement didn't last long. Linda's family cared too much about her. Mary remembered Linda as one of the kindest people she ever met. "She couldn't stand to see anyone suffer. One time, she saw this guy in the winter without a coat, and she went and bought him a nice new leather jacket and gave it to him. I didn't have the heart to tell her he'd probably turn around and sell it. That's the way Linda wasa"she couldn't do enough to help you. She couldn't stand to see anyone cold or hungry or unhappy."

Of all the Bailey sisters, Linda was the one who was the warmest, most affectionate, and fun loving. What she felt for this man so full of pretense and braggadocio was a mystery to her family, but they loved her and wanted to stay close. They had mixed emotions when Linda and David announced plans to remarry. Mary Bailey, of course, disapproved. Frankly, she thought Linda could have done better. She had argued against David as a husband until she was blue in the facea"but to no avail. Linda adored the man.

"I finally gave up and said nothing. I could see it wasn't doing any good, and it was driving a wedge between Linda and me. But even when we made up with Linda, we didn't see her often. David didn't like to have her spending time with her family, our visits weren't encouraged; and he was furious if she ever discussed any problems with us. He wanted her all to himself."

Others in the Bailey family were glad to have David back in the fold. He was such a go-getter that they believed him completely when he talked about all the businesses he was going to start. He was an egomaniac and a bulls.h.i.+tter, but David Brown might well be a way out for more of them besides Linda. He hinted that there would be jobs for many of them when he got his enterprises going.

Manuela and Arthur Brown, while a little surprised at their son's many marriages before the age of thirty and not particularly fond of Linda, were relieved that he finally seemed to have settled down. All those marriages and divorces couldn't be good for his health. The emotional strain of having one marriage after another disintegrate must surely have contributed to his ulcers and colitis and asthma, and all the other ailments he suffered from.

The mercurial state of his health was only one of the many paradoxes about David Brown. He talked of being constantly ill and of having little energy, and yet he exuded an aura of self-confidence and can-do. n.o.body he interacted with ever seemed to doubt hima"in either mode. David was not a well man and had to be coddled, but he was also a winner in the world of business.

Either deliberately or with some innate sense he possessed, David surrounded himself with people who viewed him as an infinitely superior man. He was smarter, savvier, better educated, and older than all his women. He really had no male friendsa"only employees. He had crafted his own worlda"where no one would question him or doubt him, or second-guess him. He was good to those he let into his life, free with his money, and he continually hinted at rewards yet to come.

He gave the women in his life jewelry and presents and promises and poems. He made jokes and kept his women laughing. He became, for three young females, as vital as the very air they breathed. Interestingly, they all used the same phrase to describe him: their life support system.

EXCERPTS FROM TWO ORIGINAL POEMS BY DAVID ARNOLD BROWN (TO HIS WIFE).

That Inward Sun Is Our Hope & Faith For Tomorrow One Good, Happy Tomorrow Can Wash Away A Lot of Ugly Yesterdays.

I Am Here For Youa"Today, Tomorrow, Forever.

Life Will Be Wonderful Love Will Be Too Both Will Be Cherished While I Share Them With You lYomantic that he was, David Brown did not let it interfere with his own ambitions. "The Process" was his breakthrough. It verified what he had always promised. The Process would bring him financial rewards far beyond what even he had visualized. And it would give him prestige and respect, which he craved even more. No one would ever remember the David Brown who had sc.r.a.ped by on welfare. He had already done well financially; he wanted to be a millionaire.

In a mushrooming computer age, there were inherent nightmares. Anyone who has ever relied on a computer lives in dread of losing the precious information stored on disks. Business files, customer lists, accounts payable, creative work, in the blink of an eye, all of it can disappear, swallowed up somewhere deep in the bowels of a previously user-friendly computer.

In the early 1980s, even more than today, computer data was vulnerable to siege. Fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, floods, power surges and outages, and human error can wreak computer disaster. "Disk error" was a message that sent a chill through the user. A "crashed" system could bring a company to its knees financially.

David Brown was not an "egghead"a"computer-programer type; he was a specialist in a new kind of rescue service. His knowledge was deceptively simplea"but there was a demand for it, and he always spoke of it in a hushed voice, enhancing the impression that he was onto something really big.

David started his own company, which he called Data Recovery, and he got a big leg up in 1981 when he went to work for Randomex Inc. in Signal Hill, California, as a subcontractor. Randomex had designed a system to repair damaged computer disks so that they could be read for backup and the vital information hidden there miraculously recovered.

Randomex profited from the fact that too many computer users neglected to keep backup disks stored outside their offices or had backup systems that had failed. The specialists at Randomex had refined their techniques to the point where they could recover data from fourteen-inch removable disk packs, and from hard drives and floppy disks. They were successful in retrieving 40 to 60 percent of the data lost by their frantic customers. That salvage could mean the difference between bankruptcy or survival for the small businessman.

David Brown studied the Randomex system as he worked for the company. He learned how to treat and clean the "media"a"the disksa"and make the heads fly back over the damaged area, bring the drives up to speed, and copy the good data onto another disk or tape. If he could improve on Randomex's percentage, David figured he would have himself a gold mine.

As indeed he did.

Randomex made all the contacts with potential customers, and David or Linda or some other family member on David's staff would pick up the damaged disks for treatment. When David came down himself, he never talked much. The executives at Randomex didn't like him, and they didn't dislike him. They never really knew him. He was simply "Data Recovery," a little subcontractor.

David added a few twists of his own and came up with what he called The Process. It was his, and his alone. He gave no credit to those who had taught him; his improvements were the real key. He soon was able to retrieve consistently a solid 70 percent of the data on the damaged disks given to him. David's special area of expertise was minidisks, the tiny hard disks that hold an unbelievable amount of data.

Cautious almost to the point of paranoia, David trained only those people he truly trusted, or over whom he wielded some power, in The Process. Even to detectives later, he could not bring himself to describe The Process in any detail. He called it "a hands-on projecta"what people out there call 'the magic of making it work' ... I guess you call it the power of what we doa"see, all this time, no one else can do this."

He always lapsed into inscrutable and deliberately vague phrases when asked to describe The Process. Linda was the first to have all the pieces of his formula. David trusted Linda because she adored him. "Well, I developed The Process," he explained. "I designed computers and disk drives and all kinds of stuff like that. I trained people like Sperry Univac. ... I trained other engineers, so training Linda ... I used training materials I used to teach other people to teach her, training materials I had written and developed."

Linda had no high school education, but The Process didn't require that. It required careful, tedious attention to the job at handa"but no special intelligence or talent. Actually, despite all the mystery surrounding David's process, and his determined efforts to remain obscure about the magic he wrought, his technique required little more than patience, Q-Tips, rubbing alcohol, and nonoily detergent. Sometimes he and Linda would have to run the damaged disks through The Process only once, and sometimes over and over, but they delivered what the customer wanted, and Randomex rewarded them with more and more jobs.

David Brown's 1099 income tax forms reflected his growing skill at data retrieval. In 1981, he was paid $ 11,255 by Randomex. In 1982, $98,143.85; 1983a"$124,905.82; 19X4a"$171,141.79. His data retrieval income dropped in 1985 to $ 114,081.02, but that was understandable, given his shock and grief over the loss of his wife and business partner.