The Hot Date Mystery Ch. 04

This story is part of an ongoing series. The chronological order of my stories is now listed in WifeWatchman's biography.

Feedback and constructive criticism is very much appreciated, and I encourage feedback for ideas.

This story contains graphic scenes, language and actions that might be extremely offensive to some people. These scenes, words and actions are used only for the literary purposes of this story. The author does not condone murder, racial language, violence, rape or violence against women, and any depictions of any of these in this story should not be construed as acceptance of the above.

Part 16 - Secured in Blood

Wednesday, January 25th. MCD was silent, waiting to hear the names of the perps.

"So who did it?" asked Joanne Warner.

"Well, that's what Lt. Perlman is here to tell us." I said. "I believe you've matched the DNA from the semen sample?"

"Yes sir." said Tanya. "But first, why don't you tell them who's behind it."

"Sure." I said. "Paulina, we will need an arrest warrant to hold Michael Miller, on the charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. And while you're at it, get a Murder-1 warrant for Yaris." I heard the gasps in the room.

"Tommy?" asked Cindy as I headed for the door.

"No." I said. "Tina."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Lt. Tanya Perlman wheeled herself into my office. Paulina sat down in the hot chair next to Tanya. No need to mention that the Green Crowbar, Cindy Ross, had seated herself on the sofa behind them.

"Okay, whaddya got?" I asked. "Jeff Fuqua or Alan Harris?"

Tanya and Paulina looked at each other, and Tanya said "How does he do that?" She then turned to me and said "Fuqua. And he's an interesting character, fer sure."

Tanya began: "The reason I delayed telling you this is because I got a hit on the FBI's database, but it wouldn't give a name. I happen to be in good with a certain FBI Agent, though, so he helped me go through the hoops to get more information." That 'certain FBI Agent' would be Jack Muscone, who was dating Tanya.

Tanya went on: "Fuqua was one of those types like the late Fred Dixon... jack of all trades, master of none. One of Fuqua's distinctions is that he is a good computer programmer. He also went 'rogue' about the same time Dixon is believed to have turned. And he may be what Jack calls a 'remnant'; a former Westboro operative that became a stray cat after the Pastor's most timely passing."

"His description?" I asked. "He could pass for Martoli?"

"He's taller, but they both have black hair, and are about the same age. Fuqua is 31 years old." Tanya said.

"So he was hired to take Andy's place on the date with Terry." I said. "He could pass himself off as Andy, since he was a programmer like Andy, and knew Andy well enough from them working together." Everyone else in the room nodded.

"Paulina, please tell me the arrest warrant has been requested." I said.

"Yes, it was." Paulina said. "About two hours ago when Tanya called me. It was granted, and McGhillie and Johnson are en route to his home to make the arrest."

At that moment, my assistant Helena, who had come in early, buzzed me.

"Okay, Tanya, thanks very much for this." I said. "If y'all will excuse me, I have something to do. Cindy, go supervise bringing in Tina Yaris, bring Michael Miller to I-2, and have him call his lawyer in if he wants one." Cindy seemed a little disappointed that she was not being allowed to stay, but she did what I asked her to do.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After my office was cleared, Patrolman Hicks came into my office. I had called him and 'invited' him to come to my office. Somewhat to my surprise, Corporal Ronnie Kirkpatrick came in with him.

And much, much more to my surprise, both men held their right hands in front of their chests... their fingers in a unique configuration that told me they were Orange Order 'Blood Order', and here under those auspices.

I got out my anti-bugging device, held it up where they could see it, and turned it on. "You may speak freely." I said as I sat back in my chair, letting them stand as they talked.

"Sir," said Kirkpatrick, "I know what you're about to ask Patrolman Hicks. I came with him to tell you that he acted upon my personal instructions to re-lock the window in Terry Schultz's apartment."

"Yes, that is what I was going to ask about." I said. "Only Hicks or Gunddottar could've done that, and Hicks is Orange Order. So... this was for Officer Greg Towson's sake?"

"Yes sir." said Hicks. "We remember what was done to him. We still can't find his son. That woman Schultz was behind his entrapment."

"So someone, very likely Tom Yaris, knew where Terry's hidden computer was." I said. "He got a maintenance ladder, climbed to Terry's back window, went in, put the original computer back on the desk, and we Police found it. Now Terry's operation is exposed." Both officers nodded.

"Sir," said Kirkpatrick," we can tell you more, but you might prefer hearing it from Chief Griswold."

I contemplated, then said "Yeah, I'll do that. Just do me one favor, gentlemen: next time, come tell me. This could create legal snags, and if I hadn't realized what was going on, it might've been a problem. I'm now 'Blood Order' like yourselves; trust me up front, okay?"

"Yes sir." said Kirkpatrick. "Our bad for not telling you in the first place."

"Fortunately, it will be okay. All of it, including the Towson family." I said. "Okay, you're dismissed to your duties." I picked up the gold button-like device from my desk and turned it off. Kirkpatrick and Hicks let themselves out of the office.

Part 17 - Issues And Answers

"Fuqua has flown the coop." said Cindy as she entered my office an hour later. "So has Harris. I've put out nationwide APBs."

"I'm not shocked." I said. "I get the idea Fuqua talked to Teddy Parker to plant seeds of doubt about Martoli himself, and Harris backed him up. I'd bet they skipped Town immediately after they hung up the phones."

"The good news is that Tina Yaris was brought in by Lydia Green and Inga Gunddottar." Cindy said. "Inga's been doing some 'extra' training with me and Joanne, so when Tina tried to fight them, Inga took her down hard. Resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer have been added to her charges."

"Excellent!" I said. "All the easier to hold her in custody."

"Yes, I can't wait to hear how you plan to charge her with conspiracy to commit murder." Cindy said.

"Oh, we may get lucky and get to charge her with murder itself... that of Andy Martoli." I said. "Ready for some fun interrogations?"

"Why don't you just tell them what happened, and they can fill in the blanks where you go astray." Cindy said.

I have to admit, it was two full minutes before I could stop laughing and regain my composure.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"It's like this, Miller." I said to Michael Miller in Interrogation-2, Paulina sitting next to me. Miller had not called in his lawyer, and said he didn't need the other guy since he himself was a lawyer and would represent himself. "ADA Patterson here has one offer, and only one, to avoid the death penalty. It might be you, or it might be your lover, Tina Yaris."

The mention of Tina's name made Miller jump almost out of his skin, but he said nothing.

"So you don't think she'll throw you under the bus to save her own skin?" I said. "Oh, I know, I know, you've invoked. So just sit and listen... and think about your future. I know that you are a very vindictive man, Mr. Miller. You take the adage about not getting mad but getting even to heart. Donald Trump even wrote about it in one of his books on business success."

"But you took it to an extreme." I said. "When your wife hired Terry to 'red flag' you, it didn't bother you in the slightest. You didn't just win the divorce case, you tried to utterly destroy your ex-wife in the process... even tried to get the firm that hired her to fire her. That's beyond mean."

"You can keep your evaluations to yourself, Mr. Iron Crowbar." said Miller.

"Ah, but it's relevant." I said. "You also never forgot about Terry Schultz. You were hell-bent on getting back at her for red-flagging you, getting revenge. You've been quietly hiring away her professional temps, or getting them into permanent jobs. You were like an anaconda... slowly squeezing the life out of her business. But that wasn't enough for you. You wanted her dead... and with Andy Martoli, you finally got your chance."

I said "I should say at this time a few other charges will be made against you: money laundering, RICO violations, maybe even embezzlement. I wondered why a man like you would be satisfied with being Executive Manager of a local branch of the State Credit Union bank, or 'SCU'. Fairly small potatoes, there, even though you had your own venture capital company behind it. And you were financing Dakota Funding, as well."

"Problem is," I said, "you did a very, very sloppy job of hiding things. You used your company's money for some ventures, but made it appear that it was SCU doing it. The paperwork looks legit, except no one else knew about it, and the SCU Board in the City was more than unhappy when I asked them about it yesterday afternoon." Miller's face began to fall.

"So... one Jeff Fuqua came to your attention." I said. "He's a bad seed. You and he might've worked together before; I'll have to do a bit more research on that, as well as connections to the late Pastor Raymond Westboro..." Miller's eyes didn't flinch; if anything, he looked surprised. Maybe nothing there, I told myself.

"So you found out that Terry Schultz and Fuqua's co-worker Martoli had a date... and it was your lover, Tina Yaris, that told you that... as Terry had told Tina. You got in touch with Fuqua, and he and Yaris worked out the details that he would take Martoli's place on the date with Terry, bring her home, then kill her. He decided to have sex with her first, which was one of his many mistakes. Then for some reason he left her computer sitting right there on the desk."

"No, he took it------" Miller started. Then he realized what he'd said. He sat back in his chair, looking utterly defeated. "All right, I need that lawyer now, to negotiate terms on my behalf."

"Terms?" asked Paulina sarcastically. "I don't have to offer terms now. You're hip-deep in it."

"Let's let him get his lawyer in here anyway." I said. I escorted Paulina out. In the anteroom I said "We still might want to make a deal with him, if he'll talk to the FBI about a lot of financial things I think he knows about."

"Okay." Paulina said. "What about Tina?"

"She's the one who should not get an offer of anything, but we might just have to give her something in exchange for a confession." I said. "Let's go rattle her cage... Captain Ross is beside herself wanting to know about Tina's role in this."

"You got that right." said the Green Crowbar, who was right behind us, waving that device in my general direction.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

H.J. Lynch of Chase, Lynch & Berry was Tina's attorney. The odd thing about Lynch is that on some rare occasions he knows not to start in on me... and he knew this was one of those times. I brought Joanne Warner and Paulina in with me. Patrol Officer Inga Gunddottar was the Uniformed presence.

"Well, Mrs. Yaris," I said. "ADA Patterson has one deal, and only one, to avoid the death penalty. And Michael Miller is talking to his attorney about getting that one deal for himself. So maybe you'll do the smart thing and start talking yourself."

"Why should I do that?" she said. "You think I did something wrong, you prove it." Hmmm, no wonder Lynch wasn't speaking; Tina Yaris was doing a plenty good enough job taunting me.

"Okay." I said. "I'll tell you what happened, and you correct me where I might go astray. You, Mrs. Yaris, have been unhappy in your marriage for some time. Tom Yaris is just not the ambitious man you thought he'd be, that you wanted him to be, that you tried to force him to aspire to. Every time he was assigned to lead other people, he walked away from that job."

"And then you met Michael Miller. He's a ladies man, a philanderer, but you had no problems getting into his bed in exchange for being a kept woman by him. Money for clothes here and there, he got you and your husband your jobs and greatly reduced rent, and maybe he promised to marry you when he got divorced from his wife, yes?"

Tina shrugged her shoulders, so I went on: "So then he tells you a sob story, that Terry Schultz and your wife conspired to bring him to ruin with the 'red flag' operation. He had you befriend Terry, talk to her, find out about Terry's date life... and when the time came, you told him about the date with Andy Martoli. It was you, not your husband, that manipulated the alarm system, told Fuqua where the cameras were. He gave you the source code to install into the alarm system to record the third floor when the second floor sensors went off, too."

"Oh, did I mix things up there, Detective Warner?" I asked, turning to Joanne for a second. "No, it wasn't Miller that was the ringleader... it was Tina Yaris here. Yes, Tina, I think you were sleeping with Fuqua on the side, as well as Miller. You had them 'whipped', you had them both wrapped around your finger."

"So what." Tina said, trying to sound bored.

"So Fuqua impersonated Andy Martoli. He was supposed to bring you Terry's prized computer. Instead, he made love with Terry Schultz and then slit her throat. You had some serious blackmail all ready to go from that data on the computer... but, so very sorry, it was just a dummy computer. Nothing on it, I'm afraid." Tina looked uncomfortable for the first time.

"But that is not even the best of it, is it, Tina?" I said. "You see, there's Andy Martoli's death. Not only was he murdered, but he was preserved with formaldehyde, and his body was refrigerated."

"Now, Detective Warner," I asked, turning to my fascinated young Detective again, "let's ask ourselves a question: where in the world can one hide a human body -and- refrigerate it -and- preserve it with chemicals?"

"Well, I did ask that question to myself at the Martoli crime scene, and there's only a couple of places that come to mind. One is the County Morgue, but that would just be a wee tad ambitious of someone to do that in the building across the parking lot from my office in Police Headquarters. And of course I checked."

"Now the only other place in this County sufficient to do that to Andy Martoli?" I said. "A funeral home. And you, Tina Sage Yaris, are the daughter of a funeral home director."

Joanne's face lit up a the connection hit her. I could almost feel Cindy's vibes getting started behind the one way glass. But Tina's expression was my favorite: her face fell. She knew I knew, and she knew it was 'ovah'.

Still, she and Lynch tried to bluff. "You'll never prove that. You'll never prove any of it." she said.

"Yes," said Lynch, "I can't wait to see your proof."

"We shall see, and you shall see." I said. "Your father, Tina, will be arrested as an accessory, and his funeral home shut down. Your husband will be brought in, and I'm willing to bet he won't take the fall for you, especially when we show that you were cheating on him, and readily spreading your legs for other men. And then there's Michael Miller... his only chance to live is to put you on the table at Jacksonville State Prison."

"I need to talk to my client." said H.J. Lynch.

"Yes, please do make her understand the gravity of her situation." I said. Joanne, Paulina, and I got up and left the room.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Oh my God." Joanne said in MCD. "It was right there in front of me, and I didn't see it."

"It was in front of all of us." said Cindy. "None of us put that together... except the Iron Crowbar, of course."

Chief Griswold had just arrived, and he brought over a chair and sat down next to the distressed Joanne. "Young lady, don't fret over this. I've been associated with this Police Department for over 40 years, and I've never met a Detective like Donald Troy. I'll also say he thinks very highly of your abilities. Let me tell you one story."

Griswold continued as all of MCD listened attentively: "Not too long after Crowbar arrived, just after he was promoted to Lieutenant, I was talking to Dexter Robinson, the Campus Police Commissioner. His daughter Robin is with the City Police. She and Sapper Warren got an email from Don, with six open cases from the City Police files listed. Don wrote 'these six cases were all done by the same people'. They checked it out, realized it was true, and ended up catching the perps. Don said to not mention his name, so they didn't, and they got a lot of credit for solving those cases. Of course, Don had read the cases, and made the connections in that brain of his."

The Chief continued: "My point here, Mrs. Warner, is that the Iron Crowbar has read or is trying to read literally every case file in the State, and half of the FBI's cases, to boot. He sits at home and reads old cases like you and I read hunting and fishing magazines. He has amazing powers of observation and deduction, but it is his tireless effort to gain knowledge that sets him apart. He never stops working, never stops trying to get better. And that's something we can all do, even if we'll never be the Iron Crowbar."

"You're right, Chief." said Joanne, feeling better. "I've got to work harder."

"You're doing very well." Cindy said. "All of you are, and the Commander tells me that very often. Let's just keep learning... from him. And the more experience you gain, Joanne, the better you will become. I daresay you just became a lot better this morning..."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Paulina came to my office about thirty minutes later. "They both want to take the deals. What do I do now?"

"Give 'em both deals." I said. "First, make sure Tina confesses fully in as much detail as you can get out of her. Her family at the funeral home is not involved, so when she says they're innocent, you can believe her. But make her confess to it all."

"As to Miller," I said, "we'll offer him a deal, but he's going to have to come correct on information. I'll be talking to him, and his answers will determine how good we make his deal."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tina Yaris confessed all. She threw Miller under the bus, and Fuqua under the bus should we ever get lucky enough to catch him. Paulina offered 25-to-Life for the murder of Martoli, and 20 years for the conspiracy to kill Terry, and Tina accepted. "They're consecutive sentences, so Tina will be doing 40 years before she gets parole with the best of behavior." Paulina said.

Tina gave every detail of her actions in the case, including befriending Terry Schultz, learning about the 'red flags' and her dating life from Terry, being told Terry had a date with Andy... she was the girlfriend Terry told about it, as Mary said usually happened... and Tina admitted that it was she who manipulating the security system at the condo complex.

I went into I-2 with Paulina and Teddy Parker. Sergeant Rudistan pulled rank to be the Uniformed presence, as he often did on my cases. I sat down opposite Michael Miller and his lawyer, the same one who'd been in Miller's office when I'd arrested Miller.

"Tina Yaris confessed." I said. "I really hope she was worth it, that she was that good in bed to get you to commit the crimes you committed."

"You don't have to taunt my client." said the lawyer. "What deal will you offer us?"

"I don't really need to offer anything." I said. "But I will offer 20 years, with possibility of parole, if you answer my questions truthfully." Miller and his lawyer nodded.