Sicilian Murder

by Alec Peche

  “I'll find a way to get it to you before I leave Rome, but I don't have his password.”

  “That's okay. I know someone in the security business in Germany that's really good with breaking phone passwords.”

  “Wait a minute, Dad may have trade secrets on his cell phone, I don't want it outside of your hands.”

  “Not to worry, the last phone my friend unlocked, he did so in front of me and handed the phone over without examining it. It’s my intent to examine the last few days to see if I can determine where your father went and who he met with. Based on what I saw at the crater, I believe this to be a well-organized murder.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t believe your father to be a random victim of violence. Someone had to have a special vehicle to get your father to the crater as I saw no evidence that he was killed there. I believe he was killed elsewhere and his body moved to the crater to make it look like an accident. Certainly it fooled the Italian police.”

  “Oh,” Melissa said and then after a pause added, “Would it help if I got information from his phone provider on where he used the phone recently?”

  “Exactly what I am looking for. In addition to any emails or texts that might indicate a meeting location, your father’s phone should have pinged looking for towers everywhere. That might help pinpoint where he was when he met his killer.”

  “I have a friend that works for a telephone company at home. I’ll call her to see how I can go about getting that information for you.”

  “Great. I know you have a funeral to plan, and it’s rude of me to ask, but that telephone information is central to this investigation. The Italian police may be able to access it sooner than I, but I’m not sure of Italian laws in regards to obtaining that kind of information. I would also expect them to call you for an interview.”

  “Okay. Should I tell them you have his phone?”

  “Let me think about that question. I don’t like lying to the police, but I’m also not convinced that they might screw up the phone somehow. I’ll leave you an email answer by the time you land in Atlanta. On second thought, I’ll have my friend unlock the phone and I’ll copy its contents, then give it to them locked. I bet they don’t have a resource to unlock the phone.”

  “I like that answer Dr Quint. I’m worried given the history of Sicily, that the mafia or someone else might have bought off the police. I don’t know if that's an old rumor, or if it’s how it is today, but at least if we have a copy we have proof if they destroy some part of it. I’ll make sure I don’t return the call until I have an email from you saying your expert has managed to unlock and copy the phone for you.”

  “Do you have any other questions, Melissa?”

  “I’m sure I do, but none I can think of at the moment. I need to get moving on arranging this phone be sent to you in Catania. You’ve made me suspicious, so I’m going to have the package held at the airport in Catania requiring you and your passport to pick it up if that’s okay.”

  “Yes that’s fine. I’d tell the airline agent that you just left your twenty-year-old daughter to travel by herself and walked off with her phone and it’s a parental emergency to get it back to her. You can say that I’m your daughter’s aunt and she’ll be returning to stay with me after she does an all-day hike up the volcano - both you and her are in a panic with her not having the phone.”

  “Thanks Jill, that’s a great cover story that I’ll have no problem acting out. Again thanks for your help and I’ll go handle getting this phone delivered to you and text you the pick-up information.”

  Jill ended the call and returned to the apartment’s living room to discuss with her team and Brenda. Nathan was still out and about which was fine. Jill was glad he was enjoying himself in the city of Catania.

  “Did you reach Melissa?” Brenda asked.

  “Yes I did and we had a lengthy conversation about Mr. Chen’s phone. She has it with her, but she’s making arrangements to have it flown back to the Catania airport this afternoon. Then I think I’ll need Henrik’s niece to come and unlock it before I hand it over to the Italian police.

  “Who’s Henrik?”

  “Someone that we hope Marie dates someday,” Angela said with a smile. “He’s a former client and special man who helps us with security type questions on our cases occasionally. He’s the guy we visit whenever we head off to Germany. In a previous case in Wales and Scotland when our good friend Nick was murdered, he sent his niece to us and she unlocked the phone in about five seconds. So Marie, go call Henrik and see if we can have his niece here this afternoon or evening.”

  Jill grinned at Angela's machinations while Marie rolled her eyes as she left the room to make the call and Brenda said, “What?”

  “We think Henrik is a super-nice widower. It's been over two years since we solved his wife's murder and Angela, Jo, and I think Henrik would make a great match for Marie. The biggest problem seems to be that he's in Germany and she's in Wisconsin, but he has a private jet and a personal fortune and so they could make dating work. We'll have to see what happens.”

  “I didn't know that about my sister or really understand the work that the four of you do. I'm impressed and glad I mentioned to Melissa that you could help.”

  Marie came back into the living room with a grin on her face and this time it was Jill who said, “What?”

  “Henrik's going to come to the apartment tonight for dinner. I volunteered Nathan to cook for all of us. It's just a two-hour journey in his plane and so he expects to be here about six. He says he can crack the phone. I hope he's as good as his niece was.”

  “Let me call Nathan so he can plan dinner and get some wine. This will be a great evening!” Jill said. “Then I need to get back to the case. I'm going to check to see if any lab results are in and then Brenda, I'd like to chat with you on whatever new product Mr. Chen was working on or excited about. We don't have any clue what the motive is for his murder other than it likely wasn't random. It could be personal with someone mad at him for something – perhaps in his personal life or even a deranged employee. The motive could also be business if he was about to land a new multi-million dollar miracle product that someone else wanted.”

  “Wow, when you put it like that, it feels like you're looking for a needle in a haystack. Randy has touched so many people and now they're all suspects,” said Brenda.

  “Actually most of them could probably prove they weren't in Sicily at the time of his death, but you can always hire someone to do the dirty deed. So only people with the means to pay for an assassination would stay on my list of suspects.”

  “How much does murder for hire cost?” Brenda asked, then seemingly appalled by her own question she added, “Oh my God, I can't believe I just asked that question.”

  “It's okay. It's one we would ask ourselves as a means to eliminate suspects. Sicily has high unemployment so I would guess that it would be cheaper to hire a killer here than in the states. That said, Mr. Chan's body was moved to the crater and that might be a costly expense depending on what vehicle was used and whose silence had to be bought. Frankly it sounds a little more sophisticated than the average street thug might plan.”

  Angela and Marie were nodding with Jill words, then Marie said, “Let's follow up on the idea that Randy had a meeting somewhere in a town with the word Sicily in its name. I'll check the cities – see what I can find about them and if they have an unusual or abundant plant that grows in that area.”

  Brenda asked her sister, “Can I help? Give me something to research and I'll do my share.”

  Jill smiled and said, “Thanks, Brenda, for helping Marie. I'd also like to look into this new product Mr. Chen was sourcing. Can you think back through conversations or emails with him and recall any obscure comments that might direct us toward identifying whatever this new product was?

  “I'm going to check into getting a car rental. Since I need to return to the airport to get Melissa's package, I may as well pi
ck up a car at the same time. I think we're going to end up traveling around the cities at the base of Mount Etna. I hear driving here is insane, who wants to be the driver?”

  “How about we designate Nathan? He did a good job in Scotland on the wrong side of the road,” Angela suggested.

  “I like that idea as he has more experience driving in Europe because of his business trips here. Angela, can you skim through my taping of the autopsy to see if the two cops said anything important there?”

  “Si,” Angela said in her best Italian accent.

  Nathan walked in just as everyone was hunkering down with their assignments. He leaned in to kiss Jill and said, “Got your text, so I've been volunteered to cook for all of you and Henrik! That'll be fun. I'm going to check a few recipes, then I'll head out to the store.”

  “Ah, babe, I need something else from you first. I need to go to the airport in about an hour to pick up a package from Melissa Chen and while there I want to rent a car for you to drive. I'm too scared to drive here.”

  “Really? You're a terror on the roads in California. You don't want to take on the drivers here?” he said with a grin.

  “Nope!”

  Nathan took a quick look at the time, did some calculation and said, “I can manage to shop and get the rental car. Let me just figure out where to park around here.”

  Angela looked up and said, “I could go outside now and talk to the neighbors and see what they say about parking. Then I'll listen to your autopsy tape.”

  Later that afternoon, each of them had something new to add to the butcher paper on Randy Chen that was taped to the living room wall. It was the easiest way to keep everyone informed and Jill always packed it in her traveling autopsy suitcase.

  Hours later, the car was parked on a nearby street. Henrik arrived and unlocked Randy Chen's phone, and now they were gathered around the apartment table drinking wine and talking about the wine industry.

  “It's nice that you frequently need my help on these cases near to my home. What will you do if your next case is in the United States?” Henrik asked.

  “We'll figure out some way to get your help long-distance. You might have to teach us all to be phone hackers as that appears to be an ongoing skill we need,” Jill said cheerfully.

  “Or you could come to the U.S. more frequently,” Marie added.

  “I enjoy your company, my friends, and so if I can work it into my schedule, I'll drop in on you the next time you need help.”

  “We'll be in Eastern Canada for our next vacation if you would like to join us. We'll be exploring Ice Wine which is also suitable for your part of Germany. When was the last time you took a vacation?” Jill asked.

  “It's been a long time. I'll think about it,” was all Henrik would say.

  The conversation moved on to other topics, and then Henrik had to head back to the airport for his flight home. Marie walked him out to his taxi, while the friends returned to the case.

  Chapter 7

  Jill was up the next morning with many to-do items on her list. First she needed to check on her test results, that was to be followed by emailing Melissa Chen, and reviewing Randy Chen's unlocked phone as Henrik had been successful in unlocking the password. She took her laptop into the living room so that Nathan could sleep in peace. She hoped by the time he woke up that she would have a few places to visit where Mr. Chen might have been on the day of his death.

  Marie also an early riser, looked up from her laptop and said, “Good morning, did you sleep well?”

  “How could I not between the jet lag and the fabulous evening. It was wonderful spending some time with Henrik.”

  “Yeah, he's a great man. It's kind of scary to watch him unlock a phone. I have so many items in my contacts app that I wouldn't want just any hacker to get their hands on.”

  “Yeah I know what you mean. Fortunately, my cell phone company has great security and if I’m ever murdered, I’d want Henrik to unlock my phone to help find my killer and that’s what we’re doing.”

  “True.”

  “So do you think you two will ever date?”

  “I don’t know. I find him attractive and nice. He brought me my favorite chocolate from Germany, but I’m not sure he’s over the death of Laura. There’s this lingering sadness every once in a blue moon that makes me think he’s thinking of her.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s faint, but I catch it too once in a while - like he wishes she was there to enjoy our company, but then he seems to shake himself out of it. From what he said of her, I doubt we would have been friends or if we would have socialized with her as she had this dark side to her.”

  “Yeah I try to avoid folks on the dark side. They’re never worth the drama about them and if I could ever develop an accurate screening tool, I would never hire one of them as they inevitably cause some workplace problem. So not to change the topic, but Brenda wrote some thoughts and I have a few cities for us to visit, but I think from what you said yesterday, you have a few priorities to take care of before you get to me.”

  “I’ve been looking at the toxicology screen results while we were chatting and I see the proof that Randy was murdered. Melissa will be relieved to know that he was likely unconscious when he was thumped on the head.”

  “How can you tell?” Marie asked, pausing in her own computer search.

  “His lab results came back with Chloroform in his blood and tissues. Chloroform used to be an anesthetic before better compounds were created. It’s toxic to the kidney and liver and disappears quickly. So he must have died soon after he was administered the drug, as his kidneys and liver didn’t have time to work it out of his system. That’s a mistake on the part of the killers, perhaps if they waited twenty minutes after knocking him out, it would have dissipated and we would have never known.”

  “I rather like the thought that he was unconscious when someone took a big rock to his skull.”

  “Yes, I would rather be anesthetized for that.”

  “Is it hard to get chloroform in Sicily?”

  “I don’t know. I need to send Melissa Chen this information and then notify our police contacts. Let me handle those tasks and then we’ll move on to your stuff,” Jill said adding the latest information to her wall poster on the case.

  Jill took one more look at the toxicology tests to see if anything else was abnormal. She wasn't surprised to see Randy’s liver had reacted to the substance as that was one of the toxic problems of chloroform. Then with some thought she composed an email to Melissa. She also read the report on the rocks she collected in the crater and the blood on them wasn't human. It would be faster to just relay the results, but she needed to add some empathy and explanation. It took a while, but eventually she was satisfied with her wording. She hit send, then looked over to Marie and said, “Tell me what you learned.”

  “There are eight cities with some form of the word Sicily in their name. Some are close to Mount Etna and others are much closer to Palermo. Their websites, once translated to English, talk about wonderful flora and fauna along with lots of ancient churches and ruins. The towns range in size from 500 people to ten thousand. Several towns have olive oil festivals and others have hazelnuts, lots of wine varietals, and prickly pears.”

  “So your search is still too wide at the moment. Did Brenda remember anything that was helpful?”

  “Yes, she did, our minds must think alike. She thought back over the past three months about conversations with Randy. She remembers in a meeting that he spoke of a couple of plants that were on his radar for new products. She couldn't remember when the meetings were if he said where he had sourced the plants. He listed several, but she could only remember two – Aloe Vera and Hippocrates' tree.”

  “The Plane-tree, platanus oreintalis in Latin.”

  “I forget about your botany background. I'm amazed you can remember Latin names so easily.”

  “It's one of the few names I remember because of its connection to Hippocrates. I don't thi
nk I could have named a single plant we saw on the slopes of Mount Etna yesterday. So are both plants here? If I recall they like the Mediterranean climate and would do well in areas of Sicily where it doesn't freeze.”

  “Yes, that's what my research showed. One of the cities on my list gets snow, so I think we can cross that one off.”

  “I agree with the snow. I'm not aware of anything special about Aloe Vera or Plane-tree in Sicily. These are not rare plants and they grow in many areas of the world. Why would Randy Chen think he could only source the plants here? And these are two common plants, who would kill over them?”

  “I don't know. We seem to have more questions than answers,” said Marie.

  “Let me get to work on Randy's phone to see if there's anything there that will help us pinpoint Randy's travels and product development. I would think that sometime today, the Italian prosecutor will reach out to us. I'm rather surprised that it didn't happen yesterday.”

  “Yeah I find that weird also, but then I think I've really learned in this case, how important the work of a medical examiner's autopsy is in determining the cause of death. If the family hadn't hired you, no one would have recognized this as a murder.”

  “I briefly did some research before arriving and was appalled at how they handle autopsies. Overall, Italy is considered to have a low murder rate, but if they miss classifying deaths as murders as they did in this case, then that statistic may be considerably inaccurate for this country.”

  “Good morning!” Angela said coming into the living room and sitting down. “What new clues have you discovered at this hour of the day?”

  “Good morning yourself!” Jill replied. “I have one new clue -there was chloroform in Randy's blood that caused a little liver damage. And that indicates he was definitively murdered.”

  “How sad,” Angela said pausing and thinking about Randy's reputation in her community and his daughter Melissa. “What do the police say about that? They seemed so hesitant yesterday to declare his death a potential murder. Mother Nature had to throw two earthquakes at them to get her point across.”