Eye for Eye

by J K Franko

  Was Susie truly as unhappy as she claimed? Maybe. Then again, maybe it was just the effect of Camilla’s anniversary.

  Would killing Harlan save their marriage? Possibly. She seemed to think avenging Camilla would fix things between them. He had no idea.

  But, practically speaking, none of that mattered.

  Not really. Not yet.

  Roy thought about Susie’s proposal—killing Harlan—like he would a business deal, an investment.

  The first question Roy asked about an investment was not How much money do we invest or What kind of return can we expect? He never focused on what was to be gained.

  The first question was always, Does the business work?

  Is the business model feasible?

  Susie had proposed that they kill Harlan to avenge their daughter.

  The first logical question to Roy was, Could they do it and not get caught?

  Was it feasible?

  If the answer was “no,” then what could be gained by doing it, and all the rest—Susie’s motivations, avenging Camilla, and so forth—didn’t matter. If it couldn’t be done, if they couldn’t get away with it, then he could tell Susie precisely that, with confidence. It can’t be done. And that would be the end of it.

  But if the answer was “yes,” if killing Harlan was feasible, then bigger decisions would have to be made.

  And so, Roy’s planning to kill Harlan began primarily as an intellectual exercise. I don’t think he fully appreciated where that intellectual exercise would lead.

  Of course, Roy had never planned a murder before.

  Where to start?

  As the scotch flowed, so did his creative juices. Roy began to pace the room, studying his bookshelves. Lots of business books, an equal amount of histories, some philosophy, and a few historical novels. No Idiot’s Guide to Murder.

  Before law, Roy studied history. He is a big believer in collective wisdom. This particular subject—murder—was very well suited to “ancestral insights.”

  On the lower left shelf, where he kept his collectibles, autographed copies, and a couple of first editions, he spotted a dusty but beautiful volume he hadn’t referenced in a while. He pulled the leather-bound tome off its shelf and sat down at his desk.

  He placed his scotch on the edge of his desk, on top of a magazine, well away from the book. Then he opened the book gently, careful of the spine, to the table of contents.

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were philologists in the 1700s in Germany. You probably know them as the Brothers Grimm. Their study of medieval German literature spanned decades.

  The brothers collected traditional stories from all levels of society, from peasants to the aristocracy. Their aim was to preserve tales that had previously existed only in oral form, handed down from generation to generation—a practice threatened by the rise of industrialization.

  Many of these stories were, by the Grimms’ own admission, “not suitable” for children.

  This is ironic, as a common thread throughout the Brothers’ Grimm collection is stories that are didactic in nature and seem to aim precisely at teaching children how to survive in a dangerous world.

  After all, fairy tales are essentially how-to survival stories.

  Roy had found inspiration here before. He skimmed through the collection, entertaining himself, almost losing sight of his objective, until he hit upon The Singing Bone.

  In reading this little fairy tale, Roy unwittingly transitioned from brooding to planning.

  The summary he gave me goes like this.

  A giant boar was destroying the countryside, such that the king put a price on its head. Among many others, two brothers set out to try their luck at killing the boar.

  The younger brother went off on his own. The older brother went off drinking with other would-be hunters—for courage. While the older brother was drinking, the younger brother found and killed the boar.

  On his way back to deliver the boar’s body to the king, he came across his older brother. The older brother joined him. But along on the way, the older brother killed the younger and buried him under a bridge.

  Then, the older brother delivered the boar to the king, claimed the credit for killing it, and, as a reward, was married to the king’s daughter.

  The story didn’t end there. There has to be a lesson. A moral.

  Sometime later, a shepherd was passing by the bridge where the younger brother was buried and saw a bone sticking up out of the ground. He picked it up and fashioned it into a mouthpiece for a horn. And, lo and behold, the horn magically began making music on its own.

  The shepherd took the horn to show it to the king and his court. Everyone was shocked when the horn sang the story of the murder of the younger brother by the older brother. The older brother was executed by the king for his crime. (There is no mention of what happened to the princess. In all likelihood, she was married to the shepherd.)

  The moral of the story: bury your bones deep, because bones can sing. Or, another way to describe it… perhaps dead men tell no tales, but their bones just might.

  This story was Roy’s jumping-off point. The first key element in his planning.

  He sat back in the chair at his desk, and mulled.

  No singing bones...

  For Roy, this initially translated into “leave no body.”

  He pondered.

  How do you best get rid of the body?

  Who is going to come looking for it?

  Where will they start looking?

  And when?

  Roy’s train of thought led him from the Brothers Grimm to hide and seek. Just as fairy tales teach children lessons about life, so do games. Childhood games are a metaphor for how life works.

  Hide and seek teaches children real-life skills.

  The “hiders” learn the life skills of camouflage, shelter-taking, and subterfuge.

  The “seeker” learns investigation, pursuit, and capture. These are skills that are useful in the roles of both predator and prey.

  Or criminal and policeman.

  Didn’t it all boil down to this?

  Roy sat and contemplated, swirling his almost empty scotch glass, his mind bouncing from point to point.

  So, what does a cop look for?

  Clues. Sure. But what kind?

  The body, fingerprints, weapon, cause of death, evidence, connections...

  What kinds of connections?

  Who would want this person dead...?

  He poured himself another scotch.

  For Kristy. For Camilla... Tom Wise’s words returned to him, as they had many times before, like a phantom haunting his thoughts. ...will you kill this fucker Harlan for us?

  What had Wise been thinking? It was insane. Fucking crazy.

  Or was it?

  He and Susie had considered the same thing—killing Bareto. And she had backed off—Roy believed—because of what he’d told her.

  It was too obvious.

  He and Susie had clearly been motivated to kill Bareto for what he’d done. They would have gotten caught.

  We had a motive.

  But Harlan?

  This guy, Harlan, lived in another state. He had absolutely nothing to do with Roy or Susie. Hell, they didn’t even know what he looked like. And Harlan certainly didn’t know who they were.

  Their only connection was the drinks Susie had shared with the wife—he couldn’t even remember her name—and that brief conversation he’d with the husband, Tom. He racked his brains trying to picture who exactly had been in the bar with them.

  Had anybody noticed them together? Possibly.

  Had they spoken to anybody? Nobody but the bartender.

  Would the bartender remember them? It had been several months. And even if he did, they could have been talking about anything.


  It was highly unlikely that either of these encounters had been caught on any kind of video, security or otherwise. And if there had ever been any video, by now it had probably been recorded over or deleted. And how would it even come to light? Because, for anyone to look for such a video, there would need to be a connection between Harlan, and Roy and Susie, and Tom and... Deb, that was her name.

  There was no discernible connection between any of them. Certainly, none between Roy, Susie, and Harlan.

  Hence, there was no discernible motive.

  No motive.

  Why would Roy Cruise of Cruise Capital, Miami entrepreneur, husband, and grieving father, want to kill a twenty-something-year-old kid, a rapist, from Austin, Texas, whom he had never met?

  There was no plausible reason why he would want to.

  Which was why it was entirely plausible that Roy could kill Harlan and get away with it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Roy’s decision to move forward was built on a careful plan.

  The morning after their fight on the dock and his initial fairy tale research, Roy awoke in the study. He’d spent the evening after their argument alone, drinking. He’d slept on the sofa, not wanting to see Susie.

  The night before, Roy had decided that killing Harlan was worth considering. Of course, that had been after several scotches and no dinner. You might think that this “decision” made while intoxicated would be forgotten the next day or chalked up to “the booze talking.”

  You don’t know Roy like I do.

  When he sets his mind to something, look out. So, too, when he makes a decision.

  Roy was now focused on determining whether killing Harlan was feasible. Whether or not to actually do it, and all the morality involved, were questions for later.

  By this point, Roy had expanded on the Grimm Brothers’ lesson.

  No singing bones.

  In his mind, this had come to mean the elimination of anything that could tie him to the crime. If you want to murder successfully, you must leave no singing bones.

  No body.

  No weapon.

  No fingerprints.

  No witnesses.

  No motive.

  Was that possible?

  What were the odds?

  Roy understood business and the odds of a venture being successful. He had no idea what the odds were like for getting away with murder.

  So, he did some research online.

  From FBI and Bureau of Justice data, Roy learned that, starting in the year 2000 and going forward, there’d been approximately 15,000 murders committed in the U.S. every year.

  In about 7,000 of those annual cases, the killer was identified and convicted.

  In approximately 3,000 of those cases each year, a suspected killer was identified, but not convicted.

  And, in approximately 5,000 cases, no suspect was even identified.

  That meant that about 8,000 murderers out of 15,000 got away with it every year. So, by Roy’s math, the odds of getting away with murder in the U.S. were a little better than sixty percent.

  Not great odds. But not bad either.

  Better than blackjack...

  This gambling analogy may well sound flippant when you consider the gravity of what Roy was considering. But for an investor like Roy, it made perfect sense. He may not have plotted murder before, but he understood how to analyze probabilities when faced with a new investment opportunity.

  All he believed he had to do was apply the same legal and business process principles here.

  Roy’s first successful venture was a music-streaming platform that came out shortly after Napster. It was called RamRod. Napster got all the press because it had first-mover advantage. But RamRod was a fast-follower. RamRod studied Napster’s platform and learned from its mistakes—both legal and business model errors—and built a similar platform that ultimately sold for over $200 million. A big win at the time.

  What Roy learned from that experience was the same lesson MySpace learned from Facebook. The first-mover doesn’t always win. Sometimes, it pays to be second. Or third.

  As long as you learn from those that came before.

  He distilled this into two fundamental but related principles.

  Principle Number One: Copy others who have successfully done what you are trying to do.

  Principle Number Two: If you fail, be original. Don’t make the same mistakes others have made.

  Roy now knew that many murders are solved (forty percent). In each of those cases, the killer made mistakes that led to him or her getting caught and convicted.

  What Roy needed to know was, What were those mistakes?

  He could brainstorm a list. But why reinvent the wheel? If anyone knew what to look for to find a killer, it would be a killer-finder, someone who did that for a living… a homicide detective.

  Roy poked around online for about fifteen minutes, then got his keys, hopped in his Range Rover and headed over to Bayside Marketplace, a shopping center that had been built in the late 80s and was regularly featured on Miami Vice—a 1980s crime show.

  Roy found this ironic.

  He parked on the street and walked to the Crocs store, where he bought a pair of navy blue Crocs, charging them to his AMEX.

  Misdirection.

  He was already focused on leaving no evidence.

  Roy then walked three blocks west to the Miami Dade Community College bookstore and paid cash for a used copy of Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques - 5th Edition.

  The PHI he called it.

  He was careful to keep an eye out for security cameras. He also wore a University of Miami baseball cap, just in case. He didn’t want any video to exist of him buying a how-to guide regarding homicide. Roy brought the book back to his study and started reading and taking notes.

  He would decide later how much “practical experience” might add to a homicide detective’s ability to catch a killer. For now, starting out by understanding how homicide detectives were theoretically trained to solve crimes was good enough.

  If he could understand the starting points and processes, he would have a much better sense of what mistakes killers made and how detectives used those mistakes to catch killers.

  The PHI was like the rulebook to grown-up hide-and-seek, with examples, case studies, and so forth. Roy built an outline, based on the PHI, of how an investigator would approach a murder. He read the entire book cover to cover. The outline took the rest of the first day and the whole day after to complete. He barely slept, and left his office only for light snacks.

  Susie was apparently still mad at him and left him in peace, which was fine. He didn’t want her to know what he was up to, and he certainly didn’t want to face her until he had an answer.

  After completing the outline, he condensed everything he had learned from the PHI into one hand-written document that he labeled Roy’s Rules for Murder.

  This left him with one final step—practical application. Roy spent the entire third day in his study planning. How could he apply Roy’s Rules to killing Harlan and getting away with it?

  At about 6:00 p.m., he put the final touches on his plan. There were a lot of details to be addressed. To be safe, he kept it all hand-written. Nothing on the computer. No digital traces. And he made extensive use of shorthand and abbreviations.

  The plan was risky. It was dangerous. But, it met all the requirements of his Rules.

  Most important, it was feasible.

  Roy opened the half-empty bottle of scotch, poured himself a generous measure, and sat back to admire his work. There were lots of practical details, forensics, and so forth.

  But, it pleased him to note that, philosophically, it all came down to hide-and-seek and the Brothers Grimm. Collective wisdom.

  No singing bo
nes.

  By the time he got through what remained of the bottle of scotch, he felt he was ready to talk to his wife.

  He set his phone alarm for 5:00 a.m., pulled a pillow from the sofa, and fell asleep on the floor, on the oriental rug where Susie had been sitting three years before when she had proposed to him that they kill Liam Bareto.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Human motivation is a complex thing. Roy Cruise is no exception. I have struggled to understand why exactly Roy went down the path he did.

  Susie had her reasons. While it took her some time to reveal them to me, once she did, her choices made sense.

  But, she didn’t reveal them to Roy until things had gone much, much further. As a result, Roy’s motivations were all his own.

  And they were more complicated.

  Roy is a very fortunate man. He’s built a solid business. He’s wealthy. He finds his work fulfilling. He has a wife he loves. He has almost everything that most people struggle their whole lives to achieve, and many never do.

  Why risk it all to try to kill someone who has done nothing to you?

  Was it fear of losing Susie—of his marriage failing?

  Was it about avenging Camilla?

  Or was he driven by the sheer challenge of it?

  He is a very competitive person. It shows in his work life. I sometimes wonder whether, maybe, proving he could get away with it played some role in his decision, as well.

  You’ll have to judge for yourself the “why” of the path he chose.

  Roy was up early the next day getting everything organized. At 7:30 a.m., he sent a text to Susie.

  She awoke to the ping of her phone.

  Good morning, babe. Meet me on the boat, please...

  The couple had not spoken since the day of the radio interview. Sending her a text message this early in the morning would most likely get her attention.

  Okay, came the reply. On my way.

  As Susie approached the dock, she could hear the growl of engines. But it wasn’t the yacht. It was the fishing boat, the Yellowfin. He hadn’t taken that boat out in a long time. Not since Camilla. Hearing the sound of it took her curiosity level up another notch.