Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “Injection was where we saw the marks in his shoulder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why so many?”

  “You know how many injections from a 100-cc needle it takes to make twelve ounces?” he asked. “Do the math.”

  Clarence closed his eyes, mumbling something about thirty cubic centimeters in an ounce. “Even with that big syringe, at least four shots. Could’ve been a half dozen.”

  “That’s a break for us. The killer wouldn’t do that without a specific reason. You don’t just notice a couple of ink bottles in a drawer and say, ‘Hey, I’ll kill him with fountain pen ink.’ It’s too bizarre and time-consuming.”

  “Maybe a sadist wanted him to die slowly.”

  “In the killer’s mind it made perfect sense. It wasn’t random.”

  The first seventy-two hours after a murder are critical. Unfortunately, it had been six days. Clarence couldn’t make lunch, so it was Jake and me at Lou’s.

  I took the six steps to the Rock-Ola, which reminds me of the robot in Lost in Space, and pressed B9, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

  As we waited for burger baskets, I said, “Okay, it’s not suicide. Not the work of a serial killer. I mean, we aren’t finding other people injected with ink with nooses around their necks. And it’s not a hired killer.”

  “Why not?” Jake asked.

  “Too messy. All those unnecessary garnishes. Somebody’s trying to make a statement. To mock us or to tell us something. A professional killer would be in and out in two minutes. This guy hung around, maybe forty minutes. It wasn’t business. It was personal.”

  “I don’t understand why the killer would leave all that evidence,” Jake said. “The insulin, the syringe, the ink, the injections, the rope, the gun. Why bother?”

  “Right. And don’t forget the crumbs and the wineglasses,” I said. “Why not just whack the guy and leave? My theory is, he’s trying to overwhelm us with evidence. It’s brilliant. There’s enough evidence that we can’t tell what’s real and what’s phony.”

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked, squeezing a lemon slice in his Diet Coke.

  “The chair, for instance. Normally you’d say this was a short person. But maybe it’s a tall person making it appear that a short person adjusted the chair.”

  “Or maybe it really is a short person.”

  “Exactly. That’s the problem. Suppose the killer tripped up and left some real evidence. How would we distinguish that from the contrived evidence? At first I thought somebody wanted to be caught. Now I think they’re smart enough to know there’re always some bread crumbs. So they’ve crumbled a whole loaf and spread it out. How do you find the real bread crumbs—or know when you’ve found them?”

  “Whoever your killer is,” Jake said, “he seems to know enough about investigations to realize how to mess one up.”

  “Yeah.” Jake didn’t know how close to home he was hitting.

  My phone gave me its “missed a call” ring. The message was Manny saying, “Ballistics confirmed murder weapon’s the Taurus.”

  “Good news,” I told Jake. “The Dumpster gun’s the murder weapon. Now we wait to see about fingerprints.”

  I took a celebratory bite of cheeseburger. I’m telling you, Rory’s a master. Emeril’s got nothing on him but a TV show.

  “There’s something else,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I don’t think the professor called me that night.”

  “But … I thought you said he did.”

  “His phone was used to call my number. That doesn’t mean he was the caller.”

  “You’re thinking it was.?”

  “The killer,” I said.

  “How would the killer know your number?”

  “Same way as the professor. There are ways to get unlisted numbers.”

  “But why call you? The killer wouldn’t know you’d be investigating the case. Even you didn’t know, right?”

  “And if he was going to call me, why linger at the murder scene to do it?” I picked up a printout. “I’ve been going over the confession. Listen: ‘I, Dr. William Palatine, do not deserve to live. I’ve crossed boundaries and forfeited my life. I admit my arrogance. I deserve judgement. I should be cast into a deep sea with a millstone around my neck.’ ”

  “First time I’ve heard that,” Jake said. “Weird.”

  “The prints were wiped off the keyboard, so Palatine didn’t write it. Probably the killer. But here’s the best part. Up to now, I’ve had to deal with a ninety-minute window for time of death. Computer forensics told me this afternoon that the file wasn’t saved by the user, but it was autosaved.”

  “So?”

  “The automatic file recovery was set to save every five minutes, whenever a change had been made. It backed up last at 11:40. That means the killer was still there, typing, after 11:35. And I got my phone message at 11:37. I say he was wrapping things up. He’d just finished off Palatine or was about to. Once he fires those two shots, he’s got to get out of the house. Time of death was probably 11:30 to 11:40. Given the multiple injections and everything else, I don’t see how it could have been before, say, 11:20. A ten- or twenty-minute spread’s worlds better than ninety.”

  “What time did that woman say she saw the professor let the guy in?”

  “Becky Butler pinpointed the commercial break that put it about 10:50 p.m. So the guy was in the house with him at least forty-five minutes.”

  “Isn’t that an awfully long time?” Jake asked.

  “Yeah. The killer wasn’t in a hurry. And I want to know why.”

  It was twenty minutes out of my way, but after leaving Lou’s I decided to swing by Dea’s In and Out in Gresham for an orange malt. I listened to a Nero Wolfe audio, Murder by the Book. Sometimes I hear something I can use in my investigation.

  But I was distracted, mulling over the case. I was looking for a crumb, a trace, a scrap of a hint. Anything. I was trying to discredit my unsettling hunch, unsuccessfully.

  I’d attempted five times to contact the professor’s brother, the doctor. I turned off Nero Wolfe and pulled to the side of the road as we finally connected.

  “You’ve heard my messages?” I asked. “I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”

  “The next three days are impossible,” Dr. Warner Palatine said. “I’ve got a few minutes now while they transport a patient. Then I scrub in for an emergency surgery.”

  “Let’s get started.” The orange malt could wait. “I have the impression you and your brother weren’t real close.”

  “We saw each other Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. Two years ago we spent a week together at Sunriver. It wasn’t fun. What? Thirty ccs? No way. I told you twenty.” I heard muffled voices.

  “Doctor?”

  “Sorry. I’m back.”

  “So did you talk to your brother on the phone?”

  “I used to, but I got tired of his stupid answering machine. Did you know every week he’d have a quote from a different philosopher? Even when we were kids, he was a show-off.”

  “How old was he when he became a diabetic?”

  “Who?”

  “Your brother.”

  “What are you talking about? Bill wasn’t a diabetic.”

  “But … he was insulin-dependent.”

  “No way … unless it happened in the last month, and that’s impossible. Too old for type 1.”

  “But he was wearing one of those ID tags on a chain. Plus, a needle and insulin in the fridge.”

  “Speaking of chains, somebody’s yanking yours, detective. The one thing Bill talked to me about was his medical condition, enlarged prostate and all. He’d call me to double-check his doctor’s advice. He was taking Diovan for high blood pressure.”

  “Yeah, we found it in the medicine cabinet.”

  “I’ve been his free medical consultant for twenty years. No co-pay. Type 1, insulin-dependent? No way. I’d know about it. Look, I’ve got to get to surgery.”

  I pulled the file fro
m my beat-up briefcase and searched my crime scene notes. Then I called the evidence room.

  “I need information right now on a piece of bagged evidence. It’s on the Palatine murder, November 20. Last Wednesday. It’s the medical ID chain that was around his neck. I need to know exactly what it says.”

  I sat there feeling dumb for not checking his medical records. But what’s the point of faking a medical condition on a dead man?

  “Okay,” said the tech. “On the back side it says ‘MedIDs.’ On the front side, in a red imprint, it says ‘Insulin-Dependent Diabetic.’ And under that it says ‘See wallet card.’ ”

  “Is his wallet still bagged?”

  “It’s here.”

  “Can you check for a wallet card?”

  “Isn’t this your job? You want me to interview witnesses, too?”

  “Just check, would you?”

  “He’s got his health insurance card. The rest is credit cards, a coffee card, and a few pictures. That’s it. There’s no medical card.”

  I contacted Palatine’s primary physician, assured him of my credentials, and he confirmed that Palatine wasn’t diabetic.

  I left a message for Manny and called Clarence to fill him in.

  “So if the professor wasn’t a diabetic,” I said, “where’d the insulin bottle come from? And whose chain was hanging around his neck?”

  12

  “A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic. A fool takes in all the lumber he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out. For every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, A STUDY IN SCARLET

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 3:00 P.M.

  I VISITED Paul Frederick’s apartment, with Detectives Karl Baylor and Tommi Elam as my tour guides but found nothing helpful. The neighbors testified that Frederick would hang over the edge of his deck, spying on people with his binoculars. He’d often do it at night. This time he’d leaned too far.

  Yeah, right.

  As I waited for the elevator on the ground floor of the Justice Center, Clarence walked in the front door. I held the elevator for him and prepared him for our appointment by saying, “You can learn a lot about someone by studying their computer.” We exited on floor 14, entered detective division, and this time turned right, away from my workstation, to computer forensics. There we met Detective Julia Stager.

  “The professor visited plenty of raunchy websites,” Stager said. “He thought he’d erased them, but we can pull up everything. Keep that in mind, gentlemen. There’s no such thing as a private moment.”

  She handed me the list.

  “Palatine searched for the kinds of things you’d expect a philosophy teacher to search for. And he also entered lots of names to search for phone numbers. Ninety percent of them were women’s. Sometimes he reverse searched, entering phone numbers to try to identify the name.”

  “Someone he contacted might’ve had a motive,” I said. “Or a boyfriend.”

  “Or husband or brother,” Clarence said. “Or father.”

  “Given his indiscretions, he made some enemies.”

  “The sites marked were in his favorites folder,” Stager said. “Here’s an unlikely one.”

  “Bill’s Fountain Pen Page?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and two sites about collecting fountain pens.”

  Manny had told me he’d found a dozen fountain pens in Palatine’s office at the college and even more at his home, in a shoe box. Plus those three I’d found in his desk.

  “Not many people use fountain pens anymore, do they?” Clarence asked.

  “The professor did. Which means I’ve developed a keen interest in fountain pens.”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27

  The next morning I asked Clarence to meet me at Lou’s at 7:30 a.m. before sitting in on his first detectives’ meeting at nine.

  Before the pancakes and western omelets were served, and after Clarence had rolled his eyes at “Puff the Magic Dragon” and put in a request for the Supremes, I said, “There’s something you need to hear before you come to the meeting. I’ve been thinking about Paul Frederick. You know how he said the man at the door gave the professor something or was holding something up for him to look at, like a little poster?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think he was showing him ID.”

  “What kind of ID?”

  “Well, who shows ID to gain entrance?”

  “Cops?”

  “Or FBI. Arson investigators. Someone associated with law enforcement. Not that long of a list.”

  “Are you saying … the killer could be a cop?”

  “Killers can be anybody with a motive, and cops have motives just like everybody else. If the guy was holding up ID and it persuaded the professor to let him in the door, it could’ve been a cop. Let’s go back to our original question of why someone would kill Frederick,” I said, as “Puff” gave way to “My World Is Empty Without You.”

  “If he thought Frederick told us something incriminating. Or that he could?”

  “Right. But what puzzled us is how would he know what he said to us?”

  “He wouldn’t. It was just you, me, and him. Unless … a bugging device?”

  “I considered that. But how would he know to plant one in the first place? How else could he find out?”

  Clarence shrugged.

  “Didn’t you take notes?”

  “Sure, but nobody saw them. You playing ‘blame the journalist’ again?”

  “You’re certain your editor didn’t see them? Carp? A custodian looking on your desk?”

  “I keep them in my briefcase. It’s with me at all times.” Clarence pointed to his black leather case, which looked like it had come off the assembly line that morning.

  “Do you take it with you when go to the bathroom?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Does it have a lock?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “You don’t use it, do you?”

  “No reason to.”

  “Unless you’re carrying eyewitness testimony in a murder case.”

  “You think someone at the Trib is the murderer?”

  “No reason they couldn’t be. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely. Unfortunately, there’s another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “I took notes too.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “What I always do. Gave them to Mitzie in the secretarial pool so she could type them for me.”

  “You think the typist is a killer?”

  “This typist is sixty-four years old and weighs a hundred pounds. But someone could see it on her desk when she steps away. People pass by her desk all the time.”

  “Not people off the street,” Clarence said. “It’s pretty high security.”

  “I’ve thought about it. We’ve got custodians. Maintenance staff. Secretaries. And of course … cops.”

  “You think …?”

  “Mitzie types it into the system. She saves the file on the server. She e-mails it to me. And to top it off she gives me a hard copy. That’s how I like it. My notes of the Frederick interview might have sat for hours on Mitzie’s desk. But even if she typed them right away, one of the detectives could’ve accessed the file or hard copy.”

  “But … one of the detectives?”

  “Why not? Someone knows Frederick saw some things. They kill him to shut him up or keep him from remembering something critical. Dead men don’t pick you out in a lineup.”

  “That’s a serious accusation,” Clarence said, leaning forward.

  I got up and pressed a few more rose-colored buttons, invoking the artistry of Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five.

  We no longer had to whisper once we were under the melodious strains of “I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I yam, ’Enery the Eighth, I yam, I yam.�
�

  “It’s a hypothesis. Unfortunately, it’s holding up. Think about how much time this guy spent at the crime scene. Who would take that risk? But if a guy had his police monitor on, he’d know exactly when dispatch called for patrol. He could be out of the house in a heartbeat. Hey, even if he was found at the scene, he could tell patrol he heard it on his monitor and was nearby, so he came to check it out. If you’re a cop, you can do that.”

  “But—”

  “Consider the phone call to my house from the professor’s. My home phone’s unlisted, but all the homicide detectives have it. He uses official ID to get Palatine’s door open. He has access to the information Frederick gave us and knows he might ID him. He can enter Frederick’s apartment the same way we did—by showing his badge. Only a handful of people could’ve read my notes and learned what Frederick told us. And most of them are homicide detectives.”

  “You really believe one of the detectives killed Professor Palatine?”

  Hearing Clarence say it made it seem more real. More frightening.

  “You have no clue how badly I want to be wrong.”

  Clarence and I walked single file through detective division, since no aisle is wide enough to accommodate us side by side.

  “Team meeting’s once a week,” I said. “We update each other on our cases. Compare notes. Helps to have a fresh perspective.”

  “We do that at the Trib sometimes. Call in other reporters and pick each other’s brains.”

  “That must be slim pickin’s.”

  When we walked into the conference room, Detectives Brandon Phillips, Kim Suda, and Chris Doyle were already there. They were huddled, but the moment we entered, Doyle stood and headed for the coffee.

  Tommi Elam walked in behind us, smacking her bubble gum louder than any forty-two-year-old should. Tommi’s chin and nose don’t quite match, but it’s a good chin and a good nose. She’s not beautiful, but she’s cute. A little sister type. She’s big sister to her partner, Karl, who’s ten years younger. Her gum cracking reminds me of a gangster’s girlfriend in a B movie. But she’s the most likable person in homicide.