Three-Ways: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  “All right,” I said. Ryan and I turned and walked out of the garage. After Ryan shut the door behind him, I saw him peel off and head toward the window at the side of the garage. A minute later, he caught up with me.

  “What’s she up to?”

  Ryan walked toward the cruiser. He opened the passenger door and looked at me over the roof of the car. “She’s crying. Out of control, curled up on the floor.”

  Chapter 18

  I eased the Charger out into the traffic on the four-lane headed back toward headquarters. Neither of us said anything. We were trying to think of what we could do next.

  “How do you read Kathy’s crying jag?” Ryan said.

  “Well, that’s obvious,” I said. “She’s very upset because we humiliated her when we caught her screwing May at noon in her studio. Or she’s very upset because the episode must have humiliated May, who she loves. Or May broke it off with her, and she’s therefore very upset. Or saying those things to us about how she knows she can never really get a good-looking woman like May made her realize she’s kinda pathetic, so she’s very upset.”

  “Okay, great,” Ryan said. “I’m going to write that down. She’s very upset.”

  “Did I miss any other possibilities?”

  “I remember once, I was maybe ten, I asked my father about why one of my older sisters was crying. He waved his hand, said something about how it was about a romance. It would be very intense, he told me, but it wouldn’t last that long, and there was no sense trying to figure it out.”

  “Tone’s a little sexist, but I think he had the basic story right.” I drove a little more. “We’ve hit a wall, partner. Without any more forensics, there’s nothing more we can do.”

  “Unless someone gets an attack of conscience,” Ryan said. “Or thinks there might be more forensics and decides to cut a deal with us.”

  “I’m not seeing it. Let’s set up a board in the incident room and draw some lines. Something might jump out at us.”

  We got back to headquarters, hung up our coats, and walked over to our desks. “Gather up the photos of the players, will you?”

  “Let me just check this message first.” Ryan’s phone was flashing. He picked it up and started writing on a slip of paper. Then he hit a button and hung up. “It was Jorge. He got authorization to tap into Austin’s username and password on Mitto.”

  “That include his financials?”

  “Yup,” Ryan said.

  “Let’s take a quick look now,” I said. I wheeled my desk chair over next to Ryan, who was already logging in as Austin.

  “He’s got an account at TripleXXX.com.” Ryan clicked their main page. “That’s four dollars a week.”

  “Next.”

  “An account with Sunrise Fertility Center.”

  “He’s a sperm donor? You gotta admire his stamina.”

  “And BioSure Plasma Services.” Ryan looked at their site. “He sells them plasma. We’ll check it on his bank account.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Something going on at A1-TermPaper.com.”

  “He’s buying his term papers? No wonder he’s a dunce.”

  “We’ll see when we look at his bank statement,” Ryan said. He tapped the keys some more and got into the bank. “He’s got a checking/debit account. No savings account.” We both looked down the list for the last year. “Okay,” Ryan said as we looked down the list.

  “There’s his rent,” I said, “start of each month. There’s his groceries, once a week. Seems normal enough.”

  “He’s not buying term papers. He’s selling them.”

  “Look at that.” I looked at all the credits from A1-TermPaper. “There’s fourteen payments. Why are some of them forty bucks, some of them eighty?”

  “My guess is it’s forty dollars per paper. Sometimes he’s selling them two at a time.” Ryan furrowed his brow. “No way he’s got time to write shitty papers.”

  “He’s selling the shitty papers his students are writing.” I smiled. “So he’s screwing Tiffany two different ways.”

  “Not just Tiffany. This way he can screw the guys, too.”

  “What’s he got going at Sunrise Fertility Center? That’s two hundred a month. They’re paying him two hundred to jerk off?”

  “That would be to jerk off four times in the month.”

  “Where you seeing that?”

  “That’s how I got my first Mitsubishi.”

  “You wanked your way through college?”

  “No, my parents paid the tuition and other expenses. I wanked my way into my first Mitsubishi.”

  “And Bio Life Plasma Services?”

  “Looks like he gets sixty bucks every three or four weeks,” Ryan said. “So you don’t have to ask, that would be twice a week for the sixty.”

  “What’s this?” I said. “Scroll up a little.” Ryan showed me Austin’s activity going back a year. “He’s donating money to United Cerebral Palsy.”

  “I see seven hundred bucks in this last year,” Ryan said. He ran his finger down the screen. “And four hundred to the Children’s Fund at the hospital.”

  “So he’s giving away all the money he’s making on the plasma and the sperm, right?”

  “That’s what it says,” Ryan said.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” I said. “We’re gonna have to figure out why a grad student who was going noplace was giving money away.”

  Ryan nodded. “You bet.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s get our stuff and set up a board in the incident room.

  Ryan nodded and slid some folders into his briefcase. We walked over to the incident room, which was just off the main corridor. There were a few old desks, some phones and computers, street maps with pushpins on the walls, and three or four whiteboards on wheels.

  Ryan put all his stuff on one of the desks while I wheeled a clean board out so we could work on it. “Give me Austin,” I said. Ryan handed me a picture of the victim. I grabbed a roll of tape and taped the photo in the middle of the board. Then I wrote his name in marker on the white border at the bottom of the photo.

  “Give me the dumb freshman girl.” He passed me a photo of Tiffany Rhodes. I put her off to the side, wrote her name on it, and drew a line connecting the two photos. “And her idiot boyfriend.” I taped the photo of Brian Hawser next to Tiffany, connected them with a line, and drew a dotted line between him and Austin Sulenka.

  Ryan handed me a photo of May Eberlein. I put her in Austin’s orbit and drew a line from her to Austin. Next I put up Kathy Caravelli, connected her to May, and drew a dotted line to Austin.

  “Who’re the other players?” I said.

  Ryan looked down at his notebook. “There’s Jonathan Van Vleet, the English chair.” I wrote his name off to the side. “Suzannah Montgomery, his adviser.” I wrote her name underneath Van Vleet. “Frances Josephine Hamblin, the Melville scholar.” I wrote it.

  “Anyone else we’ve interviewed?”

  “Melissa Harmon, the new MA.”

  I wrote her name. “That it?”

  “That’s all we’ve got so far.” He looked at the board. “Let me draw a timeline.”

  I handed him the marker. He drew a horizontal line. He made a mark on the left end and wrote a “7.” He made another mark, to the right, and wrote “10.” Then a third mark, and a “12.”

  “Okay, he was with Tiffany at seven.” He wrote her name above the mark. “We don’t have her DNA.” He wrote “No DNA” after her name. “Around ten we have May and Kathy.” He wrote “No DNA” after May’s name. He paused.

  “After Kathy’s name,” I said, “write ‘DNA on dildo.’” He paused and looked at me. “Write it down, Miss,” I said.

  He wrote it, and then wrote “Murder” above the “12.” We both looked at the timeline.

  “Robin said there were two different sets of DNA on his dick, right?”

  “That’s right,” Ryan said.

  “But neither of them is Kathy. So
write ‘DNA1 and DNA2 on dick’ above ‘Murder.’

  He shook his head but wrote just what I said. We stood there, looking at the board. “Next to Kathy, change ‘DNA on dildo’ to ‘DNA3 on dildo.’” He did it.

  “Since May and Kathy both say May had sex with him around ten, we could say May is DNA1,” Ryan said.

  “So that means DNA2 is either Tiffany Rhodes—”

  “Which means Austin didn’t wash up after she left before eight.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Or DNA2 is a fuck buddy we haven’t identified yet.”

  “If we had Tiffany Rhodes’ DNA, we’d know the murderer is Tiffany, May, or Kathy—”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” I said. “It could be Brian, the boyfriend. Hell, it could be the waitress next door.”

  “But we can’t even make a list of suspects until we figure out if there’s another player we haven’t identified yet.”

  I walked over to the table, picked up the phone, and dialed the chief’s office. “Margaret, this is Seagate. Yeah, I’m in the incident room. Could you see if the chief could give us two minutes?” I waited a few seconds. “Terrific,” I said. “Yeah, the incident room. Thanks.” I hung up.

  A minute later, the chief walked in. “What have you got?”

  “We need a third set of eyes. Help us see if we’re missing something.”

  “Sure,” he said. He waved his hand, telling me to go ahead. I really like that about him. I think he misses working cases.

  I walked over to the board and pointed to the horizontal line. “This is Sunday evening. Seven pm, Austin Sulenka is screwing Tiffany Rhodes.”

  He looked up at the photographs. “She’s his student.”

  “From last semester,” Ryan said. He pointed to the picture of the boyfriend. “Brian Hawser knew she was involved with Austin as late as January of this year, but he still doesn’t know she was involved with him as late as the night of the murder.”

  “That’s the dotted line?”

  “That shows a relationship we don’t yet understand,” I said. “Brian had the restraining order from trashing Austin’s car. Tiffany tells us Brian doesn’t know she was still screwing Austin, but maybe the two of them plotted to kill Austin, or maybe they just stumbled into killing him. Or Brian did it on his own, and Tiffany’s protecting him.”

  “But we don’t have her DNA? That’s what ‘No DNA’ means?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Around ten o’clock, May Eberlein and Kathy Caravelli are over there. Kathy’s the lesbian from the Air Force. May straps on the big black dildo and pokes Kathy. Then May takes off the dildo so Austin can poke her. We’ve got Kathy’s DNA on the dildo, and two other, unidentified sets of girl DNA—”

  “On Austin’s dick,” the chief said, reading off the board. “Presumably, one set is May Eberlein. And the other?”

  “That’s where we are now, Chief,” I said. “Could be Tiffany from earlier, or another girl.” We were silent for a moment. “Unless we can get some more DNA, we can’t say if Austin was screwing someone we don’t even know about.”

  “This other list?” the chief said, pointing to the names.

  “Those are people we’ve interviewed,” Ryan said.

  “English department chair. He got any motive?”

  “No,” I said. “He told us Austin was an asshole for screwing the student and being a general dickhead. But no.”

  “Suzannah Montgomery, his adviser? You like her?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “She’s got a vagina, but she’s at least in her mid-forties. Not particularly attractive. What do you think, Ryan?”

  “I don’t see Austin going for cougars when he could get young women as good-looking as May.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But we don’t really understand him. Maybe he was, you know, a sex addict. But, Karen, you remember how Suzannah got all huffy when you suggested he might have nailed the freshman just because she was a piece of ass?”

  “Yeah, but I think she’s just the protective type. And it was real soon after he died.”

  “Frances Josephine Hamblin, the Melville scholar?” The chief turned to me. “She have a vagina, Karen?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but she’s had it about sixty-five years.”

  “Who’s this Melissa Harmon?”

  “She’s another grad student, an uggo. He wouldn’t do her. Anyway, she’s in love with Ryan.”

  The chief looked at Ryan. “Should I ask?”

  “Ignore Karen,” Ryan said. “I was polite to Melissa. She appreciated it. That’s all. There’s no evidence she was ever in contact with Austin.”

  “You’ve looked at the phones?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s how we found out he was still screwing the dumb freshman.”

  “And May, too,” Ryan said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “May tried to tell us she’d broken up with Austin a month ago, but the phones said they were still in touch.”

  “Why’d she lie?”

  I exhaled. “Could’ve been a couple of things. I think it hurt her feelings that Austin was such a pussy hound—her being a real looker, and all—or maybe it was she was kind of embarrassed about doing the les while Austin looked on, beating his meat. I think that was it.”

  The chief nodded. “Anything else I can do?”

  “The one thing we’d like to know: there’s two sets of female DNA on Austin. One’s probably his girlfriend, May Eberlein. The other one could be Tiffany Rhodes, who we think he screwed at seven o’clock. He didn’t screw anyone else—at least, anyone we know of—until ten o’clock.” I looked at Ryan, then at the chief. “I’m not a guy,” I said, “but wouldn’t you, you know, hose that thing down between sessions?”

  Ryan put his palms up. “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

  I turned to the chief.

  He just smiled. “I think Mr. Sulenka would want to clean himself up a little. But what do I know? I don’t make a habit of watching live lesbian sex.”

  “So,” I said, “if we could get DNA from Tiffany Rhodes and May Eberlein, we’d at least know if he nailed any other women that night.”

  “Assuming he didn’t use a condom with her,” Ryan said.

  The chief nodded. “Did you ask those two for their DNA?”

  “They both refused,” I said.

  The chief walked over to the desk and sat on the corner. “Just trying to think of a story you could tell them to scare them into volunteering it.” He shook his head. “Since we don’t have a weapon, I’m not coming up with anything. They’ve already admitted they were with him that night.”

  “Can we compel them?” I said.

  “I don’t think so, but let me ask Larry.” He was referring to the prosecutor, Larry Klein. Chief Murtaugh stood up. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Did you get a chance to check his financials?”

  “Yeah, we took a quick look, a few minutes ago. Thanks for that.”

  “Anything pop out?”

  “Not really,” I said. “He was selling his plasma and sperm—and I think he was selling his students’ term papers—but he was also donating money to United Cerebral Palsy and the Children’s Fund at the hospital.”

  His head pulled back. “He didn’t have cerebral palsy, right?”

  “No, he sure didn’t.”

  “Someone in his family?”

  I turned to Ryan. “What did Suzannah Montgomery tell us about him, Ryan?”

  “I’ll have to check, but I think she said the father left and the mother died of cancer.”

  “That’s what I remember,” I said.

  “It might be important. Run it down,” the chief said.

  Chapter 19

  “Thanks for coming over, Larry,” the chief said, gesturing for the prosecutor to sit.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Larry Klein said. “Needed an excuse to get out of the office for a little while.”

  Larry Klein has been the prosecutor about as long as I’ve been a cop. He came here from P
hiladelphia, a small, wiry guy with grey eyes that dart all around as he’s talking with you. He always wears a black suit and tie and a white shirt over a sleeveless undershirt. I’ve worked with him on cases maybe eight or ten times. He gives straight advice in simple English, and he’ll spend as much time as you need, which I appreciate because sometimes the law doesn’t make any sense to me. But he never says anything personal—about me, about himself, anyone. I don’t know, for example, if he has a family, if he’s straight or gay, or why he left Philadelphia.

  I’m okay with him being all business, me not being willing to tell people all that much about myself. But his level of reserve is quite unusual in Rawlings, where we’re pretty outgoing, although most of what we say to each other most of the time is bullshit. In both senses of the word: waste of time, plus mostly untrue.

  All the judges really like Larry Klein, probably because he knows the law inside out, but also because he never talks them into doing something stupid that will come back and bite them on the ass. For that reason, the judges don’t try to second-guess him, and cops don’t, either. If he agrees to file for a warrant or a court order for you, you’ll almost certainly get it. If he starts to shake his head a little and suggests there might be a problem with that, you should ask him what he would do, thank him for his time, smile, and turn on your heels. Then you should do what he told you to, because you’re not going to get what you wanted—and you probably shouldn’t.

  It’s not that he resents explaining the law to you. He seems to enjoy that. But he doesn’t appreciate it if you want to waste his time bitching about how the law is stupid or out of date or contradictory or something. He tells you—once—that he didn’t write the law, which is your cue to move on. And he really won’t tolerate you telling him he’s wrong and you’re right. He isn’t, and you aren’t. I’ve seen other detectives try to do it. He just turns around and walks away in his little black suit.

  Larry sat down in a soft chair, his left ankle tucked up under his right knee. The chief motioned for me and Ryan to sit on the couch against the wall. We got settled.