Three-Ways: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  “Easy, Ryan.” Larry Klein lifted his body off the chair and tucked his right leg under his left knee. “I agree with you. Hawser hadn’t been charged with any crimes at that point, and you weren’t speaking on behalf of the prosecutor’s office. Besides, I told his counsel that all we were filing at this time was the negligent homicide on Tiffany. We don’t know yet whether we’re going to charge him with the assault on Van Vleet.”

  “You could hold off on that one,” the chief said. “See if you could use it as bait for a guilty plea.”

  Larry Klein nodded his head. “Personally, if I were his attorney, I’d hold out for a better deal, but, yeah, we can file that one anytime we want. I’ll offer to throw it in as part of a package—”

  “How easy you gonna go on him?” I said. I didn’t like thinking that we were going to ease up for any reason.

  “I was thinking fifteen years fixed, no early parole, instead of twenty, if he just pleads to the negligent homicide.”

  “To keep him out of court?”

  “Yeah,” Klein said. “He’d be thirty-seven instead of forty-two. It’d be worth it to not have to try him.”

  “That’s five more years to kill another girlfriend,” I said.

  Larry Klein shook his head. “There’s no difference in the recidivism rates once they’re that old and done that much time inside.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  Larry smiled. “Well, now you’re changing the topic.” He stood up. “Bottom line, your interrogation was good. You got the confession. I’ll work it out with his attorney.”

  “Thanks, Larry,” the chief said as the prosecutor turned and walked out of the office, waving his hand at us.

  The chief turned to me and raised his eyebrows. “Any questions?”

  I didn’t know whether he was asking me if we had any questions about the legal stuff regarding Brian Hawser or about where we were going to go next with the Sulenka investigation.

  I stood there, thinking. I could feel the chief’s eyes on me. Ryan’s, too. But there was something nagging at me that wasn’t coming into sharp enough focus yet. Then it hit me.

  “Chief, we know Brian didn’t kill Austin.”

  “The way I’d put it, Karen,” he said, “is we don’t have any evidence that puts him there, and his statement that he choked her with his hands—we know that’s untrue.”

  “What I mean is, we still don’t know about Tiffany.”

  Ryan said, “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “I just want to make sure we’re not crossing off the two of them just because we think it wasn’t Brian.”

  “She admitted having sex with Austin around seven the night he was killed, right?” the chief said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Then she went over to her girlfriend’s place and screwed the two guys with the weed.”

  “Do you have a timeline on that?” the chief said.

  “Not an exact one,” Ryan said. “You thinking Tiffany smokes pot with the two guys, then goes over to Austin’s place around midnight?”

  “I’m not thinking anything. We know May Eberlein and Kathy Caravelli were doing Austin around ten till maybe eleven-thirty. So it’s possible.”

  “I don’t like it,” Ryan said. “She’s stoned, she just screwed the two guys. She’s going to go to sleep.”

  “Let’s go back to motive,” the chief said. “Why does she want to kill Austin?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Same reason any of his fuck buddies would want to kill him. She fell in love with him? Didn’t like it that he was just a pussy hound?”

  The chief scratched at his chin. “How do you square that with her doing the two guys an hour earlier? Doesn’t that make her the same thing?”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, if you’re doing it like math. But if you’re looking at it from her perspective—she’s an average girl, in the worst way. Average looks, average brains. She sees herself settling into an average, boring life with a loser like Brian. Then, all of a sudden, this exciting guy comes along, this intellectual guy, shows some interest in her. She thinks maybe he sees something special in her, so she lets herself think she’s special. She falls for him. When she figures out he was just fucking her—realizes maybe he just fucks one or two girls from each of his classes—she realizes Austin sees her as one step up from a hooker. To Austin, she was as special as a used rubber. She gets pissed.”

  “And you’re thinking Brian knew she killed Austin?” Ryan said.

  I shook my head. “We’ll never know that one. If she told Brian, he’s not gonna tell us. He’s in love with her.”

  The chief sighed. “Let’s get back to what we can say to Larry Klein. We don’t have any forensics putting her at Austin’s place after she did him at seven pm. Correct?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “So we could take his place apart—and her place, too—and anything we find is going to tell us the two of them were sleeping together. Even if you find a blouse at her place with his DNA on the sleeve—it doesn’t tell us she strangled him with that sleeve. It tells us the two of them were sleeping together. You get me someone tells us she said she was going to kill Austin, a phone message says she did it, an eyewitness saw her coming out of his place around midnight. Give me something and we’ll work on Brian some more to find out whether he knew about it or conspired with her. Until then …” He just raised his arms, palms up.

  “So what do we do now?” I said.

  The chief looked at his watch and frowned. “I don’t know about you two, but in about five minutes I talk to Tiffany’s parents.”

  “They’re here now?”

  “In about five minutes,” he said.

  I shook my head as Ryan and I walked out of his office. The parents were sitting there in his outer office. They looked awful. Both of them were in blue jeans and baggy sweatshirts. The father was a short, stocky guy with a buzz cut. The mother had dyed red hair, pushed off to the side, like she’d slept on it in the car or at the motel. But it didn’t look like she’d slept much. She sat there, gazing straight ahead, looking at the wall, a crumpled handkerchief in her hand. The father’s expression told me his thoughts were far away, like maybe he was thinking about how he brought his wife and their new daughter home from the hospital right after she was born. He looked like he was going to start crying any moment.

  I hurried past them. I didn’t want to stop and introduce myself or offer any condolences or anything. Back at our desks, Ryan saw me looking a little the worse for wear. “We didn’t do it, Karen.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “One way of looking at it.” It wasn’t me who punched her, anyway.

  “Let’s get busy,” Ryan said. “No sense thinking about Tiffany.”

  “What you got in mind?”

  “We were tracking down Suzannah Montgomery’s story. We were trying to figure out—what was that phrase you used?—if the husband lies like a lawyer or a complete liar?”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.” I thought for a moment. “Or a bald-ass liar.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, giving me a smile. “That’s it. Let’s figure it out.”

  “What was his story?” Now that I’m in my forties, I’m having a little more trouble remembering details from the cases, even if they happened only a few days ago.

  “He said he graduated from Cornell, took a job with some architect in Berkeley. She stayed in South Carolina, taking care of her mother, who was dying. Then she went to Europe for a year.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “He’s never been to South Carolina. You got any of that stuff written down.”

  Ryan tapped at his jacket pocket, where he kept his skinny notebook. He pulled it out and opened it up. “Lawrence Yu, in Berkeley. That should take me the better part of a minute.”

  I waved at him to go ahead. His fingers started tapping the keyboard.

  He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and told someone who he was and what
he wanted: Was there an architect named Aaron Montgomery who worked there around the year 2000? “Not a problem,” Ryan said after a few seconds. Then, to me, “It’s before his time, but he’s looking it up.” Twenty seconds later, the guy was back. “Hmmm,” Ryan said. “Yeah, I can hold. That’s quite all right.” Another half minute of waiting. “Okay, thanks very much. I appreciate it.” Ryan hung up. “The office guy wanted to check with someone to confirm what the records showed.”

  I frowned at Ryan. “Yeah, that was the question I wanted answered. And did the office guy get that confirmation?”

  Ryan smiled at me. “Yes, he did. Indeed he did.”

  “Why do you break my balls like this?”

  “Because it’s fun. You’re like a sister. An older sister. An overtired, cranky older sister.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now I understand why you break my balls.” I sat there, in my desk chair, just looking at Ryan.

  “Come on, you want to know. I know you want to know.”

  I shook my head. “I really don’t give a shit anymore.”

  “Ask,” he said, still smiling. “Please? Pretty please?”

  “Never.” I got up out of my chair, lifted my bag off my desk, slung it over my shoulder, and started walking over to the coatrack.

  “They never heard of him.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “The office boy said they never heard of him.”

  I stopped and turned. “Were you talking to me, Ryan?”

  “I’m sorry, Karen,” he said. He opened his eyes wide and hung his head down on his chest. “It was wrong of me to do that.”

  I walked back over to the desk and put my bag down. Then I sat down in my chair. “Asshole.”

  “That was hurtful, Karen.”

  “All right, you’re sure you got the right architect firm in Berkeley?”

  “There’s only one Lawrence Yu Architecture, LLP in Berkeley.”

  “So Aaron Montgomery doesn’t just lie like a lawyer,” I said. “He makes shit up.”

  “The Montgomerys sound like a perfect couple. She steals her roommate’s identity, complete with her MA degree.”

  “Yeah, lovely. The question is, What’s the fastest way for us to figure out if the two of them killed Austin?”

  “We don’t have probable cause to search the Montgomery house or her office or anything like that. We can’t compel her to give us DNA to put her in Austin’s apartment.”

  “The only thing we can do,” I said, “is see how many layers of lies they’ve told, confront them, and see if we can pressure them to work with us.”

  “Threaten to expose them?”

  “He’s got this high-profile do-gooder job, she’s a tenured university professor. Plus, they’ve got that sick kid who needs lots of care. You saw the father with him. He loves the kid, right?”

  “Looked like it to me,” Ryan said.

  “So that might be their vulnerability. If we can show them how it can all turn to shit if we expose the lies—going all the way back to the car crash, when she put the other girl in the driver’s seat—we might be able to get them to plead to Austin.”

  “You mean if they both plead to Austin, the court might be able to work out some way they alternate jail time, so one of them can take care of the kid?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Nope,” Ryan said.

  “Okay, so what other bullshit did he try to feed us?”

  Ryan looked down at his notebook. “Two things. She cared for her mother for two years, then she went off to Europe for a year.”

  “The mother thing could be a pain to track down.”

  “Because we don’t know which mother it is: Suzannah Collins or Carol Winters?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t want to call the real Collins father again to ask whether his wife died. And Carol Winters … there must be a bunch of them in Charleston, South Carolina.”

  “That’s if she’s from Charleston,” Ryan said. “But why should the mother be from Charleston? Every other fact about this woman has been bogus.”

  “I know who’s got accurate facts,” I said. “The FBI. Let me call Allen Pfeiffer. He’ll be able to tap into the State Department records.”

  “Of course,” Ryan said, smiling and nodding his head. “Passports.”

  I went to my contacts on the computer and pulled up Allen Pfeiffer’s phone. He’d helped us out on a couple of earlier cases. There’s a process for local law enforcement to requisition information from federal sources, and it only takes a few days or weeks to find out what you want. But if you know a friendly fed who’s willing to tap a few keys, it goes much faster than that.

  I dialed. Then I looked at my watch. It would 6:15 in Washington. Shit. The phone rang a few times. Then he picked up.

  “Pfeiffer.”

  “Aaron, this is Karen Seagate, in Montana. You’re supposed to be home, having a drink by now.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they told me during orientation. How’re you doing, Karen?”

  “I’m good, thanks, Allen.” We spent a couple of sentences catching up. “Allen, can you tap the State Department database?”

  “What do you need?”

  “If I give you a name and Social Security—I don’t have a passport number, but they’re U.S. citizens—can you give me dates of travel, leaving and re-entering the U.S.?”

  “We stamp passports only on re-entry, so all I can get is when they come back into the U.S. The only way I could tell you when they left is if you can tell me where they went—I might be able to contact that country and get the date they arrived there. Give me what you got.”

  I told him the information for Carol Winters, or Suzannah Collins, or Suzannah Montgomery, with the best Social Security I had. I also told him about Aaron Montgomery. I said I thought she or the both of them might have been traveling between 1996 and 1999. He asked where I thought they might be leaving from in the U.S. I told him I thought they might have been living in South Carolina, so maybe they were on an international flight from Atlanta. He said he’d call me back in a few minutes.

  I went into the break room and found some pastry I recognized from yesterday and some coffee from this morning. I heard the phone ring from the bullpen and hurried back to my desk.

  It was Allen Pfeiffer. I put him on Speaker. “I couldn’t get anything on exiting the U.S. There’s no centralized database that collates all the passenger manifests from the different airlines. If you had a date and airline, I could do that, but not without the name of the airline.”

  “Yeah, I understand that,” I said. “How about coming back to the U.S.?”

  “Suzannah Collins and Aaron Montgomery got their passports stamped in Newark, New Jersey, on June 9, 1998.”

  “Have you got addresses on those passports?”

  “Yeah, they’re roomies. At 1400 Evergreen Parkway, Apartment 2D, in Charleston, South Carolina.”

  I thanked Allen and hung up.

  Ryan said to me, “So we don’t know when they left the U.S.”

  “I don’t really give a shit when they left the U.S.,” I said. “I know that Aaron Montgomery said she went to Europe. He didn’t say they went together, right?”

  “That’s right,” Ryan said. “And he said he’s never even been to South Carolina.”

  “So they both have some honesty issues.”

  “Doesn’t mean they killed Austin.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I ran my finger along the edge of my desk. “But it does mean that if one of them did it, the other one was probably in on it—or at least knew about it.”

  “So how are we going to force them to give it up?”

  Chapter 33

  “No,” the chief said, shaking his head, his mouth set in a frown. “I’m not going to do that. It wouldn’t be smart.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “I’m not going to go to the university to pressure Suzannah Montgomery to work with us. We have no evidence sh
e violated any laws.”

  “All the lies on her application forms at Central Montana State?”

  “That’s civil. If the university wants to go after her, they can. But that’s for the university to find out. It’s not for us to tell them. Certainly not now. Not without proof.”

  “The car accident in South Carolina?”

  “Key words there are ‘South Carolina.’” The chief showed no expression. “When it comes time to inform the university, I’ll be on the phone to President Billingham. But not yet. He’d tell you the same thing: if we can arrest her and indict her for a felony crime, that’s the cleanest way to do it. If we can’t, what’s he going to do with an allegation that she fudged her papers?”

  “I wouldn’t call stealing a woman’s identity fudging her papers.”

  “We’re a ways from proving identity theft. Right now she’s got a U.S. passport saying she’s Suzannah Collins, and I bet she has a marriage certificate that makes her Suzannah Montgomery. We’d have to do a lot of legwork to prove she’s—what’d you say her real name is?”

  “Carol Winters.”

  “Carol Winters.” He frowned. “Anyway, I don’t want to bring in the university. We get them to pressure her—she’s a popular teacher—what’s that going to look like? A police department that can’t make an arrest, so they start harassing an innocent faculty member with a sick kid. If she’s guilty, she’d have no incentive to cooperate with us. It might even make her run. You two need to figure out if she—or she and her husband—killed Austin Sulenka. Answer that question yes or no, then we’ll talk about what to tell the university. Understand?”

  Ryan and I went back to our desks to keep digging through the layers of lies the Montgomerys had assembled. We’d already unearthed plenty, and we could probably keep going for another couple of weeks and come up with a lot more, but what was the point? We already knew she’d been in the car with the real Suzannah Collins when it crashed, and that she’d poured her into the driver’s seat to save herself from vehicular manslaughter if the girl died. We already knew that she’d stolen Suzannah’s degree, her Social Security, basically her whole life. But we weren’t getting any closer to figuring out if she killed Austin Sulenka.