Murder with a Twist

by Allyson K. Abbott

  “Probably, but I’m guessing she either hoped we wouldn’t do the comparison, or figured at the least it would complicate things and slow down our progress in the investigation.”

  “It’s a good thing Tad hates his rich wife so much.”

  “It’s also a good thing you snuck a peek at that Rolodex. I’d like to have another chat with Juanita Alvarez, but I doubt she’ll cooperate. Still, I think I’m going to send someone to get her and invite her down to the station for a chat.”

  Duncan made the call and we finished our breakfast. After cleaning up after ourselves, I started my morning prep for opening. A little after ten, Duncan gave me a kiss and headed out, saying he’d check back in later.

  The next hour crawled by as I waited for opening time. When Pete and Debra came in at ten-thirty, I artfully dodged their questions when they asked if I had any news about the Cooper case. At eleven, we unlocked the doors and within half an hour, Carter and the Signoriello brothers had arrived. It was Wednesday, which is Larceny Day, and that meant the discounted drink of the day was a Ginger Snap made with Larceny Bourbon. Carter announced that he had come up with a riddle for the day and we listened as he recited it.

  “The wealthy owner of a castle is throwing a masquerade party. There is a man who wants to rob a very valuable painting from the castle, but the entrance is guarded and in order to get inside, he needs to know the password. So he dresses as a minstrel and gets himself an empty violin case he intends to use to stash the rolled-up canvas from the picture. In order to figure out what the password is, he hides in some nearby bushes and listens as other guests arrive.

  “The first guest is a woman and the guard asks her, ‘Do you know the password?’

  “The woman says she does.

  “So the guard says twelve, to which the woman responds six. The guard lets the woman in.

  “The robber now thinks that the proper response is half of whatever number the guard says, but he decides to wait for one more guest to see if his theory holds out. The second guest is a man and when the guard says six, the man responds with three and is allowed to go inside.

  “Convinced his theory is right, the robber finally approaches the door and when the guard says ten, the robber confidently responds with five. The guard tells him he is wrong and he is then immediately taken prisoner. What should his answer have been?”

  Joe Signoriello jumped in with, “I know, it’s the numbers on a clock. The correct answer is whatever number is opposite the one stated.”

  “That can’t be right,” Frank said, rolling his eyes at his brother. “If it was, the answer to six would be twelve, not three.”

  “Oh, right,” Joe said, looking dejected.

  Before anyone else could offer up an answer, Cora came into the bar carrying her laptop. “I have something,” she said, and despite protests from the others who wanted to know what it was she had, I ushered her into my office.

  “What did you find?” I asked, as anxious as the others had been. “Any suspicious money transfers?”

  Cora shook her head. “Tad was able to give me Douglas and Meg Monroe’s bank account information, but I haven’t been able to access them. Tad is still working on it. However, I did a little digging around online and found something interesting on Facebook.”

  Cora set down her laptop on my desk and settled into my chair while I wondered how on earth a social networking site was going to be of any help. She opened the computer and, as she typed something into it, said, “I don’t want to say too much because I want your take on it.”

  I walked around behind the desk and peered over her shoulder. “Here we go,” she said. “It turns out that Juanita Alvarez has her Facebook security options set at the highest level, but her password was painfully easy to guess.” Cora shook her head and gave me a pitiful expression. “She uses her last name with the number one after it. I really thought she’d be smarter than that.”

  I looked at the page, which had Juanita’s picture at the top and some innocuous posts featuring recipes, cartoons, and pithy sayings. There were also pictures of Alberto and their daughter.

  “I was looking at some of Juanita’s friends,” Cora said, “and saw something interesting.”

  She clicked on one of the friend links and brought up another picture. Then she let me study it.

  “Wow,” I said after only a few seconds. “They taste almost exactly the same.”

  Cora gave me a quizzical smile.

  “Visuals sometimes manifest as tastes for me, particularly pictures, TV, and movies, where the image isn’t real life. Every image has its own unique taste, but Juanita’s and this girl’s picture both taste like freshly picked raspberries. There is a very, very slight difference, but it’s barely noticeable.”

  “Good,” Cora said. “Now look at this friend.”

  She clicked on another picture and within seconds of viewing it, I got another raspberry taste, though this one was also slightly different, a tiny bit tarter.

  “They all taste like fresh raspberries. One is a little sweeter than Juanita’s, and the other has a hint of tartness to it.”

  “What does that tell you?” Cora asked.

  “That they look very much alike,” I said. “They have the same shaped noses, the same dark hair, the same dark brown eyes, and even the shapes of their faces are the same. The teeth are a little different, and the haircuts aren’t alike, but other than that . . .”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  “Well, from a visual perspective, I’ve seen people who look a lot alike, but other than identical twins, the only time two pictures taste so similar is when they are siblings who strongly resemble one another.”

  “I saw the similarities the instant I clicked on the pictures,” Cora said. “And there’s something else. Most of Juanita’s posts are the typical social chatter, happy birthday wishes, congratulatory comments, responses to cute kid and animal pictures, that sort of thing. But with these two friends, she shares some private messages. Nearly all of them are like this one.” She clicked back to Juanita’s page and then to a private message sent from one of the look-alike girls. The look-alike had written: Hey, do you remember Mateo Gutierrez? He married Mia Hernandez even though he is ten years older than she is. She’s only eighteen. And she’s pregnant already!

  Juanita’s response, which was posted two days later, was: Of course I do. I will send them a gift right away. Beneath that she had typed two rows of numbers: 01241986-2145067210 on the first line, and 10141975-3127423450 on the second line. Then Juanita had written, Tell them Consuela Garcia and Anthony Perez say hi.

  I frowned and looked at Cora. “What am I missing here?”

  “Not much . . . yet. Check the date of the post. This exchange occurred nearly a year ago. Now look at this one.” She then clicked on the next message in the exchange, from the look-alike girl: Mia and Mateo got your gift and are very grateful!

  “Sorry, Cora, but I’m still not seeing it. What is the significance of the numbers?”

  “I wondered about that, too, at first, but when I found three more messages with an exchange like this, also with a string of numbers, I started to wonder. All three say something like: ran into so-and-so today and his thirtieth birthday is next week. And then Juanita says she will send a gift and lists a string of numbers. Then she includes a closing line of some sort that mentions another name. The digits appear to be two separate numbers separated by a dash. In both messages, the first string of numbers is eight digits long. The second string of numbers is ten digits long and at first I thought they might be phone numbers. But when I tried calling the first one, I got a recording telling me that the number I dialed wasn’t in service. The second one was for a restaurant in Canton, Georgia, and the third one was for a construction company in Dayton, Ohio.

  “Then I noticed that all of those second string numbers ended in a zero, and I started to wonder if perhaps the zero was superfluous. If you take away the zero, you have nine digits left,
and what common number contains nine digits?”

  “Social Security numbers?”

  “Right. And the first string of numbers could easily be dates—birth dates in fact.”

  “In fact? You verified this?”

  “I did,” Cora said, looking very pleased with herself. “Those Social Security numbers and birth dates happen to belong to people who are dead, and not just any dead people, but babies and children who died at Milwaukee Memorial Hospital back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Except they’ve recently been resurrected.”

  “She’s creating false IDs?” I said, finally making the connection.

  “That’s what I think, yes. I think she’s using them to bring people into the country from Mexico, because these two friends of hers on Facebook, the ones who look so much like her? Their names and birthdays—at least the day and month, which is all they have listed on Facebook—also belong to people who died at Milwaukee Memorial years ago. I bet twenty bucks those two girls are her sisters and they established fake identities so they could get into the country.”

  “Juanita used her access to old medical records at the hospital to help them.”

  “It sure looks that way, and since the death records are public, Duncan should be able to obtain them. There are enough coincidences here to get a search warrant, I would think. Maybe even an arrest warrant.”

  “Have you told him yet?”

  Cora shook her head. “I wanted to test you with those pictures first, to make sure I wasn’t seeing a resemblance because I wanted to, but because there really was one. I’ll call him now.”

  I stood and listened as she relayed her information to Duncan over the phone. It took her awhile to explain it all and without the visual of the Facebook pages, I imagine Duncan had a hard time understanding at first. When she was done, she listened for a minute and then said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up. “Duncan was on his way here when I called him. He said he’ll be here in a few minutes and to tell you he has more good news and bad news.”

  “Great, that again,” I said.

  Cora gave me a curious smile, and though I’m sure she would have liked me to explain further, I kept mum.

  While we waited, Cora showed me the other posts on Facebook. As promised, Duncan showed up about three minutes later.

  “So which one do you want first this time, the good news or the bad news?” he said as I shut my office door.

  “Let’s go with the good news first this time,” I decided.

  “Tad has found something that might help us.”

  “That’s great! What’s the bad news?”

  “Juanita Alvarez has flown the coop.”

  Chapter 32

  “Oh, no,” I said to the news about Juanita. “Where did she go?”

  Duncan shrugged. “I’m not sure. Her husband is still here. We found him at the house, but he told us that Juanita took their daughter and split after they had a big fight at the country club last night, right after we left. She didn’t come home, and she didn’t show up for work this morning, either, or call in. So I can only assume she’s in the wind. Alberto says he has no idea where she might have gone and, oddly enough, when I asked him if Juanita had any family she might have gone to stay with, he said her family were all back in Mexico.”

  “Did you believe him?” I asked.

  “I did. He seemed genuinely shaken up by it all. I talked with him at length and I don’t think he knows what Juanita has been up to. But he did confirm, once I promised I wouldn’t turn him over to the IRS, that he not only takes care of the country club pool, he has a number of private accounts he does pool care for, all of them for cash under the table. And included in those accounts are the Monroes. He said Juanita often helps him out with these private cash jobs and that she was the one who typically did the Monroe pool.”

  “Hence the chlorine smell,” I said, feeling redeemed. “What did Tad turn up?”

  “Several things. First, he gave me bank account information for the Monroes and I had a look at their recent transactions. It seems that Douglas is the only name on the accounts—keeping with Meg’s desire to fly under the radar, I imagine—but she is an authorized signer for his checks. And even more interesting was the discovery that she got herself a new Social Security number for the bank’s records to go along with her new date of birth and name. I traced that Social Security number and discovered that it really does belong to a woman named Meg Monroe who is the same age our Meg is claiming to be. But that Meg Monroe lives in San Francisco. Coincidentally, she was born here in Milwaukee at the same hospital where Juanita works. That leads me to assume that Meg got the number from Juanita and the two of them are in cahoots together.”

  “Cahoots?” Cora said, smiling flirtatiously. “How cute.”

  Duncan frowned at her and then continued with his story. “Anyway, we found two ten-thousand-dollar checks written to the same charity within the past two weeks from one of Douglas Monroe’s accounts, and Meg was the one who wrote them.”

  “So?” I said.

  “The charity they were made out to only exists on paper. It’s called CALM, supposedly an acronym for Cleanup All of Lake Michigan. And after tracking down the ownership of the organization, all I came up with was a dummy corporation called M&M Enterprises.”

  “M&M? As in Meg Monroe?” Cora said.

  “That’s my guess,” Duncan said. “I don’t know if Meg’s husband has a clue about what she’s doing. But I’m betting that money went to Juanita Alvarez. We had a look at the Alvarezes’ bank accounts, too, and there aren’t any unusual deposits, so I’m guessing Juanita kept the money as cash. And that means we’re likely to have trouble finding her.”

  “You think Meg Monroe hired Juanita to kidnap her grandson?” I said to Duncan.

  “I do.”

  “Do you think she wanted Juanita to kill Belinda, or was that solely Juanita’s doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “But clearly Juanita knows how to create a false identity, and I’m betting that Meg either knew what Juanita was doing and was helping her with the illegals she was bringing over, or Meg found out what Juanita was doing and asked her to do the same thing for her and Davey.”

  “Which means she probably has a new identity established for both herself and Davey,” Cora said.

  “Yes, and that’s good news and bad news for us, too,” Duncan said. “It certainly bodes well for the boy’s safety and future, but it also means it will be painfully easy for them to disappear. Given Meg’s resources, I’m sure she has everything planned down to the last detail.”

  “Then why hasn’t she disappeared already?” I asked. “I mean, if she used the money she took from her husband for this fake charity to pay Juanita to kidnap Davey, then why is she still hanging around? He’s been missing for several days and I would imagine she had everything ready to go the instant she got her hands on the boy. Why would she wait?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Duncan said. “And I think I know the answer because of what Tad found. While going over Douglas Monroe’s retirement portfolio this morning, he noticed that one of the funds was missing a substantial chunk of money—fifty grand to be exact. And Douglas doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “Oh, that sneaky bitch, Juanita,” Cora said. “She’s holding the kid for ransom, to get more money out of Monroe.”

  “That’s my guess,” Duncan agreed.

  “If that’s the case, isn’t it likely that Juanita is still somewhere in the area?” I asked. “If she still has Davey, he must be somewhere close by.”

  “Maybe,” Duncan said doubtfully. “If Juanita was really smart, she’d be as far from here as possible and get some locals to do her dirty work. But I’m thinking she wants to get her hands on that money personally, with no go-betweens to mess things up. Even if she has distanced herself, I’m betting Davey is somewhere close by.”

  “I think those look-alike Facebook friends, who I’m betting are Juanita’s s
isters, would be a good place to start,” Cora said. “I looked them up and they both live in the area.” She handed him a piece of paper with the addresses written on it.

  Duncan took the info and gave Cora a quick kiss on the cheek. “You rock, m’lady.”

  For the first time since I’ve known her, Cora blushed.

  Duncan turned to me next but I didn’t get a kiss, just an invitation. “Mack, will you come with me? If I need to question these women, I wouldn’t mind having you there to help me interpret their responses.”

  Once again I had mixed feelings on the matter, but my desire to see little Davey brought home outweighed any reservations I had. And I sensed that we were closer now than ever before. So I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”

  Cora promised to keep us posted if she found anything else and, after checking in with my staff to let them know what I was doing, Duncan and I headed out. When we were settled in his car, he started the engine to warm both it and us up, and then stared at the two addresses. “One of these addresses is in the same neighborhood that Juanita lives in. The other is across town near Brewer’s Hill. I’m not sure which one to go to first.”

  “Go to the one closest to Juanita’s house first,” I said. “She knows that area better and I think she’d be more comfortable there.”

  “Fair enough. That’s as good a logic as anything I can come up with.”

  We arrived at the first location, which was about six blocks from Juanita’s house, a short while later. The home resembled Juanita’s in that it was a bungalow dating back to the early half of the twentieth century with a tidy, well-manicured lawn. The curtains were all drawn, which I took to be both an encouraging sign and an ominous one.

  Duncan parked in the street a few houses down, and called in his location with his cell phone. Then he turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. I started to open my door but he grabbed my arm to stop me. “Hold on a second,” he said. “Let me think this through.”

  I sat patiently as Duncan stared out the windshield at the house. The windows began to fog up as the cold seeped into the car. Cold always tastes tart when I feel it, like a sour orange or lemon, which I’ve always thought was odd given that both the fruits and their respective colors tend to be associated with warmth.