Slice of Greed: A Kevin Rhinehardt Mystery (BOL Mysteries Book 1)

by K. C. Reinstadler

  Ted and I sat down, and I extracted my note pad, placing it on the table in front of me. She began asking questions. We knew her brain must have been on fire. We counted on it.

  “Detective?”

  “Rhinehardt, ma’am, Kevin Rhinehardt. And this is my partner, Ted Banner.”

  “Didn’t we already speak the other day on the phone?”

  “Why, yes, and it’s nice to finally meet you in person. We just have some follow-up questions about the homicide of Dr. Marvin Redbone and Raul Diaz.”

  Trying to look puzzled, she retorted, “Well, as I indicated to you on the phone, I don’t know why anyone would say I knew that man. I don’t. And who’s this Diaz fellow? Never met either one of them. Sorry.”

  “I realize that, Ms. Howard, but we’ve been speaking to lots of folks about this case. I’m sure you understand.”

  A nervously smiling Cheryl Howard replied, “I can just imagine, Detective.”

  Pulling out a Miranda rights admonishment form from my pad, I placed it in front of her.

  “Ms. Howard, before we speak, it’s my department’s standard policy that all potential witnesses read and sign this rights acknowledgment form before we speak to them. It’s just a formality. Please read it.”

  Her voice rose an octave. “Am I under arrest, Detective?”

  “Oh no, no, Ms. Howard, and you can choose not to speak to us if you like. You can ask us to leave, too. It’s just standard sheriff procedure to advise you of your rights before we talk.”

  I detected a slight tremble in her hands as she held and scanned the document. She looked up twice and then slowly reached for the pen. She signed it and slid the waiver form back to me.

  Ted spoke up. “Ms. Howard, apparently you don’t know Marvin Redbone. But are you acquainted with a Camarillo attorney by the name of Robert Richardson?”

  She stared at Ted briefly and then turned to look at me. “Richardson…No, can’t say I know him. Should I?”

  My turn. “As you know, I was assigned to investigate that little incident you had with your husband, Dan, several weeks ago. Do you remember my speaking to you about that?”

  “Yes, but how is our little misunderstanding connected to your inquiry about those murders? I just don’t understand that.”

  “Well, Ms. Howard, while checking on your domestic incident, I found out that you had a little problem in the Cayman Islands several years ago. Your fiancé drowned while diving near Cayman Brac in 1990. Isn’t that right?” I pretended to fumble through my notes. “His name was…Troy Williams, right?”

  Looking directly at me, she said, “Yes, but I just can’t believe you would bring that up now. That was long ago, and I lost someone very close to me. I wanted to marry Troy. I loved him very much.”

  She was shaking her head, her hands held up to her eyes, as she made that tearful declaration. Ted and I were touched.

  I reached out and touched her trembling hand briefly.

  “Sorry, ma’am. And I am sorry for your loss back then. However, the problem is, I found out from the Royal Cayman Islands Police Services that well…let me find it here.”

  Fumbling once again in my briefcase, I pulled out the RCIPS report. I fanned the pages, looking through the report.

  “Why, yes, here it is…” I quoted the page: “Ms. Cheryl Oswald has retained Miami attorney Robert E. Richardson in this matter.”

  Her hands dropped from her face almost as quickly as the color did.

  Looking eye-to-eye with her, I said, “I’m a bit confused. Did you forget you ever knew Robert Richardson?”

  We saw Cheryl Howard’s demeanor morph right before our eyes. She looked intensely at me, and I could swear she leaned forward as her eyes narrowed a bit. The hair on the back of my neck stiffened, and without realizing it, my right hand slid down my side, closer to the .40 caliber GLOCK on my hip.

  Then, as quickly as she had stiffened, her face softened into a wry smile. “Wait. Yes, now I remember. I did speak to an attorney on the telephone back then. Gosh, I think you’re right, it was a Robert…What was his last name again?”

  Ted answered, “Richardson, R-I-C-H-A-R-D-S-O-N. He has an office in Ventura County about a hundred miles from here.”

  Howard then explained, “I believe I conferred with him about the Cayman authorities wanting me to return to the island. I was scared and just needed some advice. You do know they closed that case; after all, it was a tragic accident. That attorney didn’t even charge me. He didn’t do much for me. I understood he made a couple of calls, that’s all. That was over ten years ago, for God’s sake. I completely forgot his name.” She stifled a contrived chuckle.

  Ted kept tightening the noose. “So, you’ve never spoken to this lawyer, Robert Richardson, while you have been living here in California, in Santa Barbara?”

  “No, Detective, not at all.”

  It was my turn to make her squirm. “Ms. Howard, let’s get back to Marvin Redbone. Ever meet him?”

  “No.”

  “Ever have him treat you as a physician? He had an office near here in Solvang.”

  “No. I see someone else: Dr. Thomas Wilson in Santa Barbara.”

  Ted quickly added, “How about a man named Raul Diaz? He lived in the Village Commons town houses near Marvin Redbone.”

  “I don’t know any Rauls.” Feigning a smile, Cheryl exclaimed, “I lead a sheltered life, I guess, Detectives.”

  My partner tightened the noose. “So, Ms. Howard, your statement is that you have never had any recent contact with this attorney, Robert Richardson, and that you don’t know Dr. Marvin Redbone.”

  “That’s right, Detectives. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.” Her eyes were wide now, implying she was being entirely truthful.

  Ted raised his index finger, as if to say hold on, just a second. He reached slowly into his briefcase. Retrieving a small digital recorder, he placed it on the table in front of the three of us. For added effect, he slowly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small memory card and showed it to her. He inserted it into the slot in the recorder. Then, ever so slowly, he pushed it toward Cheryl Howard seated across from us. Banner pushed Play.

  We heard a short pause on the recording—just some static. Then suddenly, the recorder played our trump card: Robert, why are the police asking me if I know Redbone? What the fuck is going on? I went to great lengths to ensure I had no connection with him…

  Just as slowly as he’d pressed Play, Ted reached over and snapped the recorder off. As she stared blindly at the table, I slid an eight-by-ten-inch glossy photo print in front of her lowered gaze. It depicted an angry, red-haired Cheryl Howard, with her finger pointed directly at Robert Richardson’s red face as they sat in the back booth at Sally’s Place two days earlier. I leaned toward her and whispered softly, “I liked you better as a redhead.”

  My hand stayed near my side arm as Cheryl Howard placed her hands over her face and lowered her head to the table. She began to sob—for real this time. After about a minute of waterworks, she looked up and said, “I’m screwed, aren’t I?”

  We just looked at her. Our silence was our agreement.

  That afternoon, five days ago in DA Janet Swan’s office, Ted had come up with a brilliant idea.

  What about taking a detour to get to our final destination?

  That detour was the use of a wiretap to obtain evidence against the less-than-honorable attorney and his coconspirator. Janet Swan liked that idea and helped us draft the affidavit. The magistrate who signed the warrant said, “This is creative, gentlemen, and I like it. However, I will give you only one week on this. Use the time wisely.”

  Running the wire was time-consuming and labor-intensive. Not only did we have to staff the recording equipment 24-7, but it also had to be a special master warrant. That was because almighty attorneys, and their noninvolved clients, must be protected from any “search” of their constitutionally protected communications, from any unreasonable searches and seizures. />
  We had other (reputable) attorneys, special masters, assigned with us for the entire wiretap. Every call to and from shitbird Richardson, at his home or office, was first monitored by our attorney special masters. Any conversations with anyone other than Cheryl Howard were immediately “minimized” (muted). The special master would then have to periodically click back to listen on the line to see if Cheryl Howard was mentioned, or if there was any conversation specifically about our murder case with anyone else who might have been involved. They don’t trust cops to do this. Detectives were only allowed to monitor all the calls between our two suspected murderers.

  We enlisted six members of our special investigations division (you know, the narcs) to help out. Will Phillips cut his teeth on monitoring this wire, too. Everyone told me he did a pretty good job.

  After our wire was in place on both Richardson’s and Howard’s phones, Ted and I paid our visits with the suspects and “heated them up” with our questions designed to get them talking. Howard couldn’t wait to call her shitbird attorney and find out why the cops had been at her door. The rest was a piece of cake.

  After she dried her now-bloodshot eyes, our killer composed herself and said, “Look, you need to know I didn’t actually know this doctor. Someone else made me do it for him. You know who I’m talking about, and I can give him to you. I will testify. That bastard Richardson blackmailed me into doing this. I didn’t want to.”

  I asked, “What about Raul Diaz? Why did you kill him?”

  Almost tearfully, she replied, “Look, I didn’t know he was there, for Christ’s sake. He was just lying there next to him in bed. Then he was running away. Shit, I couldn’t let him go. It happened so fast I just reacted. Why the fuck was he there, anyway? I thought only Redbone would be there, goddamnit!”

  Truth be said, I believed this part of her confession.

  My partner kept her going. “So, Cheryl, go on. Tell us about what Richardson said and did that you claim made you commit these murders. This is your only chance to tell us everything we need to know.”

  Howard then got her composure back and started using that calculating brain of hers. “Look, I want a deal. I can’t go to prison.”

  Ted and I chuckled out loud at the same time. Ted responded, “Are you kidding me, lady? You kill two people and expect to spend your afternoons at the frigging gym or out shopping on Rodeo Drive. No prison? Right.”

  I then put frosting on her cupcake. “Ted, hold on, did I hear you say she killed two people?” I looked right at her and said, “Ms. Oswald, you and I both know it was three people you’ve killed, don’t we?”

  Cheryl went back to sobbing as Will Phillips, along with Janet Swan and a crew of five other undercovers, walked through the front door to serve the search warrant that I slid under her nose on the table. It’s all about timing, you know.

  Two hours later, after she gave us a detailed account of the slaughter, and as the search was winding down, Ted and I were bemoaning the fact that we had failed to locate anything of evidence in the house of our beloved Phantom. Sure we took the usual indicia of occupancy: her PC, laptop, and tablet. She was probably too smart to write a journal about what she did, but you never know. We had her confession and plenty to go to court with, but shit, I wanted it all. I wanted to roll her in bread crumbs and fry her.

  I was beginning to put my papers and equipment away when I heard a familiar voice screaming upstairs in the hallway.

  “Rhino, get up here!” Will Phillips was lying on his back in a small upstairs hall closet, legs hanging out, with his head tucked back under the clothes hanging on the rack above him. He looked like some pervert in Macy’s looking under the door of the women’s changing room.

  “Get down here, Kevin. Look at this.”

  Reluctantly, I lay down next to Will, dirtying up my suit pants and shirt, and stuck my head under the hanging clothes.

  His flashlight shone into a small open panel in the wall at the back of the closet. A two-foot square piece of wall board sat against the wall next to the hole. Inside this open wall space was a brown cloth bag with a 24-7 Fitness logo on it. As I lay on the ground next to Will, I turned to him and said, “How the hell did you know to look here?”

  Smiling, the young lad said, “Well, I wasn’t always a cop you know. I was a plumber’s apprentice in my former life, and I know that older houses like this have plumbing clearouts, usually inside closets like this, always at the back. Just ask me next time, Rhino. I’ll solve all your cases.”

  What a smartass—a very smart ass.

  After being photographed, we dissected the contents of the gym bag. Inside was a pair of bloody surgical gloves, turned inside out, wrapped around a brown leather knife sheath. Carefully extracting the blade, the curved blade of the fillet knife from the scabbard, I could see dark-red flakes along the edge of the razor-sharp stainless-steel edge. Dried, dark-crimson spots marked the blade stop at the top edge of the black plastic handle. This undoubtedly was a mixture of Marvin Redbone and Raul Diaz’s blood—a testimony to their savage demise. A gray, hooded sweatshirt lay at the bottom of the bag, too. Small crimson specks could be seen near the zipper and pockets.

  I could hear the fry grease cracklin’.

  Young Will Phillips spoke up. “I can’t believe that crooks keep this shit around.”

  I replied, “In the words of the famous LAPD homicide detective, John ‘Jigsaw’ St. John: ‘I’ll take luck any day!’”

  Chapter Twenty

  Unbiased Reporting

  William Thomas Baxter was thirty-three years old and twice divorced. He had no pets, no hobbies, and lived in a studio apartment outside of Santa Barbara. At five feet seven inches tall, balding, with a pronounced beer belly, he was a fine specimen of manhood. He had a case and a half of Pabst beer in his fridge, along with a few small items of day-old junk food. Discarded dirty pizza boxes and crushed beer cans were strewn about the living room, revealing his penchant for fine dining. A dog-eared copy of Hustler Magazine lay atop his bedroom nightstand, along with an open jar of Vaseline—a testament to his lack of female companionship beyond the inflatable kind.

  Billy Baxter began working in television news on the central coast after being fired from the Los Angeles Times when they learned he had provided sensitive information to members of the Sur 13 street gang in East Los Angeles.

  Baxter was assigned to the crime beat in LA County when he learned from a loose-lipped LAPD patrol officer about a large-scale gang raid scheduled for the following morning. The raid involved nearly seventy-five law-enforcement officers from three separate agencies and was targeting Sur 13, who was suspected in three recent drive-by shootings. Surprisingly, the reliable police informant proved unreliable, when no weapons were located in all thirty locations searched. No guns or drugs were found at all. Nada. Zip. It was like a frigging street-gang miracle.

  The Times fired Baxter after one of the gangbangers later gave up Baxter’s name as the police leak after the shithead was arrested in a separate drug bust. The paper never found out that Baxter had actually sold the information for an ounce of blow. It was better they never knew. Plausible deniability, you know.

  When Billy applied at KCMP-TV, Channel 3, he was interviewed by the news editor, Mr. Earl Waxford. How fortunate for Billy, because Waxford completely discounted the LA Times allegations that Baxter had been terminated on the suspicion he was providing confidential law-enforcement information to a criminal street gang.

  Waxford told Baxter, “You probably had a good reason to distrust the police, those lying bastards.”

  The two hit it off right away.

  More than a year ago, Bill Baxter’s cocaine habit got a bit too expensive, so some of his good buddies introduced him to the fine art of smoking crystal meth. It was cheaper, and the high seemed even more intense. He was dating a nurse with similar cravings at the time, and she kept him in vitamin-B shots, mood-calming drugs, and the occasional Klonopin tabs that she managed to steal from the dr
ug locker at the doctor’s office she worked in. She had made an extra key for that treasure trove a long time ago.

  Earl Waxford turned a blind eye to Baxter’s occasional paranoia and mood swings, because Baxter could always be counted on to come up with a sensational story just when the station’s ratings dipped. Sure, many around KCMP questioned his sources, but Earl Waxford wasn’t one of them. The editor would just proclaim his virtues. “Good job, as usual, Billy, my boy.”

  Baxter got the nickname “Butthole” eight months earlier, after he stole another KCMP reporter’s story right from under his nose. More like right from under his desk, because Baxter stole and copied all the guy’s notes from the man’s unlocked desk drawer one night. The older reporter had worked for weeks gathering information about a pair of mortgage scammers who were stealing tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting home owners in the tricounty area. These folks were desperate to do anything to save their homes from foreclosure, and in their desperation, they just trusted the wrong people. The veteran KCMP newsman was eager to expose the scammers.

  This elderly reporter kept his research and pending story quiet until Billy overheard him speaking to his wife about it over the telephone one afternoon. He was ready to break the story, and the excited reporter was preparing to go to Earl Waxford with the details. Baxter beat him to the editor’s office the next day with his version of the story after gleaning the details from the stolen notes. Then, despite the other reporter’s objections, Earl Waxford let Bill Baxter report it as his own featured segment on the late-evening news.

  Less than one week later, the other reporter resigned from KCMP, and in a letter written to all the station staff, pinned to the bulletin board, he warned them never to trust Bill. He wrote, Baxter’s a real butthole! The name had stuck to Billy like glue ever since. It fit him to a T.