Judged

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Yup. It should just be a few minutes.” Joe minimized the screen he had before him and went to work.

  My ear caught the sound of the tech-department door opening. I turned to see Couch entering.

  He walked up. “It’s our van?” he asked.

  “It is. We’re running the numbers that were on the rear glass now. It looks like it’s a phone number with some missing digits. One of the missing numbers is for the area code, so we only have ten possibles,” I said.

  “Local?” Couch asked.

  “Three oh five, yeah.”

  The printer at the edge of the room came alive and kicked out a sheet.

  “That should be your first phone owner there,” Joe said. “You’ll have to log into the system to pull them up and see what they have as far as registered vehicles. More coming,”

  I walked to the printer and removed the sheet. The phone number belonged to a woman. I took one of the workstations nearest the printer, logged into the Bureau’s database, and ran the name. She did not have a Ford van—or any van—registered to her. Her age was sixty-six, her record clean—she wasn’t our vigilante.

  Beth brought me another sheet from the printer and stood over my shoulder as I ran it. The man’s name was Douglas Bering—no van registered and no reason to think it was him. We continued.

  The next sheet I ran belonged to a Timothy Wendell. His information came up as I punched in his name: age, forty-two; height, five foot eleven; weight, one ninety; hair, brown; eyes, brown. I looked at his driver’s license photo. The man had a thin face and was clean shaven and had finger-length hair parted on one side. Looking me dead in the face was a registered 2015 Ford Transit van, color silver.

  “Got him,” I said. “Timothy Wendell. Let’s get a warrant in place and get over there.”

  “Last name with two ls?” Beth asked.

  I confirmed.

  “Let me see if the last name shows up anywhere on our list of possibles. Maybe this guy is related to someone there.” Beth left to get the file of potentials.

  “Where does he live?” Couch asked.

  “The address is listed as SW 144th Court in Miami.”

  “Hold on.” Couch clicked some buttons on the screen of his phone. “It’s a forty-five-minute drive,” he said. “I’ll get the wheels turning for that warrant. Why don’t you call your guy, Harrington at Miami Dade, and have him get something going for getting local units out there. Nobody does anything until we arrive, though.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed Lieutenant Harrington.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tim had carried the unconscious woman upstairs, thoroughly bound her hands and feet, and barricaded her into the master bathroom. He was sitting on Jensen’s living-room couch, staring over at the doctor, who was lying flat and bound to the chaise underneath him with two rolls of duct tape from the garage. Tim’s bag sat next to him on the couch.

  “Wake your ass up,” Tim said.

  The doctor had been grumbling and making noise for the past twenty minutes—the drugs were starting to wear off.

  “I said wake up. We have things to talk about.”

  Tim stood, dug through a pocket, and grabbed a bottle. He popped the lid under the doctor’s nose. After no more than a second, Jensen opened his eyes and yanked his head back.

  “What the hell,” Jensen said.

  Tim snickered, placed the cap back on the bottle of the ammonia inhalant and retook his seat on the couch. “Smelling salts,” he said. “Apparently, they work at waking the dead—or the soon to be.”

  Jensen groaned, moving his arms as if he was trying to reach for his face, but they were stopped immediately by the restraints. He writhed back and forth. “What the hell is this?” The doctor put his chin to his chest and looked down at the tape securing him. “Why am I taped to the chair?”

  “Because I taped you to it. Now, your money, where is it?”

  “Is that what this is about? Money?”

  “In part,” Tim said. “How much do you have accessible at this moment? I want every last cent.”

  “There’s no money here, but I could get you some. Let’s just talk this out.”

  “I don’t want some of your money. I want all of it,” Tim said.

  “But it’s not here. It’s all at the bank or tied up in investments.”

  Tim reached into the bag beside him and removed a large white envelope. “See, there’s a little something off with that. I have your bank statements and some of your monthly investment-account statements.”

  “How did you get that?”

  “I’ve been intercepting your mail. That’s not important.” Tim pulled some of the paperwork from the envelope. “It looks like you only have about twenty thousand in the bank and about a hundred thousand in investments. That’s far too little for someone in your tax bracket. So if I had to guess, you probably keep a sizable amount on hand. Why would a reputable, upstanding psychiatrist do that?”

  “I keep money offshore. Tax haven,” Jensen said.

  Tim looked at him and shook his head. “We both know that’s bullshit. You made a little over two million dollars last year. All of your taxes on everything have been paid and look like they were in order. You don’t even try to write anything off to get a tax break. This house, paid for. The car, paid for. You don’t really have much debt and have a huge income. I find it hard to believe that you would dump all of your money overseas into any kind of interest-bearing account and then not pay the taxes for any interest generated. Which would be illegal, by the way.”

  Jensen didn’t respond.

  “So where is the money in the house?”

  “There isn’t any. Look, let’s go to the bank, I’ll drain the account and give it to you.”

  “The bank is closed,” Tim said. “I just want whatever you have here now.”

  “I swear I don’t have anything here,” Jensen said.

  Tim went to the doctor and went through his pockets until he found his wallet. He opened it and took the cash from inside, about a hundred dollars. “What about small items? Jewelry, watches, things like that. Your clothes and car say you like the finer things in life.” Tim yanked up Jensen’s shirt sleeve and looked at the doctor’s watch. “IWC watch, huh? Looks nice. What’s something like this go for?”

  “About ten grand,” Jensen mumbled.

  Tim took it from Jensen’s wrist and put it on his own. He rolled his hand back and forth for a look as he wore it. “I think it looks better on me than you. Have any more? I figure you probably have a Rolex or two floating around here just because it was the wealthy-person thing to do.”

  Jensen said nothing.

  “I’ll go take a look.”

  Tim left the doctor restrained to the chaise and walked upstairs to the master bedroom. He rifled through dresser drawers until he found a watch case. Tim glanced at the six watches inside the glass-topped case—while he wasn’t familiar with any of the watches other than the Rolex he’d correctly assumed was there, Tim imagined none of them were cheap. He tossed the watch case onto the bed and continued going through drawers and cabinets, looking for valuables. He found nothing else that looked to be of value or easily fenced at a pawn shop. Tim grabbed the watch case from the bed and tucked it under his arm. He stared down at the bed itself, reached out, and lifted the side of the mattress to see if anything was tucked between it and the bedspring.

  “Ha.” Tim smiled at five yellow-banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills—ten thousand dollars each. He shook his head and said, “I’m betting you have more.” He continued searching in the closet, scanning the floor and shelves. He reached up and pulled down a shoe box that was unusually heavy. Tim flipped open the top.

  “Holy sh—” Tim cut his sentence short.

  Stacks of yellow-banded hundreds completely filled the box. Tim’s eyes rose back to the shelf, where he spotted two additional shoe boxes that looked similar. Tim set the box he was holding,
along with the watches, on the carpet of the closet floor and pulled down the two additional boxes. Each weighed the same as the first, and each was filled with money.

  Tim laughed at the sight of hundreds of thousands of dollars before him. For a moment, he imagined sitting on an island somewhere the dollar went far, sipping rum for his remaining years. A sound through the wall to his right quickly broke his daydreaming.

  “Looks like the woman is awake,” he said to himself. “I better go finish up before she finds a way out.”

  Tim grabbed the money from the bed and jammed it into his pockets. Then he went back to the closet and stacked the boxes on top of each other. He balanced the watch case on top as he carried them back downstairs. He set them in the kitchen and returned to Jensen, who was trying to squirm out of his restraints.

  “Fight all you want. You won’t break free.” Tim took a seat next to his bag on the couch. “I just want you to know that I found your money in the shoe boxes and your watch case. Both will be leaving with me.”

  Jensen’s face scrunched and he sniffed hard. “So you have what you came for.”

  “Not at all. Oh, and your woman friend will be just fine, in case you were wondering, which I’m sure that you weren’t.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs, locked in your bathroom. She can’t help you, though.”

  “Look you have my money and watches. What more do you want?”

  “I want your confession.”

  “For what?”

  “Esther Germain, to begin with,” Tim said.

  “Esther Germain? What about her?”

  “How you got seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of her money.”

  “Is that what this is about? Are you a family member of hers or something?”

  “I am not.”

  “I don’t understand the problem, then. Ms. Germain left me money in her will. I’m assuming that me seeing her for years helped her, and with no immediate family to leave an inheritance to, she chose me for some reason. I didn’t even know she did it until I was contacted by her attorney.”

  “Why don’t you tell me how she died,” Tim said.

  Jensen was silent for a second. “In hospice.”

  “And what led up to that?”

  “She took a turn for the worse, I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t see her much after her health deteriorated.”

  “Did you ever diagnose her with anything?”

  “Just depression. We spoke of her emotional issues of growing old and outliving her husband, mostly.”

  “Ever prescribe her anything?” Tim asked.

  “Just alprazolam.”

  “What about maybe giving her a little something in office that you didn’t write out a script for? Something like, say, haloperidol?”

  “Haloperidol? I’ve never given that to anyone.”

  “What about prochlorperazine and thioridazine?” Tim asked.

  “Never. Those kinds of drugs aren’t recommended for use in the elderly. She was also seeing another doctor at the time. They could have been prescribed by him, or maybe she acquired them herself.”

  “An eighty-nine-year-old woman out acquiring drugs for herself and self-medicating. Really? I would suggest you quit playing stupid.”

  Jensen was silent.

  “We’ll get back to that. Let’s move on, shall we? How about Maria Norman? What can you tell me about her?”

  “She passed away.”

  “And you were in her will?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much money there?”

  “A little over one point four million after everything.”

  “Weird. Another patient of yours that passed away and left you a sizable fortune. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall to hear how you convinced these patients of yours to leave you what they did.”

  “I would never do such a thing. I mean, I understand that it’s odd for them to leave me in their wills, but I help these people. It must be their way of returning the favor after they go,” Jensen said.

  “Return the favor, huh?”

  “Possibly. Like I said, I have no control over other people’s last wishes.”

  “Right,” Tim said. “Okay. I have a couple more names, but I have a hunch this is going to continue this way unless we shake things up a bit. So your story is that you never gave these elderly women anything and never tried to influence them into leaving you any inheritance?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Then why would you have ordered this?” He reached inside his bag and removed a vial of haloperidol. “Or this?” Tim pulled another vial out.

  “Those aren’t mine.”

  “Hmm. Well, they were left on your doorstep. They came from a sketchy pharmaceutical company that says that it is in Canada, but the products ship from somewhere in Albania. I did a little research. Now, why would you be having these drugs delivered to your home? That doesn’t seem like something a good doctor would do. And don’t bother trying to deny it. I matched up the invoice that was in the box to your bank statement.”

  Jensen said nothing.

  Tim unwrapped a syringe, plunged it into the vial of haloperidol, and drew up the fluid. He set the loaded needle down next to him, reached back into the bag, and reached for another syringe.

  “What are you going to do with those?” Jensen asked.

  “That depends on if you confess or not.” Tim held up a loaded needle and flicked its side. “I can tell you this, though. If you don’t confess, I’ll fill you up with these drugs until you’re overflowing. I’m actually starting to get good with using these things. The last ones were filled with heroin, though.”

  “Okay. I confess,” Jensen said.

  “Confess to what?”

  “I did it. All of it.”

  “I’ll need some more details than that.” Tim set the needle down and filled another from another vial in the bag.

  “I’d befriend them. Con them into leaving me money.”

  “How?” Tim asked.

  “I told them that I was a partner in a pharmaceutical company. I told them how we were revolutionizing psychiatric drugs for the elderly but were desperate for funding. I laid it on thick that investors wouldn’t take us on because of our target demographic. A lot of my older patients would offer money, which I would never take. I’d continue telling them every time I saw them how much good we could do if we only had the right people backing us. After that, my patients started leaving me money in their wills. I never asked them to specifically, though.”

  “They thought they were helping. The drugs you were giving these people under the table—I assume you said it was something from your so-called pharmaceutical company?” Tim asked.

  Jensen nodded.

  “And this was all bullshit?”

  He nodded again.

  “You knew full well what you were giving them and what the adverse effects could be?”

  A third nod.

  Tim took a small notebook from his bag and walked it to the doctor—he set the notebook on Jensen’s midsection and freed the doctor’s hands from the tape that secured them.

  “Write it down. A full confession and sign your name to it.”

  “A confession, even on paper, is worthless if under duress,” Jensen said. “It will never stand up.”

  “I don’t need it to,” Tim said. “Get to writing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We approached Timothy Wendell’s neighborhood. Beth and I drove with Couch while another group of his agents, Rivera and Pottsulo, followed in a car behind us.

  My phone call an hour earlier to Harrington had been brief. He said he would be on scene and would make a call to the local department where Wendell lived to secure the area. No one was to approach the home or make contact in any way until we arrived with the warrant, which was in hand. I’d also called Ball and left him a voice mail with an update that we may have had our guy. Beth didn’t find anything matching th
e last name anywhere on our list of possible suspects. My final bit of phone work was a text to Karen that I would be working late and would call her as soon as I could in the morning—she’d responded right away with the standard message, “Be safe” and “I love you.”

  “It’s going to be another block up and around the corner. The address will be on the right-hand side of the street,” Couch said.

  We stopped at a four-way intersection. Out my passenger-side window, I saw three marked Miami Dade police cruisers parked with their taillights toward us. Parked on the opposite side of the street were two more Miami Dade cruisers and two unmarked cars parked facing us. The leading unmarked gray Crown Victoria flashed its headlights at us. Couch yanked the wheel right and pulled alongside the car. The window lowered, and I saw Lieutenant Harrington’s face.

  “There are lights on in the home,” he said. “Do you guys have the warrant?”

  “In hand,” Couch said. “Is this everyone?”

  “Yeah. We were just waiting on you and the word to roll up. The house is just about directly through there, one block over.” Harrington pointed at the home directly out his passenger-side window.

  “I’ll round the block and come down from the other direction. As soon as you see my headlights, you come. Are all of your guys ready?” Couch asked.

  “We’re ready to go,” Harrington said.

  “All right. Let’s go serve our warrant and take this son of a bitch into custody,” Couch said.

  Harrington nodded.

  Couch raised his window and rounded the block, following the street as it bent left one hundred and eighty degrees and straightened out to lead us to Wendell’s home. A string of headlights at the end of the block headed our direction.

  Couch threw the truck into park in front of the address. The streetlights lit the light-brown single story with its empty red driveway leading up to a garage facing the street. White arches covered the two front windows to the left of the dark-colored front door. The place didn’t look more than ten years old. Harrington pulled the nose of his Crown Victoria next to the front bumper of Couch’s truck and stepped out. The rest of the squad cars lined the street, and the Miami Dade officers poured out. Some stayed with their vehicles, and some were instructed by Harrington to surround the property, which was fenced. Some officers pulled themselves over the five-foot wooden fence to gain access to the backyard. We drew our service weapons and advanced on the home. Agents Rivera and Pottsulo walked at Couch’s shoulder. Harrington and the officer he was with followed at our backs.