The best part of the Jerry’s plan was he was no longer recognizable as the old Jerry Shaw. Even Holly and Jeff probably wouldn’t recognize him. His beard was neatly trimmed, giving him an academic look, like a college professor. Even more impressive, he had lost fifty pounds, slimming down to a svelte two hundred, his lowest weight since high school, and he had gone from a size 44 to 38 waist. The act of losing weight and toning his body had remarkably changed the shape of his face as well. His chubby jowls had transformed into a gaunt, sharp countenance, and his eyes had narrowed into a determined, distinguished scowl. Somehow he looked older, more mature, a serious guy. Jade was amazed at the transformation but added that she liked it. She liked the new Jerry Shaw.
Jerry’s dramatic loss of blubber around his mid-section was attributed, first of all, to a radical change of eating habits. He had sworn off burgers and shakes and fries from any fast food chain and instead ate healthy doses of salads and fresh fruit and vegetables. In his regimen of reclaiming his manhood and self-confidence, he worked out regularly and with sincerity at a local Gold’s Gym, and he joined a Tae Kwon Do class where he learned how to respect his mind and body.
From these sustained efforts, Jerry had not merely excised his flab, but he had become downright ripped. His mental attitude had also changed for the better. He believed in himself for the first time in his life and his thinking had become positive and confident. He no longer saw himself as weak and unfortunate, but instead as strong and opportune. Jerry now sometimes found himself admiring his pectorals in the mirror, and how his good-looking, boyishly square features had returned after so many years hidden by fleshy, unappealing jowls. In short, after only six months as an anonymous man, through sheer discipline and dedication and hard work, and with Jade’s help, Jerry had a developed a whole new sense of well-being, confidence and determination that would mark the rest of his life.
Jerry’s biggest regret was that he was unable to show the new him to Holly and see her reaction. He spent too much time fantasizing over that, imagining her goggling eyes, and the way she might throw herself at him.
But more importantly, as Jerry had changed over the months, transforming himself, he sensed that Jade saw in him more than a means to riches. At some point, Jerry believed that she may have fallen in love with the man he had become.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The typed address for Global Life & Casualty Insurance was blazoned across the center of the envelope in bold, crisp black capital letters. But the upper left-hand corner of the envelope was blank – there was no return address.
Three weeks after the letter had been delivered, Jack Fox found it one morning in the in-basket on the squat desk in the small cubicle assigned to him at Global’s headquarters offices in downtown Philadelphia. There appeared to have been no good reason, except bureaucratic sloth or negligence, for the letter to have taken so long to find its way to him.
Later that same afternoon, Fox found himself sitting in Chief Reynolds office. He watched with some impatience as the Chief meticulously inspected the envelope, then the two emails. Wearing rubber gloves, the Chief turned the emails over in his hands several times before finally reading them. Fox thought the gloves were unnecessary in light of the fact that the envelope and emails had been handled by at least two secretaries and himself since their arrival.
Chief Reynolds settled into an intense scowl as he continued reading. He lingered over them a few minutes more, his mouth moving to the words at times, before again turning them over and over again in his hands, inspecting every last millimeter of them. Fox suspected that the Chief was trying to find fingerprints, hair follicles, skin scrapings, DNA, something to link them to Holly and Jeff.
Finally, Chief Reynolds looked up.
“These are confessions,” he said. “Or pretty damn close. At the very least, highly incriminating.”
Though his expression remained deadpanned, the Chief seemed genuinely surprised and just about as happy as Fox had ever seen his old friend. Then, after letting a few moments pass, he sighed. “We’ve confirmed these email addresses belong to her, him?”
“Yep,” Fox said. “Our computer forensic geeks did. It’s conclusive, they said.” Fox waved a piece of paper. “Here’s their report. The address is registered to Holly Shaw. And the other one belongs to Jeff Flaherty, his work email. And Flaherty’s the guy I saw at the house after the insured’s funeral. Of course, we still need the computers they were typed on to confirm that the emails were prepared and sent on them. But short of that, looks like we got a break in this case. The proverbial gift horse.”
The Chief nodded. “Hard being right all the time, hey Jack?” Then asked his old friend, “So how did they end up in our lap? Who sent them?”
“That’s what I mean by gift horse, Chief. I haven’t a clue why I got them,” said Fox with a shrug. “I suppose Mrs. Shaw and, or, Flaherty, have an arch-nemesis out there. All we know is that they were mailed from Syracuse in upstate New York.”
“Syracuse?” Reynolds rubbed his chin and thought a moment. There was something too neat about this. Too gift-wrapped. Finally, he looked up.
“Fingerprints?”
“Nada,” said Fox.
“Anything else? Hair, skin. Saliva on the envelope? For a DNA check.”
“Did all that,” Fox said. “The envelope is one of the modern ones, with the seal security strip or whatever. The lab found nothing else – no hair follicles, skin particles, spit. They put it under electro-violet light and all that. It’s clean. So, like I said, we still need to link them to Holly Shaw’s and Flaherty’s computers.”
Chief Reynolds mulled over the situation for a time.
“Think this will convince the DA down in Buffalo to reopen the case, get a warrant?” he asked. “Grab her computer, his. Find out what other incriminating emails or other stuff we can find. Maybe grab enough evidence to charge them both with murder?”
Fox shrugged. “All we can do is ask,” he said.
Early the next morning Fox was on a flight back to Buffalo. He had an appointment at eleven with the deputy chiefs of the homicide and white collar crime bureaus of the Erie County District Attorney’s Office. By 12:15, having read the emails and discussing the case for a time, the deputy chiefs were downright enthusiastic. They told Fox they didn’t foresee a problem getting a judge to sign a search warrant. In fact, they expected to be executing one at the Shaw home, seizing her computer, by the end of the week, or early next week at the latest. Flaherty’s might be more complicated, since it could contain client confidences wholly unrelated to his communications with Holly Shaw. But they promised to do the research on that and hopefully be in a position to simultaneously execute both warrants.
“During the search, I suggest we come down hard on the widow Shaw,” chimed in Inspector Dan Miller, an investigator with the DA’s office. “See if we can make her come clean. Snitch out her lover on the hope of getting a plea deal.”
It was just short of 1:30 by the time the meeting ended. As Fox was shaking hands with the deputies and Inspector Miller, Miller offered to take Fox to lunch at a diner out by the airport then drive him to his departure gate.
At the diner, while chewing his burger, Fox told the inspector that his instincts had been right all along.
“I knew something was up when I saw Flaherty at the house Friday after the funeral,” Fox told Miller. “Still, this turn of events has left me less than satisfied. Those emails plopping down in our laps from Heaven. As if our insured, Shaw sent them.” He took another bite of his hamburger and looked off mulling over the whole case.
Inspector Miller frowned as he twirled a spoon around inside his cup of coffee. He was a wizened old cop himself, having served a long and honorable career, now close to retirement. He understood completely about hunches, and could tell right off that Fox’s had been right on more often than not.
“Sometimes you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Miller said. “Sounds like your company ma
y have just saved itself four million bucks; or, whatever the perpetrators haven’t spent or hidden.”
“Yeah,” said Fox, “I know. But this only created another, maybe more interesting mystery.”
After chewing his burger for a time, Miller said, “As in, who sent those emails?”
“Exactly,” Fox said. “And how did we get them?” Miller set the burger down on a plate.
“Sounds like that one might be even harder to solve,” he said, “than the murder we are about to.”
Hard or not, it seemed to Fox that it might be worth solving. Something wasn’t quite right about the whole damned thing. Incriminating evidence just didn’t plop out of thin air. Whoever had sent those emails incriminating Holly Shaw was deeply involved in this caper as well.
And Fox desperately meant to learn who that person was.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Erie County Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant at Holly Shaw’s house that afternoon and seized the old personal computer from the small desk in what used to be Jerry’s den. On the computer hard drive, the Department’s forensic computer guys would subsequently find evidence that the email message Jerry had planted had been transmitted from the machine to Jeff’s work computer. Of course, because Jerry was presumed dead, and no one else had access to his old computer except Holly, they would naturally conclude that Holly had typed and sent it. Who else could have? They would also find the purported reply message from Jeff, sent by Jerry from Jeff’s work computer.
That same afternoon, the managing partner of Carlton and Rowe voluntarily handed over to the Sheriff Department’s investigator, Inspector Dan Miller, the hard-drive of what used to be Jeff’s work computer. It seemed that about three or four months ago, Jeff had abruptly left the firm. Inspector Miller had learned just that week that Jeff was still living in Buffalo, in a three-bedroom apartment on Anderson Street just off Elmwood Avenue. However, during an interview with the apartment’s landlord, he found that Jeff had given notice of lease termination and was in the process of buying a large chunk of property, a ranch or something, out in Montana. Lastly, during surveillance conducted on Wednesday night, Inspector Miller learned that Jeff was still seeing Holly Shaw.
The Department forensic geeks were quickly able to find the incriminating email message on Jeff’s hard-drive in answer to Holly Shaw’s received message. The managing partner of Carlton and Rowe confirmed that no one in the firm except Jeff Flaherty had access to that particular computer on the day in question. The password used to access the computer and e-mail was known only by Jeff. In short, no one except Jeff Flaherty could have sent the email message.
And better yet, during their subsequent analysis of Jeff’s computer hard drive the following week, they discovered more incriminating evidence. Someone, presumably Jeff, had been surfing the Internet for information about garage fires in the weeks before the purported and now questionable accidental fire; and, that someone had saved a newspaper article about some poor schlep who had been burned in a garage fire while working under his used car.
At around ten that same morning, Holly was home when Inspector Miller arrived to confront her about the incriminating emails found on the computer in her upstairs den. He handed her crisp copies and watched as she read them over for a time. Finally, she looked up and surprised him by remaining cool, aloof, and silent. Still, he noticed that her hands were shaking as she handed the emails back to him.
“I didn't send this,” she said. “They're fake.”
“Well,” Inspector Miller said, taking them back from her, “they sure look real to me. And my computer guy tells me this one was written on the very computer we took out of here yesterday.”
“I have no idea how that happened,” Holly said, keeping calm. She remembered what Jeff had told her if the time ever came when she was confronted by police or insurance investigators. Keep your mouth shut. Say nothing. Don't even deny anything, or try to defend yourself in any way. Assert your right to remain silent, he had told her, and more importantly, your right to a lawyer.
Holly's stare hardened. “And that's all I got to say to you, Inspector,” she said. “I don't have to talk to you. I have the right to remain silent.”
“That's right,” Inspector Miller said, his demeanor hardening as well. But if you won’t explain the meaning of those emails, I have to be wondering, why not?”
“I don’t care what you’re wondering,” Holly said. “I’m not answering any questions. I stand by my rights.”
But she kept talking anyway.
“That was Jerry’s computer,” she said. “I never used it.”
“Well, someone used it,” Inspector Miller said. “And Jerry’s dead.
She cursed herself for saying that. “I said, I'm done talking to you. I want a lawyer.”
“Look, I'm just trying to help you,” Miller said, trying now to play the good cop, become her confident. “These e-mails make it seem you got yourself involved in maybe something you shouldn't have. Maybe someone forced you into it. I'm just trying to get you out of trouble.”
“I said, I want my lawyer,” Holly told Miller.
“Sure, sure,” Miller said. Then, he looked to one of the police officers assisting in the search. “Take her in.”
They took her to an Erie County Sheriff’s Department substation near the town hall and sat her on a hard plastic chair in a small conference room used exclusively for interrogations. But Miller didn’t let anyone ask her a single question while waiting for the lawyer she had called, a guy by the name of Dan Morgan from Carlton and Rowe.
“Never heard of him,” she heard Miller whisper to another cop.
While waiting for Morgan to arrive, Miller returned to the conference room. He told her he didn’t want her to say a thing, just listen. Then he filled her head with all kinds of devastating scenarios if she persisted in keeping quiet and protecting Flaherty. He told her she was going to jail for life all because she was protecting her dumb ass lover who’d probably blow her in the first chance he got. The young detective with Miller, whose name she never quite got, Detective Orson, Olson or something, started playing the good cop, chiming in that the judge would certainly consider her cooperation in coming clean and helping them to convict Flaherty, who surely must have been the real brains behind the murder plot.
But Holly kept her poise, staring forward trying not to listen.
Finally, Miller said, “Go ahead, keep your mouth shut. Doesn’t matter anyway. With these emails, we don’t even need you to talk.” He flipped the two emails out in front of himself. “We got your own words. Your own treasonous words. You and that asshole murderous boyfriend of yours are as good as cooked. You cruel, murderous bitch.”
Holly remained stoic. Once or twice, she smirked, seemingly pleased with herself.
Finally, Dan Morgan arrived and demanded to speak with Holly alone.
“What the hell is this about, Hol?” All the cops had told him that his client had become a suspect in the murder of her husband.
Holly had worked for Morgan from time to time at Carlton and Rowe. Morgan had ended up in the commercial litigation department primarily making sure that commercial contracts didn’t screw the firm’s clients. Conversing in the firm kitchen, they had talked about their lives at times and she had even told him how unhappy she was with the way things had turned out for her and Jerry. Morgan said his life had pretty much the same humdrum feel. He had married his college sweetheart and they quickly had two kids. He was making a good living at the firm but the rest of his life seemed laid out for him. He had told Holly that he and his wife rarely made love anymore. And for a time, before Jeff came into their lives, Holly had fantasized going to bed with Morgan.
Now, looking at him across the conference table, she thanked God she hadn’t. He was balding with a perpetually worried frown, a clone of all the other junior partners and associates in the firm. All of them, comfortably numb.
“I need to call Jeff,” Holly said
.
“Jeff?” he asked. “As in Jeff Flaherty?”
“Yeah,” she said, “that Jeff Flaherty.”
Morgan handed Holly his cell phone and watched while she punched in the number.
“Yeah, speak.” It was Jeff, the brusque way he always answered, as if the last thing he wanted to do right then was talk to whoever was calling.
“It’s me,” Holly said and had to hold back from whimpering.
“What’s wrong?”
In the next minute or so, Holly told him what was going on as coherently as she possibly could with Dan Morgan standing there, watching her.
“You kept your mouth shut, right?”
“Of course. Like you told me to, I kept quiet.”
“Emails?” Jeff said, mulling it over with himself. “Where the hell did they come from?”
He drew in a breath, suddenly concerned. “Listen, we better watch what we say. This call could be tapped, you know. If they got a search warrant, they might have gotten a wire-tap order. I’m not even sure they need one for a cell phone call. I’m surprised they are letting you call me in the first place.”
“They're not letting me. I called Dan Morgan, it's his phone I'm using.”
“That idiot?”
“Yes.” Holly sighed. “Jeff, listen. Maybe . . . maybe we should tell them. The truth.”
“Shut the fuck up!” he snapped. “Just shut the fuck up and keep your cool. They aren’t going to prove anything on the strength of a couple ambiguous emails.”
“But you haven’t seen them,” she said, still whispering with her back to Morgan. “They make it sound pretty bad. Like I was involved in Jerry’s death. And you, too.”
“Look,” he said, softer. “Enough. Just keep quiet. This conversation is getting us nowhere except perhaps in trouble. And that goes for Dan Morgan, too. Don’t tell that asshole a goddamn thing.”
The Anonymous Man Page 14