by Peche, Alec
"If they are wearing a disguise somewhere in all of the video that has been collected on them, it would further help us to chase these guys down through additional avenues," Marie mused. "Can you get copies of the various videos with the two men and see if they're all the same facial features?"
"I would have thought the police already did that but there is some disconnect between agencies so perhaps not," Jill interjected. "I was supposed to go to the city maintenance yard and watch street cameras, but I had to cancel the appointment. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow."
"If we do find another picture that Henrik can link to, that would be great so it's worth asking the question. I also think we need to explore the cyber side of the equation though. These guys had some personal medical information and they knew enough about the conditions to talk their way into the opportunity to kill each victim. There might have been a few insurance companies hacked into. Let me check some of my sources that discuss hacking; it's also one of the places I use to evaluate candidates. I want to know if they have tried to steal information. If they have, I cross them off as a candidate because if they have attempted to steal information from someone else, then they will attempt to steal from their employer, too.
“Henrik sure has been helpful to solving cases,” Marie noted. “We and our clients were lucky to be kidnapped by him. Have you calculated your case solve rate since he has been around to help?”
"He has done two things for me, accelerate the speed of which we solve cases and case solve rates. Prior to his assistance, I would guess that perhaps twenty-five percent of my cases were never solved. Maybe I’ll go back and see if Henrik can shed any light on any of my cold cases. I’ll have to go back over my old cases and see if there was someone we couldn’t identify, that he could make a difference with.
"Okay, I'll add that to our list," Jill said as she wrote down some notes. They paused to let a French speaking family pass them on the hike. Jill hoped the family wasn't that fluent in English such that they would be able to understand any part of their conversation that drifted upwards towards the hikers.
Jill was sweating profusely, the back of her shirt soaked, her headband working hard to keep the rivulets from running into her eyes. She paused to sip more water and was grateful that she had attempted to remove the make-up she applied that morning for the meeting. Having foundation mix with sweat made for a light brown stain on one's clothing and potential blotches in skin color. Marie was also sweating, although not with the gusto that Jill was showing. They drank some more water, paused to admire the scenery, then continued the climb to Nevada Falls at just under six-thousand feet of altitude.
Both women continued thinking about the case and what further clues they could follow. Jill thought that law enforcement was on top of the case and wondered what they weren't sharing because of inter-agency rivalries.
"Law enforcement seems committed and intelligent about this case," Marie stated. "Moving employees over a hundred miles away to another state and providing them with protection is a huge commitment. The lack of sharing of information between the agencies is more likely to be accidental rather than purposeful.
"In thinking about other areas that we could explore, perhaps we could look into the membership of your sovereign citizen movement and follow up on the individual names to see if they match our two suspects."
"That's an interesting idea," Jill agreed. "Preliminarily, based on the pictures I've seen, the two suspects do not look like they're blood relations. So they had to have met somewhere and chatted somewhere before planning these murders. That somewhere, most likely, is on the internet as I think these guys have computer skills to collect a lot of relevant information about victims before they murder them."
"It is good to be walking uphill and thinking about the case at the same time," Marie noted. "My brain is only focusing on two things – not tripping and clues to the case. When we get back tonight, I'll be refreshed on what to search for as we brainstormed quite a few new clues while on this trail. Perhaps Yosemite could rename the trail, the idea trail, rather than the mist trail. This uphill walk has cleared all of the mist out of my brain."
The two women continued uphill for another hour before reaching the spectacular summit of the Nevada Falls. Like from any other vantage points in the park, an observer could see where ice glaciers cut through granite rock to form the Yosemite Valley. Even though this was a low water time of year for Yosemite as the snow had long melted a few months ago, the roar of the falls was breathtaking and hypnotic. They dipped their feet into the cool water, ate their snacks, and drank more water so that they needed to refill their bottles. They both hated to leave such a place of beauty, but there was a silent urgency to get to the bottom of the hill, return to Jill's house, and carry out some more research. Jill knew from past experience to grab a piece of branch that she could use as a walking stick on the way downhill. The constant breaking with the use of the quadriceps muscle and the knee joint would have her in pain by the bottom of the trail. In past jaunts up this trail she had at times walked backwards downhill just to alternate the load on her legs. She would be interested to see if Marie had the same aches and pains by the end of the walk.
An hour and a half later they were back at the car park at Happy Isles parking lot stretching before getting in the car for the hour journey home. It was only four in the afternoon, and so they would be home by five, showered shortly thereafter, and back on their computers chasing the clues they had developed during their hike.
Chapter Twelve
With her long blonde hair drying in the still hot air of early evening during a central valley California summer, Jill went over her notes that she took on the trail. She sent some e-mails to her contacts at the various law enforcement agencies asking for a copy of video footage relating to each employee murder. She wanted to make sure that she did not have an additional facial recognition search for their faces. As Henrik had found copies of the original faces on Facebook, unless these guys were very crafty, it was unlikely that they wore the same disguise when out in public amongst their peers which had to be where the photographs were taken and it appeared that it was their unmodified faces that had been caught on camera. Her contacts all promised her copies that night. It was nice to see that even though this was beyond business hours, people on the task force were monitoring their e-mails on this topic.
Next Jill went back to the sovereign citizens groups. In some ways this was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were several groups in each state; each had some kind of presence on the internet. Jill could waste a lot of time searching down everyone in every group. Perhaps Marie would have a suggestion of how to reduce the numbers of group members to research further.
"Hey Marie, I have simply too many people to run down. One estimate believes that there are half a million people who purport to follow sovereign citizen ideology. Furthermore, this one article said that in recent time,most new recruits to the sovereign citizen movement are people who have found themselves in a desperate situation, often due to the economy or foreclosures, and are searching for a quick fix. Others are intrigued by the notion of easy money and living a lawless life, free from unpleasant consequences. So with all that in mind, do you have any ideas on how I can limit the group that I am researching? With half a million potential suspects, I need to quickly pare this group down to a manageable number."
"Tell me more about the sovereign citizen mentality and maybe I can think of a way to reduce the numbers of people to look at."
"Sovereign citizens today grew out of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s that hated the government and blamed them for individual financial collapse. They were also a white supremacist group but in more recent years the greatest growth has been in the African-American population surprisingly. The targets of violence are often police and judges as they enforce the laws that they don't believe in. Their weapon of choice is paper. In many states they'll file liens against judges or police officers for absurd amoun
ts; according to one article one of the suits asked for $1.4 trillion in damages, as retaliation for trying to enforce laws the judges are appointed to enforce. They usually have fake IDs; don't pay taxes, have fake vehicle registration and sometimes fake license plates. The television show, '60 Minutes' even did an episode on them after they shot and killed two police officers in the South. If you ever see someone driving around with a license plate from the Kingdom of Heaven, it's likely a sovereign citizen at the wheel. They believe in the right to keep and bear arms and politicians should be shot for creating more laws that don't make sense. One of the leaders of the movement has said that the ownership of guns and the threat of violence are required to protect the movement's rights. Oh and since this is all about the constitution, they don't believe that states exist - they call them the 'United States territory of' and you name the state."
"These people sound scarier than that Albanian sniper that was after you, Jill. How are they organized as a group?"
"That's just it - one of their fundamental values is no organization. There is a guy that writes a lot and even has a radio news hour once a week on the American Independence Channel. He seems to be the spokesman for the movement but not a leader as they don't have a leader. It is really quite ugly to read about."
"That much hate does sound hard to read about. Maybe this strategy won't work because we can't narrow down the candidate pool. How about if we focus on how the murders were committed. How would these guys know that Manuel Valencia was in his office and victim #4 was in his home? Did we check phone records for perhaps a call five or ten minutes before each kill? Or did we look at the tape to see if they walked in wearing a different uniform to check the availability of the victims?"
"Those are great questions! I had not thought of any of those issues before, but hopefully our law enforcement friends did. Let me send them an email and then we'll head over to Nathan's house for dinner.”
Chapter Thirteen
Allen Frost and Jerome Taylor were sitting in Jerome's apartment. They were both in their late 30s, Allen was Caucasian and Jerome was African-American. They had met while exchanging comments on Fadask’s website devoted to the theories of the sovereign citizen group. When they lost their jobs in the recession of 2008, they had lost their homes and their wives. It was so unfair. Why did banks have the right to take a house from you that you had paid money for and lived in for five years, all because you fell behind on a few mortgage payments? It was the government’s fault for allowing banks to charge law-abiding citizens high interest rates and even to raise those rates. Those very banks caused the overall price of land to escalate because more people were given loans and then more could bid housing prices up.
Now they both had discharged their debt. They had filed papers in court declaring the banks to be unconstitutional and as a result they were free of debt. The fact that neither man had approval from the courts for their absurd lawsuits was not relevant. Perhaps this is why the FBI had called the sovereign citizen movement “paper terrorists” as they used paper to clog up the court system. Cops who asked for identification from Jerome were shown papers indicating he was a sovereign citizen and needed no driver’s license. Likewise when Allen was notified by city officials that he needed a $20 license for his cat, he filed five different lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the city and their right to charge pet licenses. In the end they decided not to pursue enforcement knowing that the city would spend far more in legal costs than they would gain in license fees and on top of that he would fight collection for several more years and every time the license came up for renewal. The city consulted with experts about the sovereign citizen movement who advised it was better to fight these citizens over large payments like property or income tax than to engage legally with them for all fees.
The two men were both employed in the consumer goods industry. Allen worked for a national package delivery company using a software program to move goods around the country, while Jerome was a warehouse worker for a large retailer. It was hard to find jobs when you didn't believe in driver's licenses. They had taken a month off to execute their plan to eliminate the bastards at the State Revenue Office. Allen had first proposed it one night after months of frustration in dealing with the State tax people and Jerome had agreed. Jerome had been itching to take on a project that expressed his passion for the sovereign citizen movement. It had taken many more meetings before they had their plan. They had layers in the plan. First they decided who had harmed them the most in the office. They developed a list of six targets. They briefly discussed whether they wanted the employee that worked at the office or if they wanted to include their family as well.
After looking at a couple of the six targets, they decided to strictly focus on the employees, leaving the families alone. Some of the employees had families out of the region or out of state and it simply took too long and too much planning to reach all of the extended family members.
"I don't understand why we can't find our final two targets," Jerome puzzled. "When we did all of the surveillance two months ago, we had several places where we were supposed to find them. Maybe they are on vacation at this moment and we just need them to return."
"Maybe," Allen agreed. "We only have a few days of vacation ourselves from work and then we'll have to develop a new plan since I have to go back to work. I don't want to lose my job and I can't take another week off of work."
"Yeah man, me too. I've got to go back to work as well. Should we risk delivering a package to them to find out the scoop? Co-workers are so willing to tell each other's business."
"I suppose someone could be on to our scheme," Allen supposed.
"I don't think so," Jerome assured. "We would have heard it in the news. Besides we have ended the lives of the tax miscreants in a variety of law enforcement jurisdictions so they won't be able to connect the deaths. Especially as we took out the leader of these illegal tax enforcers; with the employees in two different locations, it will take management forever to connect the dots, as we have made all the deaths look like they were from natural causes."
"That's true. Even our fourth kill is well hidden. The idiots will never detect the nitrogen gas. Remember according to our research, they would have to find the body within twenty-four to thirty-six hours and in the United States Territory of California, Rossi's absence from work wouldn't generate any police interest to find him. Isn't that the grand irony! Residents of the territory pay all that tax money and the police won't even help them search for someone that could be in trouble."
"We looked twice for the final two targets at the movie theater," Jerome lamented. "I get that they might have skipped one week or two due to a vacation, but we missed them two weeks in a row now and we only have this weekend left to kill the two bitches. I thought they were like clockwork, seeing a new movie every Friday around seven in the evening. How about if you make a delivery to their office and see if you can pick up any gossip? That worked well in our plans for Mr. Valencia. They are so well paid; they probably took a long vacation."
Allen nodded his agreement and said, "I could do that. That really helped us pinpoint that Mr. Valencia would be in his office. I was amused that I delivered the package in a different uniform ten minutes before we came back as ambulance attendants to kill Valencia. Better still let's say we are picking up a package from their office location and say I got a call for pickup at this location. That way I don't have to leave any evidence behind; not that they're looking for us anyways."
Jerome smiled at that thought and added, "We could always go over to Rossi's house and see if his dead body is still rotting away."
They sat in silence thinking about the suggestion. Then Allen shifted on the sofa and said, "No, it doesn't tell us anything if the body is there or not. Just because the body is not there only means that it was discovered and removed and not that there were suspicions about the death and we don't want to be spotted."
"True, then I guess we are back to your s
uggestion of picking up a package from our final two targets. What are our other options?"
"We could be fake process servers and require their signature on a document," Allen suggested.
"Do we need a uniform for that?"
"I don't know," Allen said. "I haven't ever been served. Let me ask that question on the internet and see what kind of pictures we get. I know that sometimes the sheriff serves people with documents, but they may not be in full uniform when they do that."
After a few strokes of the computer keys Allen had his answer, "it says that most process servers wear business casual clothes and this one website discusses the use of disguises when process serving. The private investigator profession frowns on using disguises unless you've tried on several occasions to serve someone who is evasive. So we could use a disguise wearing a business casual suit, and try to deliver a summons to both of our final two targets. I like that idea."
They spent a few hours scripting out being a process server. Allen did the research on what they needed to do and Jerome created a legal looking summons document that they would try to serve. As it was getting close to the end of the day and they knew the targeted office was open for business between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon, they planned to process serve early the next day. After pulling straws, it was decided that Jerome would be the designated actor in their little scheme and he practiced his role to perfection.
The one thing they hadn't been able to locate was where the employees worked. All website and mail addresses were either post office boxes or the Capitol building. That didn't necessarily mean that that was where their office was located. So they had scripted an encounter with a Capitol employee if they needed to be told that the employee didn't work in that building. The two men approached the Capitol and after a fist pump, Jerome went inside the building in search of their final two murder targets.