Deadly Web

by Michael Omer

  “Damn it, Jurgen!” Bernard shouted. “You’re even a worse private detective than a cop!”

  “Go to hell!” Jurgen said, gritting his teeth. “I was a good cop.”

  Bernard snorted and stared out his window. Jurgen knew what he was thinking. Internal affairs hadn’t exposed the results of their investigation, but they’d had enough to get Jurgen to quit. He often wondered what would have happened if he had stayed. Would they have managed to implicate him in the crimes of bribery and misconduct?

  Maybe. The dirt had been there to be found, Jurgen had never been the cleanest cop around. He had tried, though. He’d been a good detective, cracked many cases before the stench of corruption started reeking bad enough to get internal affairs poking around.

  Whatever. Water under the bridge.

  The red Nissan stopped, and Jurgen turned onto a side street and parked the car.

  “Well?” Hannah asked, still breathing hard. “Is this where you’ll get your dirty pictures? Will your client be happy?”

  “Doubt it,” Jurgen said tiredly. “This is where she takes Pilates lessons. The teacher is a sixty-year-old woman.”

  “Well,” Hannah said, “this has been… anticlimactic.”

  “Welcome to the fun life of the private detective,” Jurgen said.

  “Our car is parked back where we met you,” Hannah said.

  “Well, this woman is bound to return home eventually,” Jurgen said. “Though she tends to go shopping after Pilates. It would probably be more efficient if you got a cab to drive you back.”

  The detectives got out of the car. For a second, Bernard looked as if he was about to say something, but then he shut the door and walked away.

  Jurgen sighed. This had been more depressing than he had anticipated.

  “Well, Sharon,” he said. “We have fifty minutes until the lesson ends. Where were we?”

  The phone interview with Henry Konner was important enough to conduct in the police station. Jacob and Mitchell called from Jacob’s phone, the call recorded like all other calls on the department’s landlines.

  “Henry?” Mitchell said. “It’s Detective Mitchell Lonnie. Can you talk now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should know we are recording this conversation.” Mitchell said.

  “Okay.”

  “Can you repeat what you told me when I called you earlier?”

  “Yeah, sure. I said that Dona’s boyfriend, Blayze, killed her.”

  “Can you tell us how you know that?”

  “Yes. Me and Dona talked a lot. We were really close. Lately, she’s been telling me that her boyfriend was scaring her.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “She said he had hit her a couple of times, that he began drinking again. And that he needed money.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know why he needed the money. Maybe he was on drugs, or he was gambling it, I don’t know. But he kept asking her for money. She said that she only started looking for a job to get him more cash.”

  “Do you know for a fact that she gave him money?”

  “Yeah, she gave him money out of the allowance that her parents gave her, but that wasn’t enough.”

  Jacob and Mitchell looked at each other.

  “So what happened then?”

  “Well, he started pressuring her into selling her Buffy collection. She had a lot of Buffy stuff, you know? Like… She had a signed poster. It was probably worth two hundred bucks. And a Spike plushie, you can’t get those anymore. She had a replica of Faith’s knife, that was also worth a lot, I guess… Anyway, she had a bunch of stuff. And Blayze wanted her to sell all that. She didn’t want to, and he got violent.”

  “Violent how?”

  “She said he swore at her, and hit her in the stomach…” Henry’s voice began to waver. “That bastard. I mean… she was such a wonderful human being.”

  “That’s it?” Mitchell asked. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said after a second. “She said that Blayze was coming over two nights ago. She sounded really frightened. I told her she should call it off, tell him to go to hell, but she wouldn’t.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I guess she should have listened to me,” Henry whispered, and began sobbing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Blayze did not look surprised when Mitchell and Jacob came to arrest him. He mostly seemed weary. As they walked him into the police station, his shoulders slumped, his feet began to shuffle, and Jacob could see the instant transformation: a free man becoming an incarcerated criminal again.

  Jacob was hoping for a quick confession. He geared himself up for the aggressive cop routine: threatening Blayze with the fingerprints they had, the DNA samples they could acquire, the testimony of the murdered victim’s close friend. Blayze’s criminal record did not improve his chances, of course.

  If they played this right, Jacob thought, looking at the broken man in the handcuffs, they could shut the case before dinner. He could eat with his family tonight. The thought was encouraging. Maybe they could go out, eat somewhere nice. He vaguely remembered that his daughter had recently requested they eat at a Syrian restaurant she had heard of. Jacob wondered what one ate in a Syrian restaurant. He was pretty sure hummus was involved.

  “I want a lawyer,” Blayze said, as soon as they sat down in the interrogation room.

  Any hope for hummus that evening quickly dissipated. In fact, Blayze didn’t seem broken at all, now that Jacob looked more closely. He just seemed like a man hunching down in the rain, knowing he had foolishly left his umbrella at home, preparing himself for the inevitable consequence of getting wet.

  They let Blayze make a phone call. While they waited for his lawyer, Jacob and Mitchell worked on paperwork. They gave Blayze a Miranda rights form to sign, though he clearly knew and understood his rights. Jacob called home. Marissa answered, and was unhappy to hear that her husband would once again be late. She said something about a dinner in the fridge. If there was a passive aggressive undercurrent in her tone, it was well hidden. Jacob doubted it. Marissa knew the man she had married. She had given up on trying to change him long ago.

  Blayze’s lawyer turned out to be a short, chubby, bald man who looked around him with wonder in his eyes as if it was the first time he’d ever been in a police station. He reminded Jacob of a hobbit, and an image popped in his mind of the lawyer sitting in his burrow, smoking a pipe, his hairy feet on a small stool. He introduced himself as Mr. Dobbyn.

  The hobbit and his client talked for a few minutes in the interrogation room, after which Mr. Dobbyn came out of the room and demanded his client be set free. The police had nothing on him besides unwarranted prejudice due to his prior convictions. His client was trying to start fresh with a clean slate, and the police were harassing him. His client had just lost the woman he loved in a most violent way, and the police could maybe do their job and arrest the actual killer, instead of badgering the poor, grieving man. There would be a civil suit.

  “Okay,” Jacob said. “Are you done? Did you get everything out of your system? Can we please interrogate Mr. Terry?”

  “If you insist on prolonging this charade,” Mr. Dobbyn said. “Be my guest. I will be in the room the entire time, advising my client.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jacob said. He did not like Mr. Dobbyn. He thought the lawyer gave hobbits a bad reputation.

  Mitchell and Jacob sat down with Mr. Dobbyn and Blayze.

  “Mr. Terry, can you tell us where you were on Tuesday, the 10th of October, during the evening and the following night?” Jacob said.

  “I was on a fishing trip all that night,” Blayze said.

  “Was there anyone with you on that fishing trip?”

  “You know damn well there wasn’t.”

  “Did anyone see you on the way to the fishing trip? On the way back?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

&nb
sp; Mr. Dobbyn whispered something in Blayze’s ear. Blayze frowned, then said, “My car was out of gas on the way to the bay. I filled it.”

  “Can you tell us where that was?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I can show you the road I was driving on. It was in the afternoon.”

  Jacob sighed and noted this in his notebook. There would be a lot of security footage to scan. Maybe they could pass the case over to the district attorney, let his guys watch hours and hours of security tapes, searching for Blayze’s car. In any case, it proved nothing.

  “You didn’t call Dona Aliysa, and inform her that you were about to visit her?”

  “My client already told you he didn’t,” Mr. Dobbyn said.

  “I didn’t,” Blayze said, ignoring his lawyer.

  “Mr. Terry, did you have a cash flow problem lately?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Mr. Dobbyn said.

  “Why not?” Blayze asked.

  “Because I told you not to,” Mr. Dobbyn said.

  “I’d prefer not to answer that,” Blayze told Jacob.

  “Why not?”

  “Because my lawyer told me not to.”

  “We’re about to acquire a search warrant for your bank account,” Jacob said.

  “I’m very happy for you.”

  “It would be better if you cooperate.”

  “Better for whom?”

  “Mr. Terry,” Mitchell said, leaning forward, “did you take money from Dona Aliysa?”

  Blayze’s eyes widened. “No, I did not,” he said.

  “She did not help you with some cash flow problems?”

  “No.”

  “Did you demand that she sell some of her memorabilia collection to solve a cash flow problem you were having?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Mr. Dobbyn said. “Detective, where are you going with this?”

  “Just asking questions.”

  “I think we’re done here,” Mr. Dobbyn said.

  “Hang on,” Blayze said. His fingers clutched the table tightly, white with effort. “I don’t know what gave you that idea. I would never ask Dona to sell anything from her collection. I mean… she loved that collection. In fact, I bought her one of the original props used in the series. It was a bracelet. She kept it in her dresser.”

  Jacob flipped the pages of the case file until he found the list of the memorabilia items. There was indeed a bracelet there.

  “Can you describe the bracelet?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it was like a silver bracelet with a white stone. Cost a lot.”

  “Did it?”

  “I have the PayPal receipt. I can send it to you if you want.”

  Jacob frowned. He sat back. Something suddenly began to bother him.

  Mitchell glanced at Jacob, then said, “Mr. Terry, did you ever hit Dona Aliysa?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Would it surprise you to know that she had told someone you did?”

  Blayze stared at Mitchell, his face becoming deathly pale.

  Mr. Dobbyn shuffled his papers. “My client will not answer any more—”

  “I never hit her,” Blayze said. “Never.” His voice was hoarse, as if he was on the verge of tears.

  Mitchell waited. Then he glanced at Jacob. Jacob realized his partner was waiting for him to pounce with a new set of questions, grilling the suspect, unbalancing him even more.

  “Thank you, Mr. Terry,” he said instead. “If you’ll excuse me and my partner, we need to verify several things before we continue with this interrogation.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Mr. Dobbyn said. “You’ll set my client free. You have nothing to—”

  “We have enough evidence against your client to keep him here, Mr. Dobbyn,” Jacob said shortly. He got up and left the room.

  Mitchell quickly followed him. “What’s wrong, Jacob?” he said. “We were halfway there! He was bound to slip soon and—”

  “Henry Konner told us that Blayze was trying to get Dona to sell her collection to get money,” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, he did. Is that what’s bothering you? The bracelet? Maybe Blayze bought her the bracelet when he was flush, then lost his money later. Maybe he got her that bracelet when he was madly in love with her. Maybe he was lying and he didn’t get it at all. Who knows? We need to interrogate—”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me,” Jacob said. He opened the case file and flipped the pages. “Look. Here’s a list of the stuff we found, her collection. See that? There’s a jacket that the Buffy actress wore in one of the episodes. Do you remember what Matt said? He said that the jacket was worth about three thousand dollars. Here, the list of jewelry props and prop replicas in her dresser. There are some pretty expensive items here.”

  “What’s your point?” Mitchell asked.

  “When Konner told us about his chat with Dona, about the monetary value of her collection, he talked about a poster, a knife replica, and a plushie—random bits from her collection—but he never mentioned the really expensive stuff. That’s a bit weird. I mean, he was trying to make a point. He was claiming that Dona told him that Blayze was forcing her to sell her collection for money. But he just mentioned those comparatively cheap items.”

  “Well… okay. What does that tell us?”

  “The jacket was in the closet. The jewelry was in the dresser. The poster, the plushie, the replica—all those things that Konner mentioned were out in the open.”

  Mitchell blinked, then his eyes widened as realization sunk in. “Konner didn’t know about the items in Dona’s collection because she told him about them,” he said.

  “No,” Jacob said. “He knew about them because he saw them, when he was in her room.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Okay, then,” Bernard said when he and Hannah finally got back to the station. “What’s going on with our search warrant? We really need to check his finances, Hannah. He could have hired someone else to kill Frank. After all, it isn’t likely he’d ask an ex-cop to do that.”

  Hannah gave it a moment’s thought. Bernard was probably right. Jurgen was not hit man material, after all. He wasn’t anything material, as far as she could tell, though she knew that before the internal affairs investigation he’d been thought of as an excellent detective. But Tarp could have found someone else to do his dirty work. She didn’t buy the whole “I wouldn’t know where to look” routine. A person like Tarp always knew someone who knew someone.

  “Hang on,” she said. “I’ll call them.”

  The woman in the DA’s office assured Hannah they were checking on the matter, and they’d have an answer for her the following morning. Hannah curbed the rising frustration and thanked her coldly. She hung up and turned to Bernard.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s check some of the other suspects.”

  “Sure,” Bernard said, groaning as he sat in his chair. “Who do you want to talk to next? His teacher, whom he charmingly called an ugly stinking whore, or that Facebook friend of his whom he threatened to rape?”

  “I’m starting to think the world wouldn’t be such a bad place if this murder was left unsolved,” Hannah said, her skin crawling. “Okay, hang on. Let’s zoom out a bit, think this case through again.” She approached the small white board in the squad room. The day before, while researching, they had used it to outline the case’s details. It had a timeline, a list of suspects, some with little notes written next to them, the murder scene diagram, pictures of Chad Grimes and Jenny and Ronald Tarp. It looked very professional.

  “Okay,” Bernard said, rolling his chair lazily to sit closer to the board. “Let’s go over the timeline. We’ll treat anything that’s corroborated by two unrelated witnesses as a fact.”

  “Right.” Hannah said, and located a red sharpie. “Okay, Frank and Jerome went out for drinks, because Jerome was feeling down about his breakup.”

  “Wait. Before that, Frank visited his sister in the care center.”

  “That’s right. He
was there until… six-thirty.” She marked an X on the board’s timeline.

  “And then, sometime in the evening… do we know what time they left?”

  “Nine-thirty,” Hannah said, marking the timeline.

  “Right. At nine-thirty, Frank and Jerome left Frank’s home and went to Leroy’s.”

  “We can’t really be sure they went straight to Leroy’s,” Hannah said. “Jerome could be lying about that.”

  “Okay. Anyway, they eventually got to Leroy’s, where they stayed until one A.M., buying drugs from Chad Grimes, hassling Jerome’s girlfriend via Twitter, and generally acting like dipshits.”

  “We know this because it’s corroborated by the bartender and by Grimes,” Hannah said. “Then they went to Frank’s place, possibly followed by someone—”

  “I don’t think they were followed,” Bernard said. “The red Toyota Corolla was parked near Frank’s house.”

  “Whoever parked it there could have followed them to Leroy’s and back,” Hannah pointed out.

  “Sounds like a lot of trouble to go through.”

  “Whatever. They got back. Had a drink. Jerome allegedly left; Frank locked the door. Then, a minute or two later, at one twenty-five there was a scream—”

  “Allegedly.”

  “Well… Petal also heard it, but allegedly Jerome heard it from the staircase. He stated that he ran up, saw someone running down the stairs, got to the top floor, saw Frank dead, screamed himself, which got the neighbor out of her apartment.”

  Hannah paused and chewed her lip, staring at Chad Grimes’s picture. She wanted to find the missing part. She wanted the epiphany that made the case clear, that made her go “Aha!” just before she collected all the involved parties in the mansion’s guest room to tell them how she had cleverly solved the case. Not for the first time, she felt frustrated with murder cases in real life, which were messy, conflicted, and never ended with the detective cleverly twirling his mustache.