by Brad Parks
He just didn’t plan on some guy with a blue ski mask shooting him in the head. Neither had Kevin Tiemeyer. Yet there they were: bonded in life by their shared round on a golf course, bonded in death by their shared murderer, bonded somewhere in the middle by a shared motivation to commit insurance fraud.
Obviously, Tiemeyer had been lured into the same deal as Okeke and was planning to make the same kind of easy money—or, if anything, more of it, since his car was more valuable. He drove to his own predetermined location thinking he’d be relieved of his car but ultimately got a lot more trouble than he signed up for.
Like Okeke, Tiemeyer had been desperate for money. He had known he was about to lose his job and probably suspected he had a long and arduous search for new employment in front of him. He was already cutting back on expenses in other ways. Getting himself carjacked would have been a great way to not only give himself some padding for the lean months ahead, but also to get rid of a car payment he could no longer afford.
That brought me back to the question I had yet to answer to any satisfaction, and that now loomed with even greater importance: how did Okeke and Tiemeyer know each other? Going back to that electrician’s metaphor: what was their first contact point?
“Did Joseph ever mention knowing a man named Kevin Tiemeyer?” I asked.
“Yes. When he first told me about the scheme, he mentioned he had discussed it with Mr. Tiemeyer. It sounded like they were approached by the same person, whose identity he did not tell me, and now they were both considering taking part. They discussed it over a round of golf, if you can believe that. I think they were working up the courage to participate.”
“So how was it they first met, Joseph and Mr. Tiemeyer?”
“That, I cannot tell you,” Tujuka said.
Sweet Thang immediately perked up. “Oh. I thought they met at Rotary.”
I felt myself swiveling toward Sweet Thang in slow motion. “Wait, Kevin Tiemeyer was in Rotary?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s in the notes Tommy sent you.”
“Oh. I hadn’t read them yet.”
“Well, it’s in there,” Sweet Thang said. “One of Tiemeyer’s colleagues was talking about what a normal, reliable guy Tiemeyer was, the kind of guy who, quote, never missed a Rotary meeting.”
“I wonder why Zabrina never mentioned that?” I asked.
And then Tujuka Okeke said the two words that changed everything. “Who’s Zabrina?”
CHAPTER 39
Black Mask had done enough of these jobs by now. Ten? Twelve? Enough to establish distinct patterns.
Enough that Black Mask knew there were aspects of this particular job that didn’t feel quite right.
The first thing was the time. Always before, it had been later. Eleven o’clock. Midnight. One in the morning. Times at which carjackers ordinarily operated.
This one was eight o’clock. It was still dark, yes. But it was a time that felt riskier. There might still be a few ordinary citizens out. And while most of them wouldn’t go to the police and say they had witnessed a carjacking—people in Newark knew it wasn’t worth it, for the most part—you never knew if one might decide to get brave.
Another thing was the place. Always before, it was an intersection with a traffic light. The corner of Mulberry and East Kinney. The corner of Bergen and Avon. The corner of Central and 10th.
This one was just an address. The man, Carter Ross, would supposedly drive the Volvo XC60 up to the house and pull into the driveway.
And then—lastly and most significantly—there was the instruction to kill the guy. Yeah, Black Mask wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. Blue Mask would do that.
But still. Even for double the money, Black Mask was feeling uncomfortable with it. It’s not like he was a Quaker or something. Not in this line of work. He had watched two men get killed in the last month.
The difference was, he didn’t know it was coming. This time, he did. And it was making him feel a little queasy.
Nevertheless, there he was, at seven thirty, plenty early. He liked to have time to look around. He had told Blue Mask to be there at seven forty-five. For the kind of money they were making, an extra fifteen minutes didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice.
He surveyed the scene, liking what he saw. The homes were larger and a little more spread out than in other parts of the city. The street was draped in large trees that had obviously been planted a long time ago. They would provide perfect cover for what was about to happen in the driveway.
Despite all the logistical differences in this job, he wanted to get it set up the way they had done all the others. Find two good spots to lay in wait. Then, with one sharp whistle, strike.
It was important to do it real professional like that. Even though the drivers knew what they were getting themselves into—after all, they had signed themselves up for it—he had been told to keep up a good front. If anyone did happen to see it and say something to the cops, it had to look like a real carjacking, every time.
Black Mask had just finished his little tour of the area when Blue Mask walked up. His ski mask was on his head, but not yet pulled down over his face.
“’Sup,” Blue Mask said.
“Hey. Nice place, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m thinking about buying me a place like this someday. But I think you gotta be rich.”
“Yeah,” Blue Mask said. “Wait. You know who lives here, right?”
“No. Why? It matter?”
Blue Mask just stared at him for a moment, then said, “Naw. Guess not.”
“Okay,” Black Mask said, slightly mystified. “You got your piece?”
“’Course.”
“You good with using it?”
Blue Mask acted offended the question even needed to be asked. “Yeah, dawg. You know I’m good.”
“A’ight. ’Cause we’re supposed to kill this one. We’ll get paid twice as much.”
“Yeah?” Blue Mask said. A small smile had come to his cheeks.
“Yeah.”
“A’ight. I’ll do him.”
Just like that. Like he enjoyed the prospect of it. Black Mask felt even more sick.
But there wasn’t time to linger on it. They needed to get settled in their places. Black Mask had decided Blue Mask should hide between two parked cars and approach from the right side of the car, like usual. Black Mask would set up around the side of the house and attack the left. His last instructions to Blue Mask were to wait for the whistle—and roll down his ski mask.
Black Mask donned his, then went around to the side of the house. He stood there, perfectly still, and waited.
It wasn’t long before a car slowed and began turning in to the driveway. The headlights strafed the side of the house.
It was a Volvo. Make that the Volvo. Black Mask whistled sharply, then pulled out his gun. He walked up to the Volvo, now idling in the driveway. With his free hand, he banged his palm on the window. “Out of the car,” he ordered. “Out of the—”
And then he actually looked at the driver.
It wasn’t who he was expecting. It was supposed to be a dude, a guy named Carter Ross. This was a woman, with brown curly hair. And she didn’t look scared, like the others did. She looked pissed.
And something else.
Black Mask could see her stomach bulging out so wide she couldn’t really close her legs and so far it was nearly brushing the steering wheel. Yet the rest of her was skinny.
Then Black Mask figured it out. This woman was pregnant.
CHAPTER 40
It says a lot about the speed at which my mental processor works that, at first, I didn’t even realize how much the revelation about Kevin Tiemeyer being in Rotary—along with those two words out of Tujuka’s mouth—really did change things.
Because I answered her “Who’s Zabrina?” with, “You know, Zabrina Coleman-Webster. Joseph’s—”
I nearly said “girlfriend,” then adherence to an ancient male code of h
onor—Do Not Get Thy Fellow Brethren in Trouble by Saying Too Much—stopped me. Instead I said, “You know, the Rotary Club president.”
Then the significance of those two words started catching up with me.
“Wait,” I said. “You seriously don’t know Zabrina Coleman-Webster?”
Tujuka’s brow had a crinkle that told me she did not. “No,” she said.
“The day after Joseph was killed, you didn’t get a phone call from a woman named Zabrina, asking where Joseph was?”
“Certainly not,” she said.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and found the photo of Zabrina and Joseph together, the one that had me pondering the vagaries of the universe a little more than twenty-four hours earlier.
“This woman,” I said. “Have you ever seen her before?”
I leaned across the coffee table and held out my phone. Tujuka took it for a moment and tilted it until she hit the sweet spot on the LCD screen. Once she had it right, it didn’t take her long to decide.
“No,” Tujuka said, handing me back my phone.
“That is Joseph with her, right?”
“Yes. Of course. But I have never seen that woman. I am sure of it. Who are you saying she is?”
I paused. Clearly, this was a case where ancient male code needed to be set aside. I’m not sure one’s rights under that code superseded death anyway.
“The woman in that photo has been telling me she was Joseph’s girlfriend, that they met several years ago, and eventually started dating,” I said. “She said they were planning on getting married.”
I never realized it was possible for a woman as dark as Tujuka to blanch. But I swear she had lost some of her color.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Joseph did not have a girlfriend.”
“Mrs. Okeke,” I said, as gently as possible, “are you sure that maybe Joseph hadn’t told you because he was afraid it would upset you? You wouldn’t be the first woman who didn’t know her ex-husband was in a new relationship.”
“Joseph had been trying to reconcile with me,” she said definitively. “He had been trying for two years. He said he was tired of being divorced, tired of living under a different roof from his family. He wanted to be closer to Maryam before she went off to college. He wanted us to share holidays when our other children came home. He wanted us to grow old together, like we planned all along.
“At first I told him no, absolutely not. We were divorced and that was it. Going through it the first time had been too painful to even think about the possibility of going through it again. But lately I admit I had been … rethinking that. He had started spending nights here again. He was spending the night here when he got killed, but then he went and did this crazy thing with his car.”
“Wait, wait, the night Joseph was killed, he was here?” I said.
Zabrina had told me she was with Joseph that night and that he had only left her to retrieve some papers for an early meeting he had. But I was starting to recognize that—like apparently everything else out of her mouth—was a lie.
“Yes, he was here,” Tujuka said. “Right up until he left. As I said, I begged him not to.”
“Zabrina said she was with him,” I said.
“Unless Joseph had learned to split himself in two, I do not see how that is possible. He was here until eleven that night. Maryam would remember. Hold on.”
Tujuka rose from her easy chair and walked just out of the room, to the base of the stairs. She called up, “Maryam, could you come down here please?”
“Coming,” Maryam said, and I could hear her bounding down the steps. She entered the room just behind her mother.
“Oh, hi,” she said, when she saw me. “Mama, this is the reporter I was telling you about.”
“Yes,” Tujuka said patiently. “Maryam, the night Daddy was killed, you remember it, yes?”
“Of course I do.”
“And where was Daddy that night, before he left?” Tujuka asked. “Mr. Ross would like to know.”
“Well, here, of course,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing to her.
“And what was he doing?”
“What he always did. Bother me about my homework.”
The lack of guile that struck me about her the first time I met her was there once again.
“Maryam,” I said. “Do you know a woman named Zabrina? Zabrina Coleman-Webster?”
Maryam looked appropriately mystified. “No,” she said.
“Have you ever seen this woman?” I asked. I got off the couch and handed Maryam my phone, which still had the photo of Zabrina on it.
“No,” Maryam said. “Who is she?”
“She claimed to be your father’s girlfriend.”
“Well, then she’s on crack. Daddy didn’t have a girlfriend,” Maryam said, with that marvelous teenaged certitude.
I accepted my phone back from her. The whole exchange was far too natural to have been choreographed in any way. Every reaction was right where it should have been.
What it came down to is that, as is often the case for a reporter, I was getting two versions of the same story. In one, there was Zabrina saying she was Joseph’s girlfriend, saying she had various conversations with Tujuka in which they had bonded over being single moms, saying she had thought about trying to continue her relationship with Maryam.
In the other, there were Tujuka and Maryam Okeke saying, in their own ways, that Zabrina was on crack. And I have to admit, that story was feeling a lot more credible.
But why would Zabrina lie unless …
Unless she was trying to mislead the reporter who was looking into these two seemingly unrelated carjackings. And the only reason she would do that is if she was hiding something: like being involved in the carjacking-for-insurance ring that was responsible for it—either as the recruiter or as the orchestrator.
Had I known Tiemeyer was also in Rotary, I might have had a chance to see it sooner. I just had the misfortune of learning about that round of golf at Fanwood Country Club first. I had thought Fanwood was the root of the tree, when really it was just a branch. The root was Rotary Club, of which Zabrina was president.
It was like twisting the kaleidoscope. Everything about my interactions with Zabrina looked different. When I had come calling about Joseph Okeke, I now saw she had two options. She could have put me off or pretended to know little about the man, which would have sent me elsewhere in search of answers.
But she was smarter than that. It was the old Sun Tzu advice: keep your friends close but your enemies closer. She wanted to keep close watch on what I was learning, controlling that information as best she could to suit her purposes.
For example, when I had mentioned the name Earl Karlinsky, she produced this story about how, yes, a man with that name had asked Joseph about his car, quizzing him about its features.
Did she know how far she was dragging me in the wrong direction? Of course not. But that was the whole point of drawing me close in the first place. She would have found a way to make a bogeyman out of any name I tossed out there, using her platform as Joseph’s quote-unquote girlfriend to do it.
I thought about how easy it was for her to fake that relationship. She knew enough about his work life from casual conversations at Rotary meetings. She knew details about Maryam, because Joseph bragged about Maryam to anyone who would listen—whether it was his next door neighbor in his town house complex or someone who just happened to be sitting at his lunch table.
And then there was that photo, which seemed to confirm the intimacy between the two of them. But that was another piece of evidence that was easily misread. If I attended a Rotary Club meeting—as, say, a guest speaker talking about the newspaper business—and the president of the club asked me for a picture, I would have wrapped my arm around her the same way Joseph did.
Had I bumped across anyone who disputed that Zabrina and Joseph were dating, she had a built-in explanation for it—that they were “keeping it quiet,” and therefo
re the person in question must not have been part of the inner circle.
Later, after she had time to think about it a bit, she probably realized she had gone too far. Which is why she played the privacy card, trying to pull their relationship off the record: she knew if I put it in the newspaper, someone—like Tujuka—would call balderdash on her.
Or maybe she was just using that conversation as a pretext to see what else I had learned and as an opportunity to mislead me even further. I thought of her sitting on that park bench, offering me a sandwich, and then smoothly wallpapering over some of the lies she had told me.
That exchange had ended with her offering me those insurance documents. Was it even possible she had them?
Actually, it was: she might have asked Joseph for a copy of his policy, so she could read it over to make sure he had the right kind of coverage for the scam she was running.
But why would she show them to me? It would only lead me closer to the truth.
And then I felt a wave of panic. Between my interest in the insurance angle—even if I had it completely backward—and my insistence in talking to Tujuka Okeke, Zabrina would have known I was eventually going to figure things out. In her mind, I had gone from curious reporter to serious threat.
Which meant she was either using those insurance documents as bait to bring her enemy even closer, or she was using them to lure me into a trap.
A trap that that I had sent Tina, my very pregnant girlfriend, unwittingly wading into.
A trap that could include a man who wore a blue ski mask and was both proficient and practiced at killing people.
My eyes flashed back to the clock on the entertainment center. It read 8:03 P.M. If Tina was on time—and I never knew her to be late—she would have pulled into Zabrina Coleman-Webster’s driveway about three minutes earlier.
I stood up, grabbing Sweet Thang’s arm as I did so.
“Mrs. Okeke, I’m so sorry,” I said. “But we have to go. I think my girlfriend might be in serious trouble.”