by Bill McGrath
popped open. It exposed the workings of the two side drawers and it also exposed the space behind them. The techs carefully photographed and removed five quart-sized clear plastic bags filled with a white powder from the space.
The right side panel also produced five powder-filled baggies. The techs carefully placed the goodies in evidence bags and went to work trying to gather finger prints from the desk cavities I had exposed. I mentioned to Samuels that the desk likely had more secret compartments but that I did not know how to open them. Each and every member of our search team took a turn trying to guess the location of some other hidden vault. None found any surprises.
I had briefly owned a time machine that allowed for some wonderful memories of my childhood. Technically I still owned the desk but it was now being loaded into a police vehicle and it would be taken to a police lab where it would be carefully disassembled one sliver at a time. Eric Samuels would in fact hand me a voucher for one-hundred and fifty dollars to cover what I had paid for the ugly old desk, but I surely would never see it again.
Jill and I rode in my car but we caravanned back to the Dallas Police Department sub-station where Samuels had his office. We were there only a little while. Samuels knew me, but technically I was just as much a suspect as anyone else in the matter. I mean, should they arrest someone and then should the case go to trial, the defense attorney would surely question the fact that the desk was in my possession for four days and hidden in a storage locker that entire time.
Additionally I had known just how to open the hidden storage sections of the desk.
Surely I could have placed the drugs there myself sometime after I had purchased the desk. So they took fresh finger prints of both Jill and I even though we were both on file at the local PD already from our past involvement with other cases.
They also separated Jill and I and told us to each write out a detailed list of everything we had done since the purchase of the desk. I am pretty sure our stories would match.
CHAPTER-07.
Jill and I got back to the house around three in the afternoon. We had promised Jana that we would try to get by her shop during the day but it started looking like we were not going to make it there. I was tempted to call her and let her know we would not make it but she had been in my bed the previous night and although I had very much appreciated it, and although I was ready for another session with her, I found myself thinking about moving too fast and wondering what all I really knew about Jana Little. At this time I could not even really rule her out as a suspect. Clearly she had not participated in the crimes the previous
night because I could account for all of her time, but that did not clear her from the earlier crimes which we were currently investigating.
Additionally, of course, I was always cautious when it came to new relationships and this one would be no different. We tend to be pretty selfish when it comes to forming new relationships. I was sitting at my desk wondering whether or not miss Jana Little would be good for me right now, but I was not thinking at all about whether I might be good for her. Her baggage might weigh me down, but what would my baggage do to her?
I wasn’t sure how to define the baggage I carried around with me. I mean I had been shot at several times since the first of the year, and was now involving myself in what appeared another dangerous case. Would a potential mate consider my line of work an asset or a liability? I think it was Groucho Marx who said “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would admit me as a member.” My profession is sort of like that. I have not heard any statistics about private investigators but for comparison sake I look at the stats for law enforcement.
Amongst the cops the highest incidence of spouses is family members of other cops. In other words when a cop gets married it is often to a girl whose father or brother is a cop. That makes it a pretty tight knit family. Unfortunately the profession also has one of the highest divorce rates, and one of the highest domestic violence rates. Could someone who is basically a clerk in a store she does not want to own possibly be a good match for one in the law enforcement career?
In addition my last several girlfriends had all been younger than I was. None of them were still around so I must admit that they had not worked out. Jana Little was my age. She would not be easy to boss around. She would likely push back.
She would already be set in many of her own ways and it may be up to me to bend to fit her rather than my expecting her to bend to fit me and my habits.
And then there was Jill. She was my friend and partner, but would never be my lover. Still, I cared for her and would not wish to take on any thing that would infringe on our friendship. From all indications though little Jill seemed to approve of Jana Little. Oh well. I had Jill call Jana to let her know we would not be by today, but set up a meeting with her at her store for ten the next morning.
Relationship wise I tend to over think things and this one wouldn’t be any different. I probably could have comfortably wasted the rest of the day simply thinking about whether I should think more about Janna and I.
I had collected a lot of things I needed to organize for this case so I got right to work on my computer. I downloaded the pictures from my digital camera, and copied the diskette Detective Samuels had given me so that all the pictures were in the same folder on my hard drive. The next thing I did was gather up my steno
pads and type all the notes into the hard drive as well. I had tons of data but very little to really look at.
Briefly looking at the photos I had taken I found one of the answers I had been looking for. We knew where all the security cameras were out in front of the stores and also inside the stores but I was hoping there would also be some cameras pointing at the back of the stores. Lola and Jana had each bought a truck load of furniture from a stranger the day of their breakins. I was hoping to get some video footage that identified the truck or trucks that had been used to deliver the furniture to them. Unfortunately, by looking through the pictures I had snapped of the back alley of the stores I found only one thing that looked like a security camera and that was on the back of Texas Treasuretrove owned by Steven and Wanda Crowley. That camera might have caught sight of the truck if it entered the back alley from that direction, but there was no way it showed the truck actually parked and being unloaded at either Jana’s shop or Lola’s shop. Still, if we could spot a given truck rolling down the alley on both days we might be able to use it as a lead. Who knows, perhaps we could even see the face of the man driving the truck. Lola would not be able to identify the truck or the driver, but Jana might be able to.
The diskette Samuels had given me contained pictures of the finger prints they had lifted from four different crime scenes now including my house, but I am not an expert at comparing prints, and I certainly did not have access to the databases the cops would use for matching them up, so they were pretty useless.
Another thing I found on the disk though was the pictures of the tire tracks. They had found a single tire track at my house and another single tire track at the house of BJ O’Riley. The two tracks had matched and they had gotten a really good cast from the O’Riley crime scene. I looked at the photograph of the tire track for a good long time. Something about it just seemed familiar. Basically the tread was made up of five rows of tiny diamonds. Each diamond was about an inch wide and half an inch tall. The first and fifth diamond in each row, in other words the two rows closest to the outside edge of the tire, were sitting horizontally. The middle row had the diamonds placed vertically, and the second and fourth rows were offset half way in between horizontal and vertical.
What one looks for when looking at tire tracks is blemishes. The reason for that is that a tire manufacturer will produce thousands of tires with an identical tread pattern on them so that the tread pattern alone will not narrow it down to a specific vehicle. However, after the tire is installed on a car and driven around a lot the tread will get bumps and dinks in it and will wear away so that eventually the tread
will have a lot of differences from the tread pattern when it was brand new.
The photo I was looking at though showed no distinctive blemishes, and it did not show much wear either which meant that it was probably a new tire
indicating that it could be either a new car, or an older car which has just gotten a new set of rubber.
I thought a bit about why there was just one tire mark. Of course it could have been a motorcycle. I printed off the picture and took it out to my own driveway. I compared the print to the tires on my car as well as those on Jill’s car and was quite satisfied that neither of our cars had left such a print. Detective Samuels had told me that it did not match either of our cars but some things you just need to see for yourself.
I looked in the area of the front yard where the actual tire track had been found and unfortunately I had to admit that it very easily could have been a car instead of a motorcycle because if the passenger side wheels of my own car had made the track the drivers side tires would have been on the concrete and not left a track. Oh well. Since they were trying to find the old desk I had just bought I expected they had driven either a small truck or even an SUV. Of course, if they had rented the vehicle the tire track would likely do us no good at all.
Somewhere in the country I knew there was a database that had sample tire tracks from known tire manufacturers, but the Dallas police department did not have access to that database. So I could do one of two things; I could search the internet for sample tire tracks and hope I get lucky, or I could simply keep the tire print in the back of my mind and then compare it only to tires of vehicles I came in contact with throughout this investigation. I was not yet ready to give up but an hour of surfing the net yielded nothing at all. Until the police had gone through all the fingerprints they had collected at Lola’s there was precious little in the way of forensic evidence to follow.
We had found ten kilos of a white powder that was now in the hands of the Dallas P.D. and it was hoped that we could get some leads from them. I expected that it was either cocaine or heroin but I really did not know which, and it really wouldn’t make much difference. The police would thoroughly check every single bag for finger prints, and they would do an extensive chemical analysis of the powder, but it was expected that these investigations would yield little.
The most likely source of clues would come from another source. We had confiscated ten kilos of someone’s drugs that would represent a huge investment.
Someone would be very mad, and word would get out on the street that the drugs had been seized. Hopefully one of the snitches that owed one of the cops a favor would hear something and report it. In the mean time, I had zilch in the way of leads.
There was one other source of clues. Three of the four victims had now been murdered after enduring Satan’s Path, so it was expected that the same person had committed all three crimes. That person had left behind a bunch of bullets and the
techs would analyze each and every one of them trying to identify a specific gun the bad guy had used. They would do this in several graduated steps. First, of course, was a simple visual examination to determine what caliber the bullets were.
If the caliber was different between one crime and the next it would prove that there had been more than one gun used. If, on the other hand, the bullets were all the same kind then they would continue with the next step. The next step would be to search the gun manufacturers literature and build a list of which gun types might have been used. Then they would examine each bullet under a microscope to see what marks were left on the bullet as it scraped its way out of the barrel of the gun.
If all the bullets had similar rifling marks it would indicate that a single gun was used. The rifling could then be used to narrow down even further the list of possible guns. Finally, of course, they would compare the specific rifling marks against another cops’ database that had test fires from specific guns so that a specific weapon might be identified. All of this weapons forensics though would be done by highly qualified professionals and not by yours truly, and unfortunately not immediately.
My cell phone chirped to life and when I picked it up I found Eric Samuels on the line. He reported two things of interest to me. The first was that the autopsy on Lola’s body had been completed. It hadn’t yielded any specific clues other than the obvious gun shot wounds were the cause of death. They still had not found any next of kin so the body would be buried in a county funded funeral sometime in the next few days. I suggested that they schedule it for the following Monday because the antique shops would all be closed that day so it would give her comrades an opportunity to attend the service and pay their last respects. He told me which funeral home would be handling the details and requested that I contact them and make the arrangements. I really did not want the task but accepted it.
The second bit of news Samuels had for me was about Lola’s estate. A CPA that worked for the police had gone over her books and found what he could. Eric gave me a summary of the report over the phone but also promised me a copy next time I saw him. Lola’s father had died twenty years ago and almost all of what she had today she had inherited from him. She owned the building the store was in and the land it was on and they were totally paid for but the taxes on them were pretty stiff. She had operated the business by herself for that past twenty years and never really made any profits from it but also had not lost money on the deal either. What little profit she got from selling junk paid the bills and taxes but could not have supported her. She owned the contents of the store but no inventory had yet been done, and unless they could find a next of kin in the next thirty days the contents and the building would be auctioned off. She owned and lived in a house just two blocks from her store but so far no one from the police department had yet visited the house and done an inventory. Samuels asked if I might want to do that task for
them and at this point he suggested that they would pay me my standard fees for doing so. I accepted that assignment as well and promised to pick up the keys from him the next morning.
In addition to the business and the house, her father had also left Lola a small bundle of stocks that were worth about half a million the day he had died.
She had done very little with the stocks. She had not bought or sold any shares of anything, and most of them paid quarterly dividends, and apparently that is what she had been living on. The value of the stocks now was about one point two million and the next quarters dividends would top out at around eighty-five thousand. She had a checking account with two thousand dollars in it and a savings account with twenty-five thousand in it. In addition she had four different CDs with different values and maturity dates. If left to mature they would total another two-hundred thousand. If Lola had a next of kin it is sure he or she would like to know about the estate.
Even though the county was arranging her funeral the CPA had figured out a way to get Lola’s saving account to pay for it, so Samuels let me know that I should pick out a plot and a nice casket. Oh hurray just the kind of thing I enjoy doing.
If we could identify a next of kin in thirty days the business, the house, the stocks, the CDs, everything would go to that person. If we could not identify a next of kin in thirty days the business, the house, and the contents of each would be auctioned off and the funds they raised would be placed in trust along with her stocks and other assets for one year. If, at the end of that year a next of kin still had not been identified, then Dallas county would become the rightful owner. If an inheritor did come along they would have to pay a pretty stiff inheritance tax but then receive something like two million bucks.
Of course, all of this could change if a will were found. With that in mind Eric Samuels told me to investigate and inventory the house but to make sure I looked for anything that looked like a will and also be careful about address books and such as she might have the will filed with an attorney and he might not yet know she is dead. If I could find any contacts with lawyers we could at least ask them to se
e if she had ever filed a will with them.
So officially my vacation was over and I was back at work. I would get my standard fee plus expenses which would certainly help my financial status. The very first thing I did was document the time I had already put on the case hoping I could somehow slip that time onto my bill when the case concluded.
I asked Detective Samuels if they had done the background checks yet on all the store owners. He admitted they had not yet finished that task and told me he would let me know what he could when he could. With that I hung up from the long phone conversation.
I thought a bit about my standard contract that included my standard rate per day and so forth. I now had to admit that I had a partner. Jill was now living mostly in my house and helping with my cases. I would have to come to some agreement with her about how and how much I would pay her. I knew that if I raised my rate or charged an hour at that rate to a client that Jill had actually worked I would have to get her licensed. We had not yet done that.
For several years now my business had not been complicated. I would get paid for doing a job and out of that pay I would pay my bills and the rest would go in my savings account. Once it was there I sort of figured it was mine to do with as I wished. Currently I had plenty in the savings account but I had to admit that soon, if not already, Jill was entitled to some of that money. I would have to consider opening a completely new bank account so that I could separate out my own money from the money that belonged to my business and would get divided at some ratio so that Jill got her fair share. I would probably then have to hire some accountant to look over my accounting practices and make sure I wasn’t breaking any laws.