False Witness

by Worthington, T. S.

  Declan sighed. “Ok, I was afraid of that.”

  “Why? What do you have?”

  “It’s more of a personal question than anything else,” Declan said.

  “You getting crank calls or something?” Chip laughed.

  “It’s ok,” Declan replied. “I’m sorry to bother you, but thanks anyway.”

  “No problem. See you tomorrow,” Chip said.

  Declan ended the call and walked upstairs to bed. He knew that he would feel a little better after a good night’s sleep. That was all he needed, just recharge the batteries and tomorrow he would have a fresh approach to the problem.

  But what if there was no approach? He would just have to wait to see what this phantom wanted from him and carry it out and just follow the orders. That was all there was to it.

  He imagined that the calls were all coming from disposable phones and if this guy was really smart, which so far he was, then he would just use a different phone for every call.

  Still the original phone that the video came from might be the same. The quality was too good to be done on a burner phone. It had to be an iPhone. Was it possible that this person was careless enough to leave that trail?

  But even if he was Declan would have to rely on someone in the IT department to trace it for him. He didn’t have clearance to that software or the expertise to use it properly. Sadly, he was a cop, not a forensics geek.

  As he closed his eyes he felt that all was completely hopeless for the first time. And for the first time he found himself wishing that he had not killed John Farnsworth.

  It was starting to be nothing more than one big problem.

  Chapter 8

  “Digging for Dirt”

  Declan woke the next morning feeling somewhat refreshed, and dare he say almost positive about things. He didn’t know why, but the new day on the horizon was transmitting feelings of peace and serenity that he did not deserve to have. He was being blackmailed into committing murder by someone who had seen him commit another murder. It was too bizarre and yet this morning it seemed almost funny.

  He was going to find this person, one way or another and he was going to kill them. In this situation it was all too easy for him to remember that he was a cop. This person was reaching out to him. Anytime a criminal did that to toy with cops or to take credit for a crime anonymously, they always did something to give themselves away. It had happened with BTK most recently. He was dormant for years, but he got the itch to play with the cops and they had him nailed soon after. It was a stupid mistake. This bastard was going to make the same fatal error.

  Declan started his day with a long jog. He probably should have gone slower and not as far since he was just getting back into it, but he felt like pushing himself. It was almost like he was fighting against a part of him that wanted to die.

  And he felt like he was going to die when he got back home. He nearly collapsed on the grass, barely making it to the steps leading up to his porch where he allowed his body to stagger to a seat. He concentrated on taking long, deep breaths overriding his body’s survival instincts to gasp and take in as much oxygen as quickly as possible. He had to build his endurance back up.

  Although he wasn’t sure how much cardiovascular endurance he was going to need in jail, but he had to focus on living. This was a perfect way to start.

  After he caught his breath and the nausea subsided to a sharp stabbing pain in his side, he made his way back upstairs where he took a hot shower. The hot water on his aching, but already hot body made it even harder to breathe at first, but after a few minutes of steaming up the room he began to feel much better.

  He bounced downstairs perky and alert to a hot breakfast waiting for him with a pot of fresh coffee. Maria had been making him breakfast every day for the past week. Usually this was a weekend only type of thing and she was hardly even awake by the time he was out the door, but he loved every single second of it.

  “Thanks honey,” Declan said.

  Maria smiled as she sat down to her own small plate of two bacon strips, and one egg with a yogurt on the side. His wife was not one of those starve yourself type of women, but she was hardly ever hungry early in the morning.

  “You are welcome,” Maria said.

  Declan began to scarf down his toast and eggs. He didn’t even realize he was that hungry before he sat down.

  “Feeling better?” Maria asked.

  Declan smiled. “Yeah, I’m fine, honey. I’m sorry about last night; I was just having an off day. Things have been tough at work, but it’s ok.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” she said with a smile.

  Declan realized once again that he was blaming his foul mood on work, even though this time it had nothing to do with it.”

  “I’ve got to run,” he said as he finished his breakfast and poured some coffee to go.

  Maria kissed him goodbye and he was headed down the road a minute later.

  It was a warm morning, and he had gotten out of the house early enough to beat most of the rush hour traffic heading into the city. Declan and Maria liked living outside of the city. It was too congested for their tastes. Besides after working in the bowels of the city all day and dealing with the worst of the worst Declan was all too happy to leave it behind.

  But he loved the city. He loved working there. He loved the good people, the sports, the culture, the art, the history—he loved his home.

  He was almost to the first cut off from the expressway when his phone rang again.

  He picked it up without even thinking about it or checking to see who it was.

  “Pull over,” the voice said in his ear. It was him.

  Declan’s blood ran cold and the good vibes he’d been experiencing that morning were suddenly all gone. He was now left with the simmering fear, paranoia, and total rage that were simmering beneath him.

  “Leave me alone!” Declan yelled.

  “Pull over, now!” the voice growled.

  Declan pulled over to the shoulder and prayed that he would not be struck by a passing car who drove like city people tended to drive. It was apparently a new law that you only had to be sixteen to be given a license and you did not have to know how to actually drive.

  “What!” Declan screamed into the phone.

  “Relax, and I’ll tell you what. Remember who I am and what I know about you. Remember the video? Speak to me like that again and I will send it all over the internet.”

  “Ok, what do you want?”

  “I want you to kill a man named Ted Bennet,” the voice said.

  Declan sat in shock for a moment. The prick had actually given him a name.

  “Who the hell is Ted Bennet?”

  The voice spoke calmly. “He is someone who deserves what you are going to do to him; you don’t need to know any more than that about him.”

  “Why do you want him dead?”

  “Again, that is my business, not yours.”

  “If I’m going to kill someone I should at least have a reason why.”

  “Because I am commanding you to; that is the only reason you need.”

  Declan gritted his teeth. How dare this scumbag give him orders—commands even. Oh, if he ever got his hands on this guy…

  “Now, listen carefully. I’ve studied Bennet for a while. I know his routine backwards and forwards and he never deviates from it. This will make your job that much easier. This coming Monday night at ten o’clock you will be waiting for him outside of Ryerson’s dojo. It’s a karate studio he opened for a friend to manage. Bennet goes there every single Monday and teaches a class. Afterwards he stays and works out for a bit. He is the last one to leave and he closes up since his friend Bill Ryerson has a college class he attends on Mondays.”

  “Ok, so I wait for him and what?” Declan asked.

  “Be patient; I’m getting to that,” the voice said. It was now less of a whisper and more of a low pitched growl, muffled into the phone
. “You will hide around the side of the building. It is dark on that side and Bennet always parks his car, a black Cadillac Escalade, on the spot at the corner. All you have to do is wait for him to step out of the shadows.”

  The voice stopped. Silence.

  “And then what?” Declan asked.

  “The rest is up to you. After all, you are the expert here. I’m just telling you the best time to do this.”

  “Ok. Listen we need to talk about this. I am not the guy to do this for you—“ the line went dead right then.

  “Shit!” Declan yelled as he slammed his phone down in the seat beside him.

  Monday was four days away. He had just a few days to sweat this out and then he had a job to do. When did he swap his job as a decorated narcotics officer for the job of a newbie hitman? Jesus, what had his life become. All because he wanted to get rid of some loser who was banging his wife.

  He thought for a few minutes about what the voice had just told him. The man on the phone knew this Bennet guy pretty well. He must have had some grudge against him, some motive. That was the primary reason he wanted someone else to kill him. That way he had an airtight alibi and it wasn’t like he paid someone to kill for him. There was always the risk with that of a person blabbing, or being careless and getting caught, or even the risk of accidentally hiring an undercover cop. Declan was a cop and there was no way that he was going to blab to anyone about what was going on.

  Maybe this guy had figured out a way to commit the perfect murder.

  It all lay with Ted Bennet. He had to do some research and find out everything that he could about him.

  Declan put his car in drive and flew off down the road toward the office.

  Chapter 9

  “Answers”

  He arrived ten minutes later and quickly holed himself up in his office. It was a good thing he’d gotten there about an hour earlier than normal, because as soon as Sinclair came in she was going to be bugging him to talk to Michael Wright. He and his girlfriend had both clammed up and let their lawyers do the talking, which always slowed things way the hell down. That was a curse on their case there, but a blessing in that it gave Declan some wiggle room to exploit some much needed downtime.

  He searched the crime database for a hit about Ted Bennet. He did not find any criminal dealings that Ted was actually involved in. The guy had no record and as far as he was discovering no one in his immediate or extended family did either. Doing a broader search online Declan was finding out more about Ted Bennet. He came from money he continued to make money.

  Ted Bennet owned a chain of Italian restaurants around the city and even a few up north. He was born into a wealthy family who owned several tire stores and a few other businesses that didn’t do so well, but most were fairly prosperous. He attended college at NYU majoring in business and managed a few chains of his dad’s tire centers. Then he branched out on his own after about ten years of that and got involved with the restaurant business. He started the first store of Polmodero’s Italian Feast about thirty years ago. It proved to be a hit and he just started to branch out adding more stores every few years. At last count he owned eighteen branches throughout the state, twelve in the city itself.

  So far he just sounded like some boring rich business guy. There were plenty of rich business guys, many of them richer than Bennet. Why did this man want him dead?

  Declan kept searching. After a few more tries he finally came upon something interesting. Two years before there was an accident at one of the restaurants that Bennet owned downtown. A busboy/ janitor had been electrocuted when the floor buffer he was using short-circuited, creating a fire. The restaurant burnt almost to the ground. It had since been rebuilt; just a few months ago it reopened its doors, surprisingly at the same exact location. The report said that the outlet that the buffer was plugged into was faulty and shorted out.

  But Bennet claimed he’d just had everything checked a few months prior and he’d passed all safety regulations. This also checked out to be true, at first. The inspector told him that the wiring was out of date and that it had to be all changed out. When pressed harder the inspector admitted that after he told Bennet this he paid him off and he altered the report to reflect a passing grade.

  Maybe this was it. The busboy’s family obviously held a grudge and somehow blamed Bennet for the death of their son, even though all the evidence claimed it was just a freak accident. All of the safety inspections had given them a passing grade. They didn’t know that the inspector had been bought off.

  But there were so many disturbed people in the world who would leap at anything like that to find fault with someone, especially when it involved the death of a loved one. The loss of someone close to you would make you do crazy things. It caused people to not think straight and some to become certifiably insane. He’d seen it happen several times.

  Bennet was given a slap on the wrist and a hefty fine, which he had no problem paying. Declan figured that did not make the family too happy. No, not too happy indeed.

  The busboy’s name was Rick Deits. Declan started researching Diets, but did not find much. Checking the database, the kid had a small criminal record. He was arrested for fighting a few times, and for vandalism. Really, just stupid kid stuff, but nothing major.

  Deits did not have much family. He was survived only by his single mother, who killed herself a month later by overdosing on pills.

  “Shit,” Declan said. “Guess there is no family to look at.”

  There had to be someone there who wanted justice for this kid. Unless it was something else going on that he was missing.

  There it was.

  It had appeared on the screen right in front of him as he was scrolling through the database trying to get a fix on Rick Deits. He had a DNA test done at one point. Why would he have that in there? He had just been picked up for fighting and for some stupid graffiti crap. Not the sort of thing that would require DNA testing.

  Declan searched farther and soon discovered who had ordered the DNA test. A Dr. Kenneth Montgomery.

  Declan picked up the phone and called the doctor. The name was familiar. Dr. Montgomery had worked with the police on several occasions, checking to make sure perps were psychologically stable enough to stand trial, acting as an expert witness, and so forth.

  “Hey, Dr. Montgomery, this is officer Declan Pierce over here at the 12th precinct, narcotics. I need some information on a subject.”

  “Well, depending on what it is, I’d like to help. You know confidentiality ties my hands a bit when discussing a patient.”

  “You don’t have to worry. This guy’s dead.”

  “Oh, who are we referring to?”

  “A nineteen year old kid named Rick Deits. You remember him? He died in a fire when he was working as a restaurant busboy.”

  “Oh, yes. I vaguely do remember him. What information were you needing?” Dr. Montgomery asked.

  “You ordered a DNA test on him at one point. Do you remember why?”

  “Oh, yes. I do,” The Doctor replied. He explained in great detail exactly what was going on.

  Apparently Deits was suffering from depression and anger issues so he was seeing Dr. Montgomery on a court order due to his violent streak after being arrested for his third fight. He had been seeing the shrink for several months and not much change was being noticed. The medication was not working and the therapy was going nowhere. So, Dr. Montgomery had ordered a DNA test for him to see why the medication was not working. Sometimes this would give an underlying cause and they could focus on the type of medication that Deits would have responded to better.

  Declan had never heard of this, but he was surprised that after all the years on the job he could still learn something new each day.

  “Oh, that’s all I needed to know,” Declan said as he hung up.

  Declan continued his search into the Rick Deits’ background. Soon he came up with something else interesting. The DNA matc
hed a result, but this person was not any legal relation to him. It was the name of a man named Harold Shutts.

  According to the DNA, Shutts was Deits’ real father.

  Declan changed his search parameter to look into the background of Shutts. After a few minutes of searching he discovered that Shutts was a former drug addict, and thief who had been in an out of jail his whole life for drug possession and armed robbery. He’d knocked up a street hooker who owed him some drugs apparently and she didn’t have them. Seemed like a fair trade. But alas, nine months later Rick was born.

  After checking further, Rick’s mother, a nineteen year old runaway drug addict and prostitute named Patricia Miller, overdosed and died about three months after the kid was born. And Harold was already locked up at that time.

  Rick had been adopted. And of course adoption records were sealed to prevent any kind of further research. But Declan had enough.

  Declan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. It was almost ten and he had not heard a word from his partner. He was counting his stars because he didn’t really want to have to deal with her this morning, but it was a bit unusual.

  Was it possible that the person who was behind all of this was Harold Shutts? What reason would he have? Maybe after he got clean he wanted to be a part of his child’s life and the adopted parents would not hear any of it? That sort of thing was pretty common. Maybe he’d kept tabs on the kid and now that he was finally an adult he was preparing to introduce himself or at least try to be a part of his life, but then due to a freak accident this opportunity had been shut off from him.