Sicilian Murder

by Alec Peche

  “Let’s call them!” Jill said. “It’s Friday afternoon in Wisconsin and I would like to speak with them before they potentially close for the weekend.”

  “Okay, but let’s think about our script,” Marie said. “I doubt that a cold call is going to yield the information we need. Perhaps, Brenda as an executive of Randy’s company should call. The firm can verify Brenda’s identity on the company website.”

  “Good point. Let’s lay out a script. Brenda are you willing to make the call?”

  “Of course! I can see where this will lead us to new information about Randy’s death. If my call doesn’t yield anything, I will send in Melissa next to ask questions.”

  “Is she involved with the funeral today?” Angela asked.

  “She may be making some arrangements, but the funeral is tomorrow.”

  They developed a script of questions to ask the company and Brenda punched the number into her phone.

  The call continued for fifteen minutes as Brenda was placed on hold at times and other times she was taking notes. Silence in the room reigned from everyone else as each of them willed the answers to come across the phone. Finally, she ended the call and smiled at everyone.

  Chapter 18

  “The lab had the answers. Randy sent them a plant from Italy about nine months ago and I spoke with the chemist who analyzed it. Randy requested a complete chemical and biological analysis of the plant. She’s going to email me the results to my work address.”

  “What’s the name of the plant?” Jill asked.

  “She gave me the Latin name and I wrote it done like it sounded but it may not make sense to you. The lab analyst said they did the genus typing of the plant and it’s in the report.”

  Jill looked at Brenda’s notes but it didn’t make sense to her until Brenda sounded it out loud.

  “Ah, like we discussed earlier it’s from the oldenlandia adscensions family. I wonder what Randy thought was different about the oldenlandia adscensions plant in Sicily than elsewhere in the world? Despite it being in all kinds of products, there are no double blind studies that prove that it’s effective at healing.”

  “The chemist was skeptical as well, but said that Randy didn’t want the gel inside the plant analyzed, rather he asked that the roots below the soil surface be analyzed. He was thinking of using it for ingestion and wanted to make sure there was nothing harmful to humans.”

  Jill had been doing a search on oldenlandia adscensions as they discussed the phone call and said, “Ingesting oldenlandia adscensions gel is toxic and potentially carcinogenic to humans, but I know nothing about the root structure and specifically, I know nothing about why oldenlandia adscensions plants somewhere in Sicily are different. I need to do some research, maybe find an expert in the plant to see what they know of it.”

  “Did the chemist receive the plant, directly from Italy?” Angela asked.

  Brenda hadn’t asked the chemist that question directly and so thought back on their conversation. “No, she mentioned in the conversation that Randy gave them the plant in person as he wanted to meet the chemist to discuss the plant.”

  “Rats, I was hoping we could trace who was involved with the plant here.”

  “Maybe the police can trace that for us. Oldenlandia adscensions should grow nearly anywhere on the island except Mount Etna as it doesn’t tolerate snow or frost, so we still have a lot of the island to search,” Jill said. “I wonder where he found the plant - does someone own the land, or is a park? I mean if he was going to get sufficient quantity to produce an herbal remedy, then he would need to have the owner’s permission to harvest.”

  “For some products, we grow our own plants in commercial greenhouses in the United States. We do that to control for purity and consistency. So my guess was that Randy would plan to harvest it himself back home,” Brenda said.

  Jill was stretched back looking at the ceiling trying to reason through what Randy was planning to do. Then her attention focused on the ceiling and she pointed to a corner and said, “What is that?”

  Everyone refocused their attention and Nathan grabbed a chair to reach the spot in the ceiling. Jill handed him a tissue to keep his fingerprints off the item. He pulled on the object and it came away in his hand. He looked at it and then put a finger to his lips signifying silence. He then approached Jill’s group and began writing notes.

  ‘I think it is a listening device. I’m going to get the scanner we used to search the car this afternoon and run it through the apartment.’

  They nodded, Jill pulled up an app on her phone with Heavy Metal Music and placed it next to the device, and smiled as she turned up the volume. Meanwhile they followed Nathan from room to room to see what else he found and they were dismayed. Jill put gloves on and grabbed some foil from the kitchen and soon they had a collection of devices collected from their luggage, purses, backpacks, and room ceilings. They would search Jo’s room the next morning as there was no sense in waking her up to search her room. Besides, as her room had been obviously empty until she arrived, perhaps it was bug free. They were relieved to find no cameras as far as they could tell with the devices after they used a kitchen knife to disassemble one of them. Once they finished they wrapped up the devices in three layers of foil content so that the devices would no longer transmit and they could talk again.

  “I wonder if we should take the scanner and walk down the street to see if there is a van out there listening to us?” Jill asked.

  Her friends turned toward her with expressions of ‘are you nuts’ written on their faces.

  Nathan spoke for the group when he exclaimed, “No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to hand this over to the police in the morning. These bugs must have been placed while we were out today. Given the number of them, this is not just one angry person, there’s an organization behind Randy’s death. The only organization I know in this part of the world besides the government, is the mafia. You’re not going to walk down the street and introduce yourself to them as they would as likely chloroform you and knock you over your thick skull and dump you into the Mediterranean Sea for fish food.”

  “Ah, okay I get your point, sweetie. I guess that was a dumb suggestion, but maybe the police placed them here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Marie said. “I don’t think our favorite Lieutenant would have had a temper tantrum today if they had been listening all along.”

  “You do have a point. Okay, as it’s late I would normally suggest we all retire to sleep, but I for one am too energized to do that. Let me go back to thinking about the plant, and what’s so special about an Italian version of the common oldenlandia adscensions.”

  Her friends joined her as they were equally energized with the discovery of the listening devices in their apartment.

  “Is the soil different here? Maybe the volcanic ash makes the plant different?” Marie suggested.

  “That’s a thought, but I can’t find a variety of the plant unique to volcanic areas.”

  “Is there an Italian version of oldenlandia adscensions?” Angela asked.

  “No.”

  “Could it be a new plant of some type - how do plants evolve or get invented?” Angela asked.

  “Good question,” Jill said pausing to look the answer up. “Okay it looks like about 2,100 species are discovered every year, but that mostly in remote parts of the world.”

  “There are parts of this island that seem remote,” Marie said.

  “Yes, but it’s been trampled upon by Greek and Roman botanists, let alone modern day, Italian, British, and American scholars. It’s hard to believe that any plant has been left untouched for centuries,” Jill said. “Maybe it’s a unique environment like soil constantly changing from volcanic ash. Should we ask University botanists about new plants in Sicily?”

  “No! I’m sure the company would still like to manufacture whatever product Randy had his eye on. If we discuss this plant with lots of people in Sicily, that opportunity will be taken
away from the company,” Brenda said.

  “Brenda, are you sure that no one inside the company knows what this product is? I don’t see how you can develop it if you aren’t sure what Randy was going to do with the plant and what medicinal purpose it would serve.”

  “We asked all of our employees if they knew what Randy was developing and the answer was no from all of them. They knew Randy died so what’s the point with withholding the answer?”

  “Has anyone quit their job this week perhaps planning on taking the knowledge with them?” Marie asked.

  “What! No one would do that!”

  “I know you think that your company is full of wonderful people hand selected to reflect Randy’s values, but then why did he go to such lengths to keep the product quiet within the company? Was he like this with every product, or was this one different? I mean I understand that he liked to meditate with each new product, but did he usually have an outside chemist do his testing?”

  “I don’t know the answers to your questions, Sis, but I’ll find them. I can’t believe any of our employees would steal this product idea,” Brenda said sounding despondent at the thought of someone stealing ideas from within the company.

  Two new pieces of information then arrived at the same time. Brenda received answers to Marie’s question from the company personnel department and Jill received an email from her testing lab in Switzerland.

  “We did have an employee quit this week. Her name was Stella Ricci and she worked in our shipping and receiving area for about four months. I have her home address here.”

  “Not to be paranoid, but that sounds like a good Italian name. Let’s look her up in Wisconsin,” Angela said. “I’ll check in with some friends to have her identified.”

  “Hmmm, that’s an interesting coincidence that an Italian sounding name was employed by your company, Brenda, but maybe it’s not important information. My lab has some interesting information as well. I sent swabs of Randy’s clothing and shoes to see if they could identify where he’d been. It’s was a long shot and it’s possibly meaningless information, but here goes. Randy had a variety of soils on his pants legs and shoes. Some of the soils reflect coastal Sicily, some reflect volcanic Mount Etna. He was recently in contact with moss spores that grow in caves in inland Sicily. Wow, I’m impressed with this lab as it was able to give me concentrates of each of the soil suggesting the degree of recent contact with each soil.”

  Angela’s and Marie’s faces reflected that they had their thinking caps on and were thinking of the various soils.

  “Of the volcanic soil, did your lab specify which side of the volcano or is the soil the same all around it?” Angela asked. “It would be nice to knock off a section of the island because Randy hadn’t visited it recently.”

  “Good question, I’ll ask.”

  “Does oldenlandia adscensions grow in a cave?” Marie asked.

  “It’s a desert plant, so it likely would not grow in a cave. It’s too moist an environment. That said, maybe that’s our clue as to what makes this Italian oldenlandia adscensions plant unique.”

  Angela looked up from her computer and read, “There are four caves on this island and we can rule one of them out - it’s the ear of Dionysius in Syracuse. That’s a well-trampled tourist attraction, so I can’t imagine any plants growing there. The Gelo cave is a part of Mount Etna. It’s an ice cave formed by a lava tube, so this is a possibility. There’s the Lauro cave just south of here. Finally, there’s the Entella cave south of Palermo which is the biggest cave. I excluded any grottoes from this list as I assume there's too much water for plants to grow, but we can revisit later if these other caves don't pan out.”

  “Does the website that you're looking at describe these caves in any detail? We're looking for a cave that has lots of gypsum, so I think that means we can rule out any caves associated with lava rock,” Jill said studying her report.

  There was silence as Angela read the websites on the various caves and then she said, “I think we should focus on Entella cave, as Gelo is volcanic, and Lauro is limestone.”

  Jill was looking up the location of Entella cave on a map of Sicily and said, “It's just south of Palermo, probably about a two-hour drive from here.”

  “Their website says they're closed to visitors as they have falling rock.”

  “Let's plan on going there after we meet with the police. It will take most of the day, but if we go to the cave entrance we should be able to spot this plant, as even if it is a special oldenlandia adscensions plant suited to the moisture of a cave, it can't be far from the entrance as it does need daylight to grow and so we should be able to see it. I wonder though how Randy discovered the plant – I mean I don't think he would just walk around the earth and randomly spot plants that he wanted to use for products?”

  “No, that's not how he operated,” Brenda answered. “In some cases, the company made its own version of a product out on the market and in other cases he would be in conversation with a group of people and he would explore what you might call folk medicine. We would test the hypothesis that X product worked for a particular ailment. We might look for clinical trials somewhere in the world to verify the hypothesis and then develop our own product. So he went looking for this plant. We need to speak to whatever community he spoke with here in Sicily to find out what folk medicine solution he was after with the oldenlandia adscensions plant.”

  “There are several small towns close to this cave and then many more small towns if you back out to a range of say twenty-five miles. Hopefully, we'll find this community folk medicine soon or we might have to move to the other side of the island.”

  “That's a possibility. Marie, Angela, and Jo, you all have to leave in a few days. We'll likely need Angela's Italian to speak with people in smaller villages, but unfortunately I think we'll be seeing more of the Sicilian countryside than perhaps we wanted. I'm going to head to bed now and we need to be ready to leave here by nine in the morning as I think we can walk to the Questura.”

  Chapter 19

  Jill enjoyed the dismay in the Lieutenant Rosso's face when yet he met another new member of her team when Jo was introduced to the Italian law enforcement members.

  “Is this your entire team, or will there be another American arriving tomorrow?”

  “This is it. We have a wide variety of skills that allow us to solve crimes, so this is all we need,” Jill replied.

  Looking at the paper rolls in Jill's hands, Rosso put his hand out and said, “I'd like to put these papers up on our conference room wall so that Vice Questore Cavallaro and Pubblico Ministero Lombardo can view your investigation.”

  Jill handed them over saying, “They're numbered so post them in order.”

  Soon there was silence in the room as Lombardo, Rosso, and Cavallaro studied the sheets of butcher paper posted on the Questura's conference room walls. Jo had been brought up to date on the walk over with the new information on the two lab reports from the Wisconsin chemist and the Swiss lab.

  Finally Rosso said, “You have new information from when I visited last night. Where did that come from?”

  “I thought you were going to share information with us. Where's your murder book, or investigative files, or whatever you call the collection of evidence in Italy?” Jill avoided answering his question wanting one of her own answered first.

  Rosso sighed and slid open a door at one end of the room covering a dry-erase board behind it. Taped to it, were several pieces of legal paper with handwritten notes on it.

  “Did you make those sheets for us or is that how you do investigations in Italy?” Jill asked.

  “We did those for you and us. We haven't tried this method before, so we thought we would see if we had new ideas to solve the case. Don't you Americans have an expression, 'When in Rome do as the Romans do'? We Sicilians are trying to be Romans,” Rosso said with clearly a distaste for all things Roman.

  This time the silence in the room was on the part of Jill
's team as they studied what the Italians had prepared. It was a faster method for her team to see what information the Italians had collected. What she didn't know was if this was all the facts they had on the case.

  Once she finished reading their information, she said, “Yes, we got a chemical analysis report from an analytical lab in the States where Randy Chen sent a plant sample to be analyzed, I also received a report from the Swiss lab on the swabs I sent them from Randy's pants and shoes. We received that information after you left last night. We were frazzled over finding listening bugs in our apartment and therefore worked a little longer on trying to solve the plant that he was so excited about. Fortunately, the United States is behind Italy time wise and we could make calls to gain this new piece of information.”

  Jill could tell her comments were like nails on a chalkboard, when Cavallaro muttered in Italian, then asked, “Tell me about these listening bugs you discovered. How did you discover them and what did they look like? Who placed them there?”

  Jill opened her purse and placed the foil wrapped collection of bugs on the conference room table, making a silencing gesture with her fingers to her lips. She looked at the three investigators and when she thought they were done, covered them up again in the foil and returned them to her purse.

  “I understand that foil prevents the transmission of signals from these devices. I was looking at our ceiling for inspiration on the case when I noticed the first bug. We then went from room to room with our electronic scanner and found the remainder of them. Interesting whoever placed them in the apartment didn't place one in Jo's bedroom as it was empty at the time they visited the apartment, but you should know we left those butcher papers up all day since we arrived. We will now take them with us whenever we leave the apartment. We detected them before our conversation about the lab and Randy's clothing swabs, so we know they don't have that information.”

  “Why don't you leave those devices with us and we'll see if we can do something with them,” Cavallaro said. “Are your fingerprints on them?”