by Don Travis
“Why bother? How in the hell could a man remember one in a zillion money orders he’s sold since May 2003? That’s what… eight years ago?”
“And change,” I acknowledged. “But it’s a lead, so you run it down no matter how improbable.”
Paul wanted to work off some nervous energy, so we changed clothes and headed for the tennis complex at the North Valley Country Club. One court was vacant, and he spent an hour and a half humiliating me. My boy was charged up. Was it something personal or just his competitive nature?
HAZEL LOCATED Abner Brown by noon Monday. He now worked as the manager of the Albertson’s Mission Center store in Las Vegas, Nevada. She confirmed he was on shift today and gave me the telephone number of the store. I always place my own calls. It smacks of arrogance to me for Hazel to get an individual on the other end and then ask him to waste his time waiting for me to come on the line. I dialed and punched the conference call button, allowing Paul to listen in.
We waited while the automated operator ran through a list of options available to any caller until finally, a human voice answered and asked us to hang on again. After five minutes Brown answered his end of the call. From his voice I pictured a short, brusque man. I didn’t wait for him to express his impatience. “Mr. Brown, this is B. J. Vinson in Albuquerque. I’m a confidential investigator. We’ve had a murder up here, and I’m chasing down leads.”
“Oh. Who got murdered?”
“Local author named John Pierce Belhaven.”
“The mystery writer? I’ve read a couple of his books. Who killed him?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Now I’m going to ask you to do the impossible. I want you to think back to May 1, 2003 and tell me who bought money order number 881166515 from the Smith’s store on North Fourth here in Albuquerque.”
“Hell, Smith’s can look that up for you.”
“They already have. But I happen to know the fellow they claim bought it, didn’t. I was hoping you might pull a hat trick out for us and tell me who he really was.”
“Who does Smith’s say it was?”
“A man named William Stark.”
The line went dead for a moment. “Who did you say you were?”
“A licensed confidential investigator named B. J. Vinson.”
“You the cop that got shot? Probably about that same time.”
“A year later. May the tenth of ’04, as a matter of fact. You have a good memory.”
“Now I’m going to surprise the crap out of you. I do remember selling that money order.”
I felt my eyebrows twitch. “You do? Why?”
“It’s kinda odd. You know we sell orders with just the dollar amount on them. The buyer fills out the payee and his own name. But we do require ID and enter the name of the purchaser in a log. And that day—”
“May 1, 2003.”
“Could be. Sounds right. Anyway I sold this money order to a fellow I recognized. But the name he gave me wasn’t the name I knew him by. When I called him on it, he said he was buying it for this guy Stark and insisted I put Stark’s name down in the log.”
“Did you do it?” Paul asked.
“Yep. But I made a note of the real purchaser too.”
“Who was the real customer?” I asked.
“Hardwick Pillsner.”
“Are you positive, Mr. Brown?”
“Absolutely. Seen his face plastered over the newspaper a hundred times. Especially after what happened in the Voxlightner thing.”
“Why didn’t you inform the authorities at the time?”
He let out a breath, rattling the phone. “Didn’t connect them, I guess. And nobody ever came around asking questions.”
“You’re positive enough to testify to this in court? And by the way I have a recording of our conversation.”
“Well, sure, if my testimony’s needed. My civic duty, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said before thanking him and closing the call.
Bingo! Wick Pillsner is William Stark.
A familiar tingle swept through me, confirming we’d had a major breakthrough in the case.
WE’D IDENTIFIED the three players in Pierce Belhaven’s much-vaunted clue about electrical meter readings. Now what to do with the information? I certainly wasn’t going to rush over to Wick’s office and confront him with what I’d learned. Paul and I walked the short distance to the police station after I alerted Gene we were coming. Roy Guerra sat waiting for us outside his lieutenant’s office.
The two cops heard us out before listening to the recording I’d made of our conversation with Brown.
Gene leaned back in his chair and rubbed his nose. “Hard to see how Wick profited.”
“Profited?” Paul asked. “There was forty million or so missing before that rip-off was over.”
“Did Wick’s lifestyle change?” Gene asked. “Any indication he got filthy rich all of a sudden?”
“Well….” Paul had no answer.
“He survived a hard blow to his business,” I said. “That was a while back, but I don’t recall him starving and walking around in rags. He had income from somewhere.”
Gene was still hesitant. “The feds took a hard look at him, including his finances. They didn’t find anything.”
“If it were me, I’d wait until the spotlight was turned off before I started spending stolen money. Wick’s still relatively young. Fifty to fifty-five, I’d guess.”
Roy consulted his pocket notebook. “Fifty-five. How long would you wait to claim some of the ill-gotten gains?”
I thumped the calendar on Gene’s desk. “Seven years seems like a reasonable time. Leaves him plenty of years to enjoy retirement, go on vacations, buy tropical islands, and do all the good stuff.”
“If that was the plan,” Gene said, “Belhaven put a size twelve boot right in the middle of it by stirring up the scandal again. And it can’t have escaped Wick you’re questioning everyone all over again, including him.”
A uniform knocked on Gene’s door and handed a slip of paper to Roy.
The detective sat straight up in his chair. “Son of a bitch! Dr. Herrera’s dead!”
“Who?” Gene asked.
“Damon Herrera, the guy down at the School of Mines who conducted the Voxlightner fire assays. Killed in a mugging on the street in Socorro last night.”
A chill ran down my spine. Someone was closing doors behind himself. I’d seen it as a Marine MP, as an APD detective, and as a confidential investigator. My glance swept Paul. Why the hell had I taken him with me to interview Pillsner?
“Should we warn Brown in Las Vegas?” I asked.
“Damn, do you think Wick will even remember Brown?”
“You willing to risk his life on Wick’s memory of events eight years ago?”
Gene reached for the phone. “I’ll call Las Vegas PD.”
Chapter 12
TIME BLURRED with activity. Despite the breakthrough we’d accomplished in identifying the three Georgia Street conspirators, we were now more or less dependent upon other jurisdictions to do the on-site interviewing.
Sergeant Anderson in Chillicothe convinced his superiors to take another look at Thelma Rider’s fatal accident and concluded something wasn’t right about it. A fresh look at tire markings at the crash site indicated her car had come to a complete halt before accelerating into the tree that supposedly killed her. A review of her bank account revealed a monthly deposit of $5,000 from an offshore bank, yet her balance grew only moderately because of withdrawals. She was a quiet loner; her one night a week at a local bar being her sole extravagance. What did she do with her money?
It turned out she did have family, after all. A nephew inherited her house and personal property. The young man hadn’t changed anything in the dwelling except to replace an uncomfortable mattress and store the heavy, lumpy, queen-sized pad in the shed out back of the house. He was as astounded as everyone else when Anderson cut open the mattress cover and found it stuffed wi
th hundred-dollar bills. Thelma evidently wanted her security close at hand. According to Anderson, $1,000,000 in $100 bills weighed around twenty-two pounds.
Anderson looked for a recent connection with Wick Pillsner and came up with nothing. Phone records showed no call to or from Wick, and Anderson identified all the numbers stored in her phone as local. The postal service couldn’t provide evidence of mail contact. Her computer revealed no email to or from Wick or anyone else in New Mexico. She could have deleted such messages, but her provider, Gmail, after a tussle over confidentiality, confirmed no messages to or from New Mexico since she left Albuquerque sometime in June or July 2003. She was involved in the Voxlightner scandal all right but seemed to be a dead end so far as linking to the other conspirators.
My business partner, Charlie Weeks, learned Pillsner and his wife visited her family in Dallas a good part of last December, including the weekend of the eleventh when Rider was killed. Wick took short flights from Dallas during that time, but none showed flight plans for the Texas panhandle.
The Socorro PD quickly reached the conclusion Dr. Damon Herrera’s death wasn’t what it seemed at first, but there was little to support their suspicions. The good doctor had gone to a local market for groceries and was attacked upon the return to his car. His watch, ring, cell phone, and wallet were all missing—appropriate to a street mugging. He had been killed by a blow to the head, delivered by something like a wrench. When Gene asked Socorro PD to check, they found $1,000,000 equally divided among three of the prof’s mattresses. His wife and children professed not to know they had been sleeping on riches. Once again, there was no evidence of contact with Wick.
That proved nothing. Socorro was only an hour’s drive south of Albuquerque, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to slip down there and back, but there was no way to determine Wick’s whereabouts at any given time without alerting him to our interest. Gene wasn’t willing to tip our hand at this point, although I argued Wick was already on the alert if he was cleaning up after himself.
Upon reflection it seemed to me that Rider’s murder—if it was murder—was off-kilter. We weren’t poking around in the Voxlightner thing back in December, although Belhaven probably was. The entry in his journal detailing three months of unusual electrical readings on Georgia Street was made sometime in September or October 2003, if I remembered right. When had he recognized the significance of them? What prompted his recollection of the readings? With nothing left of his notes, there was no way to know. Or was there?
I dialed the Belhaven house, and the woman I wanted to speak to picked up the phone. “Hoped you’d still be working there,” I said to Sarah Thackerson.
“Won’t be for much longer,” she said. “About to get all Pierce’s affairs wrapped up and delivered to the attorney.”
“I know we discussed this before, but I’d like you to think about it again. Do you know what caused Belhaven to recall those old meter readings and understand their significance?”
An exasperated sigh came over the line. “I’ve already told you I can’t. I’ve thought about it a great deal lately, and I can’t come up with anything.”
“Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when he mentioned it to you?”
Sarah took her time and talked herself through the last few weeks. Her mumbling sharpened into speech. “We were here in the office. He’d asked me to do a lot of research on fire assaying, you know, the equipment and the process. I recall he said something.” The line was silent for another moment. “He said, ‘It’s electric? How about that, it’s electric! That’s what he meant.’ And that was all. I asked him about it, but he said he’d put two and two together and came up with four. He talked like that sometimes.”
“Thank you. That helps a lot.” As an afterthought I asked if Spencer Spears was still around.
“Oh yes, the family needs to keep the grounds up until they decide whether or not to sell.”
I hung up, pleased with the call. I now knew what triggered Belhaven’s memory. He’d learned the equipment required for a fire assay was electrical. And it surprised him, as it had me.
Then reality grabbed me by the collar again. Okay, so Belhaven figured out the reason for the excessive residential electrical usage. But how had he determined who the real lessees of the residence were? Bud Nelson at Bud’s Minimart and Gas on San Pedro hadn’t mentioned anyone else looking for the same thing I was. Nor had Brown, the former service counter attendant at Smith’s Food and Drug. No, Belhaven made the identification another way. Perhaps through the power and light company where he worked. Had he taken the next step? The one I was searching for?
About that time Paul and Det. Roy Guerra bustled into my office. They’d been to Socorro to consult with SPD on Herrera’s death.
“Wow, Vince, do you know what a million bucks in $100 bills looks like?”
“Like power, I’d guess.”
“And how!”
“Learn anything new?”
“Not much. Just eliminating things, mostly. If the Rider woman hadn’t been killed last December, I’d write this off as a mugging gone wrong,” Roy said. “Because of the money we found, and the fact two people died less than a year apart, I’m convinced they were partners in crime, but damned if I know what sparked their killing. Hell, the killer didn’t even try to recover the money. And the money’s what ties them together.”
“Hit and run,” I said. “The killer didn’t want to spend one second more with his victims than he needed to. Kill them and get out. That’s what he did. If it’s what we think it is, the killer’s got his own millions stowed away.”
“Wonder if Wick Pillsner would let us take a look at his mattress?” Paul joked.
“Why stuff money in a mattress? It doesn’t do anyone any good there,” Roy put in. “And while a million bucks is a lot, it doesn’t seem like much considering what was looted from VPMR.
“It isn’t. My guess is this was just security money. Most of VPMR’s funds went overseas, so Rider and Herrera both probably had more to come. I’m convinced they reached an agreement not to touch a dime of the overseas loot until enough time passed to take the heat off,” I said.
“That must be it,” Paul said.
“Belhaven punching the beehive panicked someone. Presumably Wick. He had to make sure the others didn’t act precipitously. He was trying to stop Rider and Herrera from surfacing the money. They must have worked out a plan to make sudden wealth appear to be legitimate. An inheritance, a business investment. Something.” I sat back in my chair and sighed in exasperation. “All of that argues the conspirators were in contact with one another. But we can’t find any evidence. In Rider’s case, she lived the existence of a hermit.”
Roy spoke up. “Couldn’t find any evidence of Herrera being in regular contact with Pillsner… and not at all with Rider.”
“What did you find linking Herrera with Wick?” I asked.
“An invitation to Wick’s Christmas party last year. Look hard enough, and we’ll probably find he was invited every year. Him and about a hundred others. By the way, Socorro let us look around in Herrera’s computers.”
I glanced at Paul. “Yeah,” he said. “I roamed around his work computer and his personal laptop. Nothing. And I checked his trash bin too. He probably deleted messages from there.”
“True, but his provider could likely reconstruct the traffic, if not the messages.”
“That’s assuming they’ll cooperate. They’re pretty secretive.”
“All the internet providers fight subpoenas like they’re strychnine,” Roy said.
“Still,” Paul said, “if the bad guys kept in contact, it’s likely through computers. We just need to figure out how, and I’ve got an idea or two.”
THE NEXT morning before I left for the office, Paul downloaded something called TeamViewer to my home computer. Once that was done, he asked me to activate the program and give him control of my computer. By providing a code and password furnished by th
e program, I complied. Soon the background on my screen went black, and Paul moved my cursor back and forth willy-nilly from his own laptop. Spooky. He opened a file I used to save personal messages we exchanged. I watched in amazement as he typed a message to me on my own computer. I followed the instructions he gave me to take control of his machine and typed in the words This is it. He moved to my side from his desk with his laptop in hand. There on his screen was the message I’d just typed.
“This is how they did it?” I asked.
“That way or through Dropbox. They can exchange messages without actually sending anything.”
“So nothing goes over the internet?”
“It’s over the internet, okay, but it leaves no footprint. Nobody can see it except those involved.”
“How long has this been around?”
“Since around 2005, I think, but I’d have to check.”
“Okay, but how does one party know another wants to connect?”
Paul wrinkled his nose. “The one wanting to make contact has to tell the other party to open TeamViewer. Phone or email, most likely.”
“That shoots down your idea. There’s no record of contact.”
“But what if they set up a schedule of times to be available. Like the first Wednesday of every month at 4:15 p.m.”
“That might work,” I said. “But this covers years, so it might even be quarterly or semiannually. A prearranged schedule makes more sense.” I paused. “But what about the password. Does it stay the same or change?” I asked.
His face fell. “It’s different every time.”
“So again, there has to be contact.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, “but maybe they carried unregistered phones to pass info around.”
“Then why would they need TeamViewer? They could just talk to one another.” I thought for a moment. “That doesn’t mean the idea’s all wet. Passing a code back and forth would be harder to find than long conversations. Hold on. Let’s check their cells.”
