Innocent Conspiracy

by David Archer

  “That’s my point,” Sam said. “Most people would’ve figured that the kid getting shot was going to be such a shock to the public that the company would suffer because of it, right? In reality, though, the company is the one who’s getting all the sympathy. Yeah, I know, people are worried about the kid, but Jade was telling me about all the feedback on the company’s website. Seems like ninety-five percent of it, maybe more, is all positive and supportive. They’re actually getting more traffic and more subscribers than they had before.”

  “Hey, even bad publicity is publicity,” Darren said.

  “Yes, but people are apparently a lot more forgiving than we give them credit for. Max Petrelli got shot, and even though everybody’s upset about it, the only ones blaming the company has been the news media. That makes me wonder when the other shoe is going to drop, you know?”

  “Then, you think there’s going to be another attack on them?” Summer asked.

  “My gut says so,” Sam said, and both Steve and Darren agreed. “Somebody spent a hell of a lot of money setting this up, that much I’m sure of. Just the fact that those two were still here, that they hadn’t already gotten as far away as they could, tells me that this isn’t over. The only question is whether they already have something set up, or if it was still in the works.”

  “You need to put Walter on this,” Steve said. “He needs to hear all of this, and anything else we come up with on John and Jane Doe. If anybody can make a reasonable guess about what’s coming next, he’s the one.”

  Sam nodded. “I have to agree,” he said. “I also have to get home. I’ll see you all at the office in the morning, nine o’clock. Everybody go home and get whatever sleep you can. I’ve got a feeling this is just getting started.”

  *

  Indie had been in bed asleep when Sam came in, and he made certain to be quiet and let her stay that way. In the morning, however, he woke to find her sitting up on the bed beside him.

  “Hey, babe,” he said. “Good morning.”

  “Hey,” Indie said. “So, how did everything go last night?”

  “A lot of paperwork,” he replied. “Had to surrender my gun for ballistics testing, just so they can be sure it was really me that shot the guy. I wasn’t alone, Karen and three other officers were involved in shooting the woman, so all of their guns are being tested, as well. Karen’s going to be on a desk for a day or two, and they put a new rookie detective on the case until she’s back.”

  “How are you doing? I know it takes something out of you when you have to shoot someone.”

  “It comes with the job,” Sam said. “I guess I can handle it, but there’s always that feeling that I might’ve done something differently, something that wouldn’t have ended up with a body on a slab in the morgue.” He shrugged. “Hindsight is always 20/20.”

  “No, Sam,” Indie said. “If he was about to shoot Karen, you really didn’t have any other options. I don’t think there’s any way you could have saved her without taking that shot, and I would bet you that she would agree with me.”

  Sam grinned. “I know,” he said. “It’s just the way I deal with things, I guess.”

  “Well, at least you know they’re not going to hurt anyone else. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  Sam let out a sigh. “That’s actually what I’m working on today. Several of us, including Steve and Darren, think that they had to have been up to something more than just that first shooting. There was some reason they stayed in town, and for all we know, they may already have something set in motion. We need to find out everything we can about them, try to back trace their steps and figure out what it might be.”

  He threw off the covers and got out of bed, then took a quick shower and got dressed. By the time he got to the kitchen, Indie had the coffee hot and poured for him, and was flipping eggs and bacon. He sipped the coffee for a few moments, and then she set a plate in front of him.

  He ate rapidly, because the day was already getting away from him. He had slept until almost 8, but he had told everyone to be in his office at nine. It wouldn’t do for him to be the only one to show up late, so he shoved the last of the egg and bacon into his mouth, swallowed the rest of his coffee, and kissed his wife goodbye as he grabbed his spare pistol and tucked it into his holster.

  Ballistics might have his usual gun, but Sam had learned that it was a lot better to have a weapon and not need it, than to need one and not have it. He had bought a couple extras, and made sure Indie knew how to get to all of them, just in case any of his enemies ever tried to harm his family again.

  The sun was shining brightly and it was already warm when he stepped out the front door, so he reached inside the Mustang and hit the garage door opener, then rolled his big Honda Shadow out and climbed onto it. His cane went into the special holster on the front forks, and he hit the starter button. The big bike roared to life, and Sam took the helmet off the mirror and snapped it onto his head.

  It was the first time he’d ridden the bike since the year before, and it felt good, rumbling under him once again. He caught himself smiling, and remembered the old joke about how to tell a happy motorcycle rider when you saw one: by counting the bugs in his teeth when he smiled. If there were more than five, he must’ve been ecstatic.

  He parked the bike in his assigned space, then got off and walked into the building. He carried his helmet all the way to his office and set it on his desk, then turned to go and get some coffee from the break room.

  He didn’t get very far. Jenna was standing just outside his door, holding not one, but two large coffees out to him.

  “Well, thank you,” he said.

  “Thank your wife,” Jenna said. “She called me and said you didn’t have time for a second cup at home.”

  Sam grinned and raised his cup in salute to Indie. He sat down at his desk, but he was only there a moment before Steve, Walter, Darren, and Summer all came in together. Sam picked up his coffee and started toward the conference table, and they all followed.

  “Walter, I don’t know if you’ve heard much about what happened last night…”

  “Steve told me,” Walter said. “I think you’re right. I think there’s something else about to happen. That’s the only reason they would have stayed around here.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. What I’d like us to do…”

  He was interrupted by the phone ringing on his desk, so he reached over and hit the button on the speakerphone on the table. “Yes?” He asked.

  “Karen Parks is on line 1,” Jenna said. “I can patch her through to the conference table.”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Sam said. There was a beep, and Sam said, “Karen?”

  “Hey, Sam,” Karen said. “I thought you’d like to know, AFIS kicked back IDs on the fingerprints we ran. The man was Juergen Schroeder, born in Germany and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, but he moved to Ithaca, New York when he was only fifteen. He was not quite thirty years old, and he’s been the main suspect in at least fifteen different murders since he turned twenty. In each case, police were fairly certain he was their guy, but there just wasn’t enough viable evidence for charges.”

  “Sounds like a pro, then, just like we thought. What about the woman?”

  “Her name was Bernadette Jones, and she was twenty-six. She and Schroeder have been together since she was about eigheen, and she’s long been considered an accomplice to his crimes. Again, there was just never enough evidence to make any charges happen.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “at least we know who they were. I’m going to put some of our people on digging into their backgrounds and trying to find out what they’ve been up to around here. We’ve all come to the conclusion that they were preparing another attack on the company, or they would’ve already left the area. The only question is whether they’ve already got something set up and ready to happen, or if they were still working on it when we took them down.”

  “I don’t know, but let me know what I can do to
help. I got a call from John Pemberton already this morning, and he’s confident the review will be finished sometime today. I should be back on the case by morning.”

  “Good,” Sam said with a chuckle. “I’m not too sure what I think of Mr. Storch just yet.”

  “Jim’s okay,” Karen said. “He just doesn’t have any experience to speak of. The main thing I like about him is the fact that he’s smart enough to realize that.”

  “All right,” Sam said. “You’re on speakerphone on the conference table. Stay with us for a few minutes, okay?”

  “Sure, no problem,” Karen said.

  He turned back to his team at the table. “I think we need to start looking at what these two were up to the last few weeks. We know they set the shooting up long before the show began, so they had several weeks to work on the next phase of whatever plan was laid out. Anybody got any suggestions on where we start?”

  “I’d like to look at the apartment,” Walter said. “And their car, if they have one. I want to see if I can get any ideas about what they were going to do next.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” Sam said. “Karen?”

  “I’ll clear it now,” Karen replied. “You can go whenever you like this morning. Just don’t forget to send your tech people out. God only knows what they’ll find.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “We need to find out anything we can about how they were paying their bills,” Darren said. “They undoubtedly had some kind of financial arrangements, even if it was just a prepaid debit card of some sort. That might give us some kind of leads on where their money was coming from.”

  “All right,” Sam said. “Darren, can I put you on that?”

  “No problem, boss,” Darren said. “And while I’m at it, I’ll see what I can find out about where they called home. They probably have bank accounts and cell phones and internet and everything else, wherever they come from.”

  “Do it. Summer, I want you to try to find out if they held cover jobs or had any friends around here. Anybody they hung out with, anybody they spent time with, we need to know as much as possible about them.”

  “You got it,” Summer said.

  “Okay, then. Let’s all get to it.”

  “Sounds good, Sam,” Karen said. “Call if you need me.” There was a click as the line went dead.

  Summer turned to Walter and Steve as they got out of their chairs. “I’m heading over to the apartment building now,” she said. “You guys want to follow me?”

  “We’ll be right on your tail,” Steve said. They followed her out of the office, while Darren stayed behind for a moment.

  “Sam,” he said. “I had a thought, and you’re not going to like it. What if these two weren’t working on their own?”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked, his eyes narrowed.

  “Professional assassins are, by definition, serial killers. Many of them display the same personality patterns we find in serial killers who are not motivated by money. If I were to build a profile on these two, I’d start with the fact that the woman seems to have sacrificed herself to try to let the man get away, which indicates that he was the dominant one in their partnership. When we find serial killers working together, we usually find that one of them is dominant over the other, but there’s always an underlying relationship of some sort. In cases where we’ve seen couples, that relationship is almost always at least somewhat romantic. They tend to be dependent upon one another, and the killings are usually related to some sexual component of their relationship.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “So, it seems odd the guy would run out and leave the girl behind him to be killed?”

  Darren nodded. “Yes, if we were talking about a typical murder couple. There have been a couple of cases, though, where the couple turned out to be non-romantic. In those cases, both the male and the female were subservient to a third individual, the actual alpha. A couple like that would probably still have one member dominant over the other, but that relationship takes a back seat to the primary. If I look at this that way, the woman was the most expendable. The alpha, whoever it is, would have expected her to sacrifice herself for her partner, so he would think no more of her loss than if a pet had died.”

  Sam stared at him for a moment. “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t like it. What you’re telling me is that they have a boss out there somewhere, the guy who is really calling the shots on this thing. Right?”

  “I’m afraid that’s how it looks,” Darren said. “I’ll start digging, see if I can find any connections they had that might be the alpha.”

  “Call me the instant you find anything,” Sam said. “I don’t care what time it is or what I’m doing. If there’s an alpha out there, that’s our top priority right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Darren said, and then he headed for his own cubicle to get started.

  *

  Summer, Steve, and Walter arrived at the apartment building along with Q and his tech crew, and they all took the elevator directly to the third floor of the building, where a uniformed officer was sitting in a folding chair just outside the ruined door to apartment 3G. They flashed their IDs, and the officer nodded.

  “Detective Parks called,” he said. “Go on in.”

  Steve took down one end of each strip of the crime scene tape that crisscrossed the door and pushed what was left of the door open. The six of them stepped inside and stopped, looking at the large blood stain just ahead of them.

  “Q,” Steve said, “let’s give Walter a few minutes before you start in, okay?”

  The stocky man nodded. “No problem,” he said. “We’re just gonna stand back and watch.”

  Walter stood where he was for a moment, just looking all around the area he could see. They were standing just inside the living room of the apartment, and the blood stain was eight feet ahead of them, just in front of the entrance to a short hallway that led to a bedroom and the bathroom. The kitchen and dining area were through another door that was in the wall to their left.

  Slowly, Walter walked around the living room. He looked closely at the sofa and chairs, the coffee table with some magazines and a laptop sitting on it, then at the entertainment center that held a cheap, flashy stereo and a large LED television set. He spotted the remote for the TV on the arm of a chair and pressed its power button. The screen lit up, and a popular talk show came on.

  He turned off the TV, then sat down on the couch and looked at the laptop. It was on, so he touched the space bar to make the screen come to life. A browser was open, and they were suddenly looking at a live video feed from just inside the main entrance of the building.

  “They knew we were coming,” Summer said. “They saw the police coming through the door.”

  Steve nodded. “Looks that way.”

  Walter took a look at the browser history, and found that it had visited the Web Wide Awards website numerous times. There was also a number of visits to YouTube, and several to a Gmail account. He clicked on that one, but it was set to log out when closed, so there was no username or password.

  Walter got up from the couch and walked to the edge of the blood stain. He stood and looked at it for a moment, then turned and went into the bedroom. Steve and Summer followed, standing in the doorway and watching him as he looked at the bed, opened some dresser drawers, and looked in the closet. From what they could see, the woman’s clothes appeared to have been in the dresser, while the man’s clothing was hanging and on shelves in the closet. On the shelf above the hanging clothes in the closet, Walter found a box of shotgun shells and another of thirty-eight caliber ammunition. He left both where he found them.

  Two suitcases and an overnight bag were tucked neatly under the bed, and each of the two occupants seemed to have a couple pairs of shoes sitting neatly together by the wall.

  Walter came out and skirted around the blood to get into the kitchen. The cabinets and refrigerator seemed to be fully stocked, and there were two six-packs of beer in the refrigera
tor. A glance in the trashcan revealed a few empty cans, along with the typical garbage associated with the kitchen. There were a few dirty dishes in the sink, but the kitchen itself was very clean.

  Looking under the sink, Walter found a number of different cleaning products. He looked at a few of them, then put them back and closed the cabinet.

  Across the hall, Walter walked into the bathroom. Like the kitchen, it was quite clean. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet over the sink, but a cup held a pair of toothbrushes and a tube of a popular toothpaste.

  “They weren’t ready to carry out another attack,” Walter said. “They already did what they came here to do, and they were just waiting for further orders. It might have nothing to do with the award company.”

  Steve lowered his eyebrows and looked at Walter. “Nothing to do with them? You think shooting that kid was the only attack they were going to make on the company?”

  “It might be about the company,” Walter said. “The company was definitely targeted by somebody, but these people were waiting for orders about what to do next. Somebody told them to wait here until they were told what to do, or were told to leave and go somewhere else.”

  Summer cocked her head to one side. “What makes you think that, Walter?”

  “They were watching the company’s website, but they weren’t posting anything on it. They were checking emails several times a day, but they weren’t sending any out. Emails were their only means of communication, because there are no social media accounts on the computer, and there are no phones or cell phone chargers in the apartment. There are no tools, no supplies to make bombs or poison, and the only guns they had with them were the ones they used to try to protect themselves. They’ve been keeping a low profile and trying to act like a normal couple as far as any of the neighbors could tell, but the man had been sleeping on the couch while the woman slept alone in the bedroom. All of that told me they weren’t really interested in the company at all, except as part of their job. That first attack was done, but then they were told to wait here for whatever was their next job.”