Long Shot: A John Rockne Mystery (John Rockne Mysteries Book 4)

by Dan Ames

  I let myself out.

  Chapter Nine

  Contacting Frederick was easy. Anna had his cell phone number because she’d had to pick him up one time from the airport as a favor to Nick and the number was still in her contact information.

  So I called Frederick who wasn’t able to talk on the phone but said he could meet me for a quick cup of coffee when he took a break from work.

  One of the draws of downtown Detroit for young people is the availability of cheap condos. However, there’s more to them than just the price. The condos are much bigger and nicer than their ilk in other cities for the price.

  Frederick’s building was in yet another funky neighborhood of Detroit, a few rehabbed buildings that were attracting young people, side-by-side with abandoned homes and the occasional drug dealer on the corner.

  We met at a coffee shop full of hipsters. The uniform was flannel and beards. And those were the women.

  Upon seeing Frederick, it struck me again how he looked nothing like anyone else in his family. While the Giordanos tended to have dark hair, dark eyes and a thick musculature, Frederick’s tall thin frame, combined with blond hair and blue eyes always struck me as such an anomaly.

  He smiled when he saw me, got up and shook my hand.

  “Uncle John,” he said.

  I bought him a cup of foamy something or other and I got a black coffee.

  It was good.

  Say what you might about these hipsters, they could brew a damn fine cup of joe.

  “How are you holding up, Frederick?” I asked. He went by Frederick. It was never shortened to Fred or Freddie. The name fit him perfectly.

  “Fine, I guess,” he said. He looked a little tired, but other than that, normal. He started to say something else but then stopped himself. Probably to keep his emotions in check and to not start crying in public. Grieving is good, but at some point you have to try to compartmentalize it, and I had a feeling that’s what he was trying to do.

  Which didn’t make my job any easier.

  “You know my sister Ellen and her team are doing everything they can to find the person responsible,” I said.

  Frederick nodded. “I’ve offered to help her in any way I can,” he said.

  A pair of middle-aged women came into the coffee shop, hesitated and then went to the counter. A couple of North Shore Nancys out on a coffee adventure.

  “So I have to ask,” I continued. “Was there anyone or anything you can think of that might have had something to do with this?”

  Frederick let out a sigh. “No. That’s just it. Paul and I have talked repeatedly since…it happened. And there’s just nothing. You know, my Dad worked. He worked all the time.”

  I did know that. Anna had occasionally mentioned how Nick was never at home, that his medical practice took up his entire life and he was always rushing from office to office, rarely returned her phone calls and was usually a no-show at any family functions.

  “It had slowed down a little bit once we left home, from what I gather,” Frederick continued. “There was the sailboat. And I guess he had started golfing a little bit in the summer.”

  It seemed a little odd to me that Nick would wait until the boys were out of the house to start taking some time off from work, but maybe that was just a coincidence.

  “Once my Mom got better, that kind of changed things, too,” he ventured.

  Katie had been diagnosed with cancer a few years back. They had caught it very early, though, and with aggressive treatment it had gone into remission and she’d been cancer-free for years, as I understood it.

  “It took a while for things to go back to normal, though,” he added.

  I was about to let that go by, but there was something about the way he said it that made me wonder. Whenever anyone is diagnosed with cancer it’s a game-changer and sure, it would take time for things to go back to normal even if the patient survived.

  But there was something about the way he said it.

  “Is that because of the severity of her illness?” I tentatively asked.

  Frederick shrugged and I could tell he was debating whether or not to add anything. Luckily, he did.

  “My Mom and her sister are big believers in alternative medicine,” he finally said.

  How odd, I thought. To be married to a doctor and not believe in what he practices.

  “That would seem to be a conflict,” I ventured.

  “It was,” Frederick said. “She wanted Dad to spend a ton of money on all kinds of weird stuff. A bunch of bizarre treatments that had nothing to do with medicine. Or science. Or reality, for that matter.”

  He glanced up as a man in a suit with a bowler walked into the coffee shop. Hipster coffee shops attract all kinds.

  “But Dad was a real doctor. A great doctor. And even though he would have done anything to help her get better, there was no way he was going to waste money on a bunch of quacks. And it wasn’t about the money. He just refused to do it as a practitioner of real medicine.”

  His voice got a little shaky.

  “That makes sense,” I said. “It would be like asking an atheist to donate money to a church.”

  “He refused to do it,” Frederick said. “And Mom never forgave him for that.”

  “But she got better,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, he was right, of course. It was the traditional stuff that got her better. Surgery and chemo. Not some kind of California mud bath and seaweed diet.”

  “Of course.”

  “Things were never quite the same after that around the house, though,” Frederick said.

  I wondered if that had anything to do with the shitload of new mail-order packages that filled the living room at the Giordano house. Or the rumors of excess drinking.

  “But my Dad was successful and money was never a problem,” Frederick said. “In fact, he said the future never looked brighter and that’s why he was able to buy the sailboat and start taking some time off.”

  Frederick shrugged. “I wish he’d been able to do that when we were growing up, though. We hardly ever saw him.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that so I just nodded.

  The rest of it made a lot of sense to me. Katie was pissed off that Nick didn’t agree to pay for the quack medicine stuff so she got even by going crazy with spending money elsewhere.

  “How is Paul doing?” I asked, to change the subject slightly.

  “Happy to be back in Chicago,” Frederick said. “It would be nice to get away for awhile. I’m probably going to go visit him in a couple of weeks.”

  “That’s a great idea. How is the start-up going?” I knew Frederick had been an extremely skilled computer programmer and had launched several companies in Detroit.

  It probably sounded odd to the outsider, but Detroit had actually exploded recently with tech firms moving in, thanks in part to a mega high-speed data system being installed by one of the companies downtown. That, in addition to the cheap real estate and significant tax breaks.

  “Really well,” Frederick said. “One of our apps is getting a lot of attention from Facebook. There have been rumors of an offer coming, but we’ll see,” he said.

  “What’s an app?” I asked. And then we both laughed. I knew what an app was after all. It was short for application, as in job application. Right?

  We finished our coffees and briefly talked about other stuff. He asked about Isabel and Nina, listened to my stories of their goofiness with genuine enjoyment. I liked Frederick. He was an incredibly intelligent young man, and although a bit standoffish at times, he was polite and seemed honestly interested in other people.

  So why did I get the feeling that deep down something was wrong with him?

  Chapter Ten

  When I got Nick’s other son, Paul, on the phone, I asked him the same questions I asked Frederick and I got the exact same answers.

  Paul had always been the extrovert while Frederick was more quiet and internally focused. Anna had told me som
e stories about Paul’s high school days which sounded like they consisted of quite a bit of partying and fraternizing with the opposite sex.

  It wouldn’t have been a surprise for me to learn that Paul had been the ladies’ man. He had the best of the Giordano looks.

  We chatted briefly and he confirmed most of what Frederick had said, never seeming to be caught off guard.

  After we finished talking I headed to my office.

  Main Street in Grosse Pointe is actually a street called Kercheval. And the downtown is simply called the Village. There’s a second village just down from the first one called The Hill.

  My office is in the Village, above a jewelry store and next to a Merrill Lynch brokerage office. I’ve always said that if business goes sour, I’ll just drill a hole in the floor and rob the jewelry store. Do a kind of Mission Impossible thing where I dangle from the ceiling.

  Yeah, right.

  I unlocked the door to my office, walked through my little waiting area that had a couple of chairs, a table with some various law enforcement magazines strategically scattered about, and a nautical print on the wall. It was a sailboat making its way through rough seas with a storm on the horizon. I liked to think that my potential clients could relate.

  It felt weird to boot up my computer and start cyber stalking my deceased brother-in-law. But I figured it was something I had to do even though I also knew Ellen and her team were already scouring every possible lead. But it also occurred to me that most of the time my clients were complete strangers and now I knew the deceased pretty well. It would expedite my searching, at least that’s what I was going to go with.

  The first sets of listings all had to do with his medical practice. The next grouping consisted of social obligations in which he had donated some money to some charity or Grosse Pointe institution. I was about to give up when near the end of the Google search results I spotted a listing about his sailboat and prior race results.

  That was interesting.

  The first thing Ellen would be trying to figure out is if the murder was random, or of Nick Giordano had been the target. And if he was the target, how had the killer known where he would be? Seeing the prior race results in black-and-white at least confirmed to me that he had been doing this for some time.

  So if a killer had wanted to set up a shot, it would have been easy. The racecourse was always the same. Everyone knew that, and most likely the killer would have, too. He just would have had to find his shooting spot and wait for Nick to sail into his sights.

  But is that what really happened?

  Or had the shooter simply waited for anyone to sail into his kill zone?

  That was the million-dollar question.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Are you napping?” Ellen’s voice spoke to me from my cell phone. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just past eleven in the morning.

  “Cute,” I said. “Are you just getting into work?”

  “Been here since seven,” she replied. “You were probably drooling into your pillow.”

  I sighed.

  “Can I help you?” I said. “Psychologically speaking?”

  “I already told you about the shooter using .223 ammo, right?”

  “Yep,” I answered. .223 ammo was the equivalent of McDonalds – tons of them everywhere, nearly impossible to trace.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you the latest news, probably because Anna is the closest thing I have to family here in Grosse Pointe,” Ellen said.

  That was a good one, I had to admit.

  “Ballistics matched the rounds to a cold case,” she continued.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  “Nope. Victim was a woman named Colleen Fairbanks. Lived in Bloomfield Hills. Married, no children. Worked in finance. They took a long look at her husband, but he was in California at the time.”

  “When and where?”

  “Six months or so back,” Ellen answered. “In a park north of the city known for its hiking trails. She was alone at the time, except for her dog. Apparently she hiked the park frequently for exercise.”

  “Easy for a shooter to set up, then,” I pointed out.

  “Very easy.”

  “What’s the husband’s story?” I asked.

  “Brian Fairbanks,” Ellen said. “Car guy, but not for the Big Three. He’s involved in electric vehicles.”

  “Huh.”

  “That’s all I got,” Ellen said. “Which is way more than you deserve, frankly. Because this really ought to be a two-way street, but I feel like you’ve got nothing, as usual.”

  “Thanks, as always for your support,” I said. “But actually, I do have some things to share.”

  It took me a few minutes to fill her in on what I’d learned from Katie Giordano, as well as Frederick.

  “Interesting, but nothing really to go on,” she said.

  “That’s what I figured,” I said. “Anything else for me? Or is that all you’ve really got?” I asked, figuring she probably wasn’t going to tell me everything.

  Her response?

  A dial tone.

  Chapter Twelve

  The newspapers told me everything and nothing.

  Colleen Fairbanks had been murdered. Shot to death while hiking a nature trail not far from her home in Bloomfield Hills.

  A single shot to the head.

  From a long distance.

  So did we have a sniper on the loose like the two maniacs in Washington, D.C. a few years ago? The guys who had customized the trunk of their car so they could shoot without being seen?

  The Colleen Fairbanks investigation had apparently fizzled out before it even really got started.

  There had been virtually no evidence.

  No leads.

  No suspects.

  Now a cold case.

  That is, until Nick Giordano had been shot with the same gun.

  The husband had an airtight alibi. Still, I knew that in cases like this the husband was always under suspicion. He may have had an alibi at the time, but he was still the husband and whenever there was a married woman murdered with no sign of a clear suspect, a dark cloud of suspicion immediately hovered over the husband.

  Usually until the case was solved or he died. And even if he died, the whispers never did.

  The husband.

  Brian Fairbanks. I continued to surf the Internet for more information. There were a lot of articles about him. A self-made millionaire with a passion for the environment and green engineering. He’d worked in the stock market, eventually buying his way into numerous green companies before finally starting his own.

  Fairbanks Automotive.

  A leading firm in the design and production of electric cars.

  I called Nate.

  “Colleen Fairbanks,” I said.

  “Wow, that’s a blast from the recent past,” he said. “So to speak.”

  “Murdered from a long distance,” I pointed out.

  I could almost sense Nate’s reporter excitement vibrating through the line. I had to be careful, though. I didn’t want to spill the beans that my sister had entrusted to me. That would be bad. Very bad.

  “So there’s a connection to Nick Giordano?” he asked.

  “Not that I can really prove,” I said, which was true. My sister probably could, along with the Grosse Pointe Police Department, but I, John Rockne, couldn’t.

  Nate was my best friend in the world, but Ellen was my sister.

  “Okay,” he said, the disappointment evident in his voice. “That Fairbanks case is probably still active, but the file is on the back burner I’m sure.”

  “Do you know the guy in charge of the back burner cases?” I asked. “I’d love to see if there’s any connection between Colleen Fairbanks and my brother-in-law. You know,” I added. “A literal connection, not just a guess.”

  Which, of course, was my way of telling Nate that the cases were connected, probably through forensics, but there had to be more to the sto
ry. And there was no phrase more beloved by reporters than ‘there was more to the story.’

  Nate and I agreed to meet for lunch at Green Dot Stables, a Detroit eatery and fine tradition downtown. Lots of sliders. Gourmet sliders. I’d seen Nate put away nearly two dozen in one sitting. I would have to bring my credit card. I didn’t have that much cash.

  After I disconnected with Nate I went back to the Internet and looked at some photos of Colleen Fairbanks.

  She was a looker. A short, modern haircut with blue eyes and a face that featured perfect lines. I knew the minute I saw her face that she had probably never taken a bad picture in her life.

  It gave me a thought that I immediately felt guilty for having. But I thought of the train wreck of a woman I’d talked to at Nick’s house. Katie. His wife.

  And then I looked again at a photo of Colleen Fairbanks.

  No comparison.

  I wondered if Nick had felt the same way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By now, they knew about the Fairbanks woman.

  He smiled at the thought of her. It hadn’t been the first person he’d ever killed. But it had been the first person he’d killed for reasons other than pleasure.

  A small laugh escaped his thin, cruel lips. It wasn’t like he was Ted Bundy or something. Christ, no. The first one had been in college, a little rough sex that got out of hand, fueled mostly by booze and coke. Luckily, she’d been a stripper that worked part-time as a hooker, so he’d dumped the body and no one had ever been the wiser.

  The second one hadn’t really been his fault. He’d drugged a friend’s mom because she was extremely hot. After he’d had his fun with her, he noticed she’d stopped breathing. Luckily, she was a typical Grosse Pointe woman. Married to a wealthy man who never gave her the time of day so she whiled away the hours with booze, prescription drugs, and flirting with her son’s friends.

  Luckily, her husband had covered up the death as an accidental overdose.