The Untimely Death Box Set

by James Kipling

  Chapter 2.

  Two hours later Yuan and Williams were at Doc Stanford’s laboratory. The tall medical examiner was in his hazmat clothes and making notes on his tablet as he finished the examination. Once upon a time, these labs reeked of formaldehyde, but safer preservatives where now used. Anyone in the lab needed to follow basic procedures if they wanted to stay around. The two detectives wore latex gloves just in case Doc Stanford wanted to show them anything.

  “Both victims were killed by a stick of rattan,” he concluded. “I found countless samples of it imbedded right where the wound was created.”

  “Rattan?” Williams asked, “The stuff they make furniture out of?”

  “Rattan is used for many things,” Yuan pointed out. “It can serve as frame for furniture, but it has other uses as well. It can be used for the frame of a house.”

  “I thought they used bamboo for that,” Williams said. His knowledge of woodworking was vague.

  “Bamboo is hollow and solid, it does not bend,” Yuan continued. “Rattan can be worked into shapes after it is soaked in water. Rattan is flexible and is used to make the handles for tools.”

  “Whoever wanted these men dead did the deed with a solid stave of rattan,” Doc Stanford indicated. “The killer wanted to take them out as fast as possible with one strike. Almost did it too, but the second victim turned after the first was killed.”

  “Do we have I.D.’s on either of them?” Yuan asked the officer who stood with them.

  The tall one playing Hyenaman was Clark Wiesel,” the officer said. “The one playing his sidekick Sunbear was Ed Marksman. They worked for Marheed-Locklin, the big defense contractor. We found their driver’s licenses and work badges on them. Whoever killed them didn’t care about their wallets or money. We think they were headed back to their office.”

  “I though Marheed-Locklin has their plant out in King of Prussia,” Williams said. “Isn’t it the big place at the top of the hill?”

  “They’ve got several locations around the Delaware Valley,” the patrolman replied. “There’s a satellite IT office in Philly where they do a lot of government work for the naval yard.”

  Williams looked at Yuan. “I think we should have a look at it. Why don’t you call downtown and get a search warrant? Even if we can’t get it, whoever is in the building might let us inside.” Yuan agreed and took the address down from the officer.

  It was a short ride to the building near Penn’s Landing where the IT office had its offices. Williams felt relived there was a parking lot next to the building as Philly parking could be a nightmare if you didn’t prepare in advance.

  Although it was a Saturday, they phoned ahead. They were met by the office manager on arrival, an older white man in a shirt and tie. He greeted them at the door and let them inside once they flashed their PPD badges.

  “Mark Smith,” the man said while he shook their hands. “I understand something has happened to two of my employees? Normally we’re not open on a Saturday, but we have a big project coming up and need to get it done for the Department of Defense.”

  “Clark Wiesel and Ed Marksman,” Yuan told him as he looked over the pictures of military aircraft on the walls. “I’m afraid they were both murdered sometime last night. We’re in the process of notifying their next of kin.”

  Smith dropped his head and put it in his hands. “I knew it would come to this. I told those two they took that hobby too far. One day they would run into some real criminals and it wouldn’t play out like it does in the comic books.”

  “Could you explain a little bit more?” Williams asked the manager. He could see the man was badly shaken by their news.

  “They belonged to some online group which tries to emulate the great superheroes of the past,” he explained. “At least that’s what they told me.”

  “Is there anyone in particular we should speak with, Mr. Smith?” Walters asked him.

  “You might try Clark’s girlfriend, Angela Powers. I think I have an address for her in my phone.” Smith pulled out his smart phone and punched out a few letters. “There it is!” He gave the detectives the information. Yuan entered it in his smart phone; Williams wrote it down on a pad. They thanked him for his time and left the building.

  “You really need to get this thing fixed,” Yuan said to his partner as smoke from burning oil belched out of the car’s exhaust. Williams loved the way Yuan would turn his nose up in disgust every time he took the old car out on a case. It worked out for the best because most of the time they ended up using Yuan’s spiffy SUV. Today, however, Yuan’s car was in the shop, which left Williams beater as the one to use.

  “Why?” he responded. “Inspection isn’t up until next month. It should last till them.”

  “What do you do if it doesn’t pass inspection?”

  “Buy another car. I can get them cheap from my guy.” Yuan shook his head. The word in the station was that Williams bought another clunker from his “guy” every year. They would last a year and then he’d buy another one.

  Angela Powers lived in a townhouse near the University of Pennsylvania. She had a job in the biomedical field with an institute affiliated to the university. This much Yuan found out on the Internet while they drove over to her house. He’d already called the woman and let her know they were on their way over. She agreed to talk to them, although Yuan could tell she was broken up about the death of Clark. From the picture he found on the institute’s website, she was blond and in her mid-twenties.

  “This is who we will meet,” Yuan announced and held the phone up to Williams while they waited for the traffic, held up by a construction site, to resume. The mayor was making good use of this year’s federal funds.

  “Nice,” Williams commented. “Too bad this had to happen to her. Too bad it happened to anyone.”

  She greeted them at the door to her townhouse in slippers and exercise clothes, and sat the two detectives down on the couch. Yuan gave her parlor a look of approval. She had good taste in furniture; none of it was from the cheap part of the catalogue.

  “I’m sorry about my appearance,” she said to them. “I was ready to hit the gym this morning when someone with the police department phoned me.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Williams assured her. “I’m sorry to have to bother you today. Did Clark have any family in town?”

  “I don’t think so. He never mentioned any. I was under the impression he didn’t talk to them.”

  They spent the next hour talking with her. She let them know Clark was very serious about his self-appointed role as a “champion of justice”. Many times, he’d canceled dates because he felt “trouble was brewing in the city”. He and Marksman were busy on some kind of crime fighting book that would talk about their own exploits and serve as a guide for others who wanted to follow the path of the heroic superheroes of the past.

  “They both spent a lot of time reading about true crime events,” she told them from her seat across from the couch. “I never could see what they got out of it. They watched all those unexplained mystery shows too. The past year it really became an obsession with them.” She dropped her head and looked at the floor. Williams could tell she was full of sorrow.

  “I run into such people all the time,” Yuan told Williams on the way back to the car. “Too many comic books, too many TV shows where everything is solved in an hour. Real criminals aren’t fazed by a man in a domino mask who steps out of the darkness. Real criminals will kill you just to stay in practice. They need to build their reputation on violence, and live for it.” Williams nodded in agreement.

  Yuan’s phone buzzed as he climbed into the passenger side of Williams’ car. He slammed the door twice to make sure the lock caught and took out his phone. “It’s the captain,” he announced. “Sending me a text. I hope it’s something we can use.”

  “So what did he send?” Williams asked after he’d pulled out onto the street.

  “It’s the
address of Wiesel’s apartment. Judge Hopner approved one of the search warrants and we’re allowed to go in and look at it. The apartment manager will meet us in the front with a set of keys.” Yuan gave him the directions and Williams made a fast turn on the street.

  “I don’t think we need to put the blue light on,” he announced. “At least all these places are close enough. As long as the traffic doesn’t bog us down.

  The apartment manager met them at the landing of the small apartment complex an hour later. The traffic was worse than they expected. Drexel Hill was an older railroad suburb of Philadelphia, which was a short drive into Delaware County. The area still had an active trolley line that ran through the county into Philly. This made it attractive for people who worked in the city. The population was dense, as it was throughout the county, and many of the buildings were old. They passed an aging shopping plaza as Williams’ car pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex.

  The manager walked them up to the deceased’s apartment and opened the door for them after he’d checked their police I.D. numbers with the information the station sent him.

  “Have to be sure,” he told them. “Can’t be too careful these days. I’ll be downstairs in my officer right by the door you came in. Let me know when you leave so I can lock it back up.”

  The apartment was a mess. Clothes were stacked everywhere and books were casually left on chairs. The rug needed to be cleaned and dirty dishes lined the sink, in spite of the dishwasher next to them. It consisted of one bedroom, one sitting room, a kitchen and a bathroom. There wasn’t even a balcony. From what they could tell, it was used as a crash pad and not much else.

  “I thought someone beat us to this place,” Yuan commented. “Now I see it’s in a permanent state of clutter.” He picked up a dirty cup and looked at it, and returned it to the cabinet where it had been sitting for the last year from its appearance.

  “My mother would have a mental breakdown in this place,” Yuan told Williams. “We’d have to take her out on a stretcher.” Yuan would often talk to his partner about his obsessive-compulsive mother who spent her waking hours cleaning the house when she wasn’t polishing the brass rails.

  “It’s a good thing she’s not here,” Williams laughed.

  He turned and saw a stack of manuscripts. They had been printed by a laser printer, which was plugged into the only clean instrument in the apartment: a stand-alone computer. Williams turned on the computer only to see the dreaded blue screen of death appear. The computer was useless; the hard drive had been wiped clean.

  “Someone has been here,” Williams told his partner. “The computer is wiped and I don’t see any sign of the book they were writing together.”

  “Other than these print-outs,” Yuan said as he picked up a few pieces from the stack. They both wore latex gloves just to be safe. “And they don’t have much on them. Some random crime statistics, a few notes about famous Philly murders, it might add up, but I doubt it.”

  “If there is a solution to why they were killed,” Williams said as he made a few notes on his pad. “It’s not here. It might have been at one time, but no longer.”

  Yuan looked at the mess of books and clothes. “Add it all up and what would it spell?” he asked Williams. “His life? Hard to say. So much of a mess and yet, this man’s life had meaning to a few people. Perhaps we’ll never know why they were killed. I hate leaving puzzles unfinished.”

  Williams was about to recommend they leave and resume work on the case Monday when he turned and noted something strange about the bedroom. He walked into it and found it to be in the same condition as the rest of the apartment. He stood in the middle of the room and scanned everything. Something wasn’t…right. He’d learned years ago to trust his sensations on these things and he closed his eyes. Williams opened them and looked at the unmade bed. There was a slight gap between the box springs and mattress. He walked over to the bed and lifted the mattress slightly.

  Beneath the mattress was a flash drive, the kind sold at any electronics store. It wasn’t expensive, but could hold plenty of data. William took a picture of it sitting in the original location with the camera on his smart phone and put the flash drive in his pocket. He walked back into the living area to find Yuan standing by the door.

  “Find anything?” Yuan asked him. Williams held up the flash drive.

  “Appears he hid it between the box springs and mattress,” Williams explained. “Let’s take it back to the station house and see if the new kid, Sunil, wants to look at it.”

  “We can use my tablet,” Yuan countered, holding it up.

  “Nah, I want to open this thing downtown. Fewer complications. What if it has as nasty virus on it? You’d lose everything on your tablet. Let’s take it back and have Sunil look at it. Today was quiet in our district and he needs something to do.”

  An hour later and they were back in Philly. After parking the car in the municipal lot where he kept it while at the station, Williams joined Yuan inside the main office. Sunil, a young man who was only serving his second year with the PPD, sat by his computer. He was the local “go-to” guy for their district when it came to computer work. Sunil’s family came from Mumbai, India before he was born. He disappointed his parents by opting for police work instead of the medical field, but they’d come to accept the importance of what he accomplished for the department.

  “Have you opened it yet?” Williams asked the rookie as he walked into the office.

  “No,” Sunil replied. “I thought to wait for you. Figured you were the one who found it and would want to be the first to see what was inside.”

  “Be my guest and open it up,” Williams told him as he sat down next to the computer he used.

  It took Sunil a few seconds to pop open the drive after he’d attached it to his computer. Just to be safe, he unplugged the computer from the police system. “For all we know,” he explained, “there’s a military grade virus on it. I’m not losing my job because I gave it access to the department’s system.”

  “What will you do with your computer afterwards?” Yuan asked him. “Doesn’t opening it up to an outside file risk contamination?”

  “I’ll run it down to the IT department tonight and have them scan it,” he explained. “If there is anything nasty on it, they’ll fix it. Worst comes to worst, they can reformat the hard drive. I never save anything important on it.”

  Sunil pushed some keys and looked at the screen. “Some encryption,” he announced. “I would expect it.” He pushed a few more keys and looked at the screen again. “Not a very sophisticated attempt to hide it. I don’t think what’s on this is very valuable or they wouldn’t be using something this mundane. There, it’s open.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Looks to be a text file of some kind,” Sunil informed them. “Here, have a look.” He spun the screen in their direction.”

  Yuan and Williams bent over to have a look at what was revealed. It was the first page of a book. They would later discover there were several other copies of the book on the flash drive in various states of progress.

  The title page read: The Art and Beauty of Death by Foreign Objects. It was credited to both of the victims.

  “Those two were into some pretty sick stuff,” Williams commented. Neither of the other two contradicted him.

  The next day, they drove back to the building where the two victims worked. Smith, the manager, met them at the door once again. This time he had visitor passes ready for them to display. “Sorry about the security arrangements,” he explained, but it’s all standard procedure down here if you’re going past the antechamber.” He wore a variation on the white shirt and tie of the Saturday before.

  They walked past the cubicles of scores of engineers busy at their computers doing design work. Yuan noticed a red button attached to each cubicle and asked Smith why they had them.

  “Perimeter breech,” he explained. “If anyone walks around t
he inside without an I.D. tag, they are supposed to yell “Breech!” and hit the red button.”

  “Really?” Yuan asked him. “Seems a bit extreme. What happens when the button is pushed?”

  “I’m not allowed to disclose it.”

  Yuan asked no further questions about red buttons.

  “This was Clark’s office,” Smith explained to them as he unlocked the door to it and walked inside. “Be careful what you touch, I had a call this morning from the FBI. Since both men worked on government projects, they’re interested too.”

  “But you don’t solely do government work,” Williams said to him as he looked around. “I though most of your company was involved with commercial applications.” The office was the exact opposite of the apartment with everything neatly stacked.

  “You are correct,” Smith said to him. “But the government work pays the bills. We have to keep it isolated from the rest of what we do. For instance, Clark and the other man used this office in this part of the facility for the past five months. When their part of the project is finished, they’ll be transferred back to where they were before.”

  “What kind of work did you have them doing before this project?” Yuan asked the manager. He stepped into the office, but didn’t see anything that tied into the investigation. Everything was based on government specifications. Nothing involved with comics or superheroes.

  “Video games and encoding comics for computer tablets,” Smith explained. “They were two of the best programmers I had. Hired both of them right out of college and they’d been here ever since.”

  “Did either of them have local family?” Williams asked as he picked up a manual with a series of numbers on it. He opened it and found it to be filled with graphics that made no sense.

  “I’d put that down, Detective Williams,” Smith said to him. “Classified information in it. As for their families, I’m not aware either of them had any immediate family here in Philadelphia. I think they both came here from California.”

  They spent fifteen minutes looking but not touching anything in the office, thanked Smith the manager, then left the building. It was another dead end lead. However, each of them needed to be looked into in case something did turn up.