The Untimely Death Box Set

by James Kipling

  But today he decided against checking out the other menu. Something told him it wasn’t the time. Instead, he sat there with Williams trying to figure out who would have matched a dog trainer up with someone who wanted to hold-up a bank. The difficulty involved at least suggested no one was going to try it again. They discussed the possibility of someone trying to pull off a copycat crime, but decided it wasn’t likely. Few crooks would spend the time and money to have an attack dog team trained for hold-ups. It might be a problem in years to come, but not now.

  “Where do we begin finding leads for this case?” Williams said to his partner. “There is so much here that doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m at a quandary over it as well,” Yuan said. “Hey, I thought you were supposed to be the analytical computer when it came to solving crimes. How are we going to crack this thing if even you can’t come up with some ideas?”

  “Give me some time,” Williams said. “I just need a while to come up with some ideas on what to do. Damn, but this one has my brain melting.”

  They sat at the table in the diner trying to come up with something. Williams was certain the key lay in finding the relatives of whoever owned the missing egg and necklace. If the old women were responsible for the death of an inmate who had them, it would be possible to trace the killer back to a relative if revenge was the motive.

  “I just had a thought,” Yuan told Williams. “It’s not easy to conceal four big dogs. Do you think it might be possible to talk to the police departments around Philly and see if there have been any complaints about people keeping big dogs in an apartment or townhouse?”

  “Why would it have to be an apartment or townhouse in one of the suburban areas?” Williams asked him, “Couldn’t the perp just as easily have put them in a house or farm in the counties?”

  “I don’t think so. Having the dogs around for any long-term basis would attract a lot of attention from a neighbor. Whoever did this didn’t want too many people trying to find out what they were up to that week. I suggest we look in a place which was leased, which is why I’m thinking a townhouse or apartment.”

  “Don’t most apartments have regulations against large animal pets?”

  “Most do, but that doesn’t stop people from having them. I recall a case some time ago about a man in New York City who had a full-grown tiger in his apartment. It was only discovered when the thing mauled him. I think the police were forced to shoot it because there was no safe way to get it out of the building. People do all kinds of crazy things in their homes and living spaces. I was just watching this German movie on line about the kinds of spaces people have in their basement. Its nuts when you think about how hard it is to do any kind of work on a lower level part of a house. I wouldn’t be surprised our perp has an entire dog kennel in his basement and no one knows a thing about it.”

  “You suggest we go around and start checking out basements?” Williams asked him while sipping another cup of coffee. This was the third one for him today. “I don’t think it would go over too well in the burbs. ‘Knock, knock, excuse us ma’am we’re looking for viscous attack dogs in your house’.”

  “No, I’m suggesting we look at the big pet supply stores and find out if anyone has bought too much dog food for a particular area. These Rottweilers and Shepherd’s eat a lot, if I recall. You’re not looking at the occasional trip to the grocery store for a few cans of doggie food. You’re looking for someone in a crowded neighborhood who shows up weekly or daily and buys bags of special dog food. I’m talking the good stuff. The kind only the posh kennels use. The kind of dog food for the ones used by Pure Finders.”

  “Pure what?”

  “Old Victorian job which is coming back in style. I see people advertise to clean yards of dog poo. In Victorian times, tanners used high quality doggie doo to counteract the effects of the tannic acids on leather. Think about it the next time you pick up an old leather bible.”

  Later in the day, Williams received another call from his friend Barnhart. “I have more information on the Fabergé egg,” he told him. “As I thought, the one you’re trying to find is supposed to still be in safe keeping in a Swiss bank. So how did it get out?”

  “That is what I hoped you could tell me,” Williams told him over the phone.

  “Best thing I can figure,” Bernhard told him, “Somebody traded the location of it to get out of a prison camp in World War Two. If the egg is supposed to be the property of the Archduke’s successors in Liechtenstein, I would expect them to be trying to locate it. Of course, they may not know it’s gone. But why keep it hidden in the bank for such a long time?”

  “Perhaps the current duke doesn’t know it’s there?”

  “Too valuable, too unique an art object. This is a one of a kind item, remember. It’s why it was never broken up for the different gemstones. Somebody used it a get out of jail free card. I’m guessing the Prussian princelings did it. Now you just have to find them or their descendants and you’ll have a line to the killers.”

  “I suppose.” Williams thanked him for the information and broke the connection.

  “Who was that?” Yuan asked him while he drove the SUV. As always, they were in Yuan’s car.

  “That was my new best friend who knows all about the way the Nazi’s looted the treasures of Europe during World War Two. He’s the man I’m working with to track down the egg and necklace. According to him, the egg was part of some Duke’s legacy and he might not even know it’s missing. It was supposed to be kept in hiding in a Swiss bank account all these years. Crazy. I suppose if you have the kind of money that these people do, you don’t think about these kind of things. I know it isn’t the same with people who don’t have a lot. For instance, my mother kept a running inventory of her jewelry. If anything came up missing, she knew about it that day.”

  “Jewelry stores are like that,” Yuan pointed out to his partner as he slowed down to merge into a lane, “one of my girls used to work in one. She told me they took a physical count of every item worth more than five hundred dollars each day, twice. One person went around and counted the number of items in a case and another checked the book where they were entered. They had to do it every day and no one went home if it came up short or over. Next time you’re in a jewelry store look and notice what items are grouped together. It’s done so they don’t have to worry about counting them or losing track.”

  “I never thought about it,” Williams said to him, “but I don’t spend a lot of time in jewelry stores unless I’m on a case. Most of the ones I go into, I’m trying to find out if the store owner is working as a fence.”

  “It’s a big business. Funny how no one wants created gemstones made in a laboratory, even if they have more sparkle than the real ones. People are strange like that.”

  “I guess the diamond industry did a good job convincing people that diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Williams chuckled. “At least the ones I know. You know that woman who works out of the detective division in the third district?”

  “Big lady who helped take down the Third Generation Black Mafia?” Yuan asked. “Yeah, she cuts a fine figure.”

  “She has two wedding rings. One fancy one she wears at home with a big hunk of rock and another one she wears on the job which is plain gold band. I guess she doesn’t want one that will rip through a latex glove on a crime scene investigation.”

  “Or she wants one on the job she can remove if she has to play the part,” Yuan proposed.

  The phone went off again and this time it was Doc Stanford. Once again, Williams took the phone out of his pocket and engaged in a long conversation.

  “So what did Doc have to say this time?” Yuan asked him. “Is he finished with the autopsy?”

  “Just filed his final report,” Williams confirmed. “I’ll look at it when we get back to the office. Sounds like he found all kinds of interesting things while he was doing the examination. For instance, he thinks the two old women
might have been tortured before they were prison guards. Weird. He found signs of broken bones that took a long time to heal. Old broken bones which might have happened in the 1940’s or earlier.”

  “How could he tell they took that long to heal or when they were broken?”

  “The way they had healed and the method used to set the broken bones. Tibia fractures too. On both of them in the same area, so it appears deliberate, as you wouldn’t expect two people to have the same kind of fracture in the same location. Unless it was done deliberately. He’s going through any data he can find about who were in the guard roles in World War Two Germany. I think he’ll find out who these two women were exactly and where they came from. God knows, anything to help us find the missing egg and necklace. I talked to the captain this morning. Washington is driving him nuts with all kinds of demands.”

  They continued on down the street discussing the case and all that it implied. Williams wanted to know if there was a possible connection between it and the current Russian government, but Yuan didn’t think so. He was convinced that the egg two old women held was the one the Russians wanted. How they came to be involved in an international incident was a story in and of itself, but the two detectives weren’t concerned with the desires of anyone outside the city. They needed to get the case resolved and the captain off their backs. And soon. Eventually, something else would emerge which would cause them more grief and it wouldn’t involve missing eggs and diamond necklaces. Most likely, it would have to do with gang wars over drug turf, as this was the usual problem they encountered.

  With the Asian gangs moving into Philly, a completely new dimension in crime was raising its scaly head. One of Yuan’s former areas of expertise involved taking down Asian gangs before they became too big a nuisance for the city of Philadelphia. It was a task that required a lot of patience and footwork on the street as many of the criminal gangs were from closed family groups and had tight ethnic ties. Some of the fiercest gangs were Chinese, but came from Vietnam. The Vietnamese government was actively removing ethnic Chinese from their country as they considered them a potential fifth column with China next door to be feared. It was something that wasn’t openly discussed in the various Asian communities of Philly, but it threatened to break the fragile peace which was maintained by the different Asian factions in the city. Yuan was part of the peace detail that did what it could through the use of temples and churches to maintain harmony in the different factions. It was not part of his official duties, but everyone knew he could be called on when trouble threatened to cause a gang war or riot. He had prevented the Asian gangs from engaging in turf wars in Philly and no one knew how close the city had come to open warfare between them. He’d let his superiors know downtown that what he did had a personal price and they kept their mouths shout about the women he went through.

  Williams was more concerned with the tradition Irish and Italian gangs, which were still big in some parts of the city. Many of them were pacified with union and construction jobs by the city government, but every now and then another war would break out on who got the bid on a city contract. It was difficult to keep the corruption under control and not visible to the public.

  Later that day, Williams and Yuan established a time for the murders with the help of Doc Stanford. The old medical examiner put the death of the women between nine and ten thirty in the morning. No one in the condominiums had heard a thing and there was some thought the women had let their killers into the condominium because they knew them. If this was the case, it meant they had spent more time that just training dogs to take out a bank. It would mean they had deliberately spent time trying to get the confidence of the two old prison guards before killing them in the most horrible ways imaginable. How hard had they tried to mask their hatred of these two old women before they killed them? With so many of the Nazi war criminals dead, or close to the grave, some people felt it was pointless to go after them,. No matter how great the monster, what revenge could be had against an old man on a colostomy bag?

  Still, they needed to know who did the deed and how they got the locations to the safety deposit boxes with the keys to them. The fact that they had a master key to the boxes disturbed Williams. Normally, those keys weren’t just handed out and the bank kept close watch on the ones it held. It took a personal and master key to open those boxes and only one party had a copy of each key. If the robbers had a master key, it meant they really didn’t need anyone’s help from the bank to get into the safety deposit box.

  It was a confusing mess, but not unknown to either of the detectives. They had uncovered many such mysteries in their years with the PPD, both as individuals and in teams. Later that day, in the office they shared at the district station house, they discussed some of the stranger cases they had solved while working for the PPD.

  “Didn’t you find the men who were smuggling dragon eggs out of China?” Williams said to his partner, “I think I saw something in the papers about it.”

  “It wasn’t dragon eggs,” Yuan told him, “that was a stupid rumor some reporter dreamed up to sell copy. I found a whole smuggle ring operating out of Manchuria by way of Northern China who were shipping fossils across the border and into collections and museums all over the world. Some of those fossils were not found anywhere else in the world. One of the smugglers paid some day laborers big money to dig up a fossilized dinosaur nest from the Gobi desert for him. Another one found the only known carcass of the Mongolian Death Worm everyone had talked about for years. It turned out to be a venomous snake, but you can’t put a price on those sorts of things. I still have the citation from the government of China for helping them out in their investigation. And didn’t you solve the mystery of the house full of dancing men, as I heard it called.”

  “Oh, that one,” Williams admitted. “Yeah, it was a little bit strange. Some con artist was running a dance studio so that rich old women could get a chance to do the whole Fred Astaire thing with a bunch of gigolos from Eastern Europe. No one could figure out where they were hiding when the police busted the operation. You wouldn’t believe the old women this guy fleeced; it was disgraceful. We couldn’t find them. Turns out, I knew a pole dancer from South Philly who was teaching these guys their basic dance moves. I happened to be out with her one night as a favor to her mother who taught at a day care center and she mentioned to me that she was going up to Bucks County to teach poling to a house full of guys. She thought it was a little bit funny all these guys lived in a house and weren’t gay. It triggered something in my mind, I asked her to describe some of them, and they fit the descriptions for the men we were trying to find. I got the address from her and paid the place a little visit on my own. With some help from the state police, we were able to seize the lot of them and get back the money these dudes had taken from the old women. In some ways, the whole scam reminds me a lot of what we’re dealing with here. The difference is that these guys weren’t killing their victims, although I’m sure they would have reached that stage eventually.

  Chapter 5

  “It’s the dogs,” Yuan told Williams later when he saw a crime scene update on the internet for the PPD. “It always comes back to the dogs on this case.”

  “What do you mean?” Williams asked him. “Shoot me the link.” A few minutes later, the link was sent to the other detective.

  The sheriff in one of the Northern Counties had found another van which also fit the description of the one they were looking for. When the bank robbers left the crime scene, they had walked right into a waiting van, which managed to stay outside the security camera range. The van was noted by several witnesses at the scene and they had looked for it for days. When found, the van bore none of the logos witnesses recalled seeing on it, but it was easy to make magnetic logos, which could be easily removed. However, the crime scene technicians found all kinds of dog hair inside the van which matched to the species they were trying to find. The crooks lacked enough time to clean it out and move on. They’d ta
ken the money and dogs, but hadn’t cleaned the van, leaving the PPD with all kinds of clues.

  “I think it’s time we paid another visit to our friend Leonard,” Williams suggested.

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Yuan agreed and they headed out to the local parking garage to grab Yuan’s SUV.

  The ride out to the training center was slow once again. The recent snowstorm hadn’t helped much and the two detectives were doing the best they could to make time.

  “So you think this guy might be connected with the bank robbers?” Yuan said to Williams, admiring his hair in the rear view mirror. His haircut was fresh, but Yuan still paid a visit to the same traditional barber every other week to get it done right.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Williams as he watched a truck sail down the highway next to him. They were passing the big stone bird on the Blue Route. It was an effigy in honor to the Welsh settlers who created the Main Line out of Philadelphia before the money followed it. Williams wondered where the money would go once the working class followed them down the Main Line. It was already happening, although some of the main line towns were fighting new apartment construction. There was plenty of money to be made breaking up the old estates and turning them into developments.

  “I think the lure of money can put the blight on many people’s brains,” Yuan told him. “This guy Leonard who runs the training center for dogs strikes me as someone who’s spent all his life working a job he doesn’t like only to blow everything he owns on a new business. He hopes he’ll enjoy it and will earn a decent income. Now he’s struggling. Did you notice the lack of cars in the lot? It was the middle of the day and he has little business. Someone comes along and wants to cut him in on a deal, which will give him the cash to run this company until it takes off. He finds it an attractive offer and doesn’t ask too many questions. We show up and now he has to face the possibility that what he’s done could put him in jail. People do many strange things to avoid jail. I just hope we get there early enough to keep him from doing something stupid.”