A Taxing Death (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist Series Book 5)

by Peche, Alec

  Walking up to security just inside the entrance, he said, "I need to serve a summons on employee Julie Fong. Can you direct me to her office?"

  "Sir, we send all summonses to personnel. They sign for them and give them to the employee. Would you like directions to personnel?"

  "I'm new to process serving and I was told I have to place it in the hands of the person who it is intended for. So at this time I'll wait and see if there is another way to deliver the summons and if not I'll be back this afternoon and you can direct me to personnel at that time," Jerome said quite pleased with his ability to reason that excuse on the fly. Five minutes later he was back outside in the car with Allen.

  "Apparently they don't allow employees to be served just anywhere. So we're supposed to deliver it to personnel and they would deliver it to Fong."

  "Did you do that?" Allen asked alarmed.

  "Of course not! I told him I was new to the summons job and with luck I'd find some other way to serve the employee. If I can't find that, I said I'd be back in the afternoon to be directed to personnel. I was trying to keep any suspicions quiet."

  "Bottom line is we still don't have any intelligence on our final two targets. If they're not at the movie theater tomorrow, then I suppose we could try again the next weekend, but I have to go back to work on Monday," Allen noted. "We need a new plan. I just don't feel confident that Fong is going to be at the theater tomorrow. Any ideas?"

  They drove in silence back to Jerome's apartment. They were nearly there when Jerome said, "I suppose we could watch her house for the next twenty-four hours? If she is on vacation that doesn't tell us anything because we won't see any activity. Our final two targets are good friends and they socialize a fair amount outside of work. Perhaps the two of them took a month-long vacation somewhere?"

  "I agree with you, I don't think there's any point in surveillance of her home. If they are on a month-long vacation I just want to verify it. With that crazy telephone system that they have, I'm fairly sure we can't just pick up the phone, call the Department of Revenue and ask to speak to her, but it's worth trying if we don't have any different ideas for what to do to find our targets. This was so simple when we planned this a month or two ago, and now we are stuck because we can't find our final two targets."

  Over the next hour or so they searched the telephone book and the internet, looking for a number that would connect them to the Department of Revenue Audit division. After numerous searches and telephone calls around the department's robotic answering machine, they were both ready to throw the telephone at the wall in frustration. In the end, they left their phone number for Ms. Fong to return their call. The telephone number belonged to an unregistered cell phone just in case anyone was watching, but the bottom line was that their final two targets had vanished.

  They thought all was lost until they watched the news later that evening. A reporter was going over a story that had been leaked to her by a relative of an employee that worked at the Department of Revenue. In this world of Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail it was very hard to keep a secret among thirty employees and their friends and family. Seventy-two hours after they had been hidden in a Reno hotel, their story was being played out by the news. It was not just a small story that ran across the bottom of the screen but the newscasters were describing it as a breaking story and the national networks were soon reporting on it. Knowing their location and that they had been moved and consolidated made Allen and Jerome dream big. Should they act according to plan and kill the final two targets, or given this opportunity, did they strategize on how to kill the entire department at once? If they followed through with that big dream then it would fix the system for other sovereign citizen movement members. They could really become heroes within their movement and pave the way for other brothers to live comfortably and without threat by the illegal tax activities of any territory of the United States of America. The two men wished they had a third or fourth member of the movement to consult with. They were aware that sometimes groups like the FBI tried to infiltrate the movement; and so they were not sure who to trust and decided the best thing was to make the decision between the two of them. The fact that the employees had all been moved and consolidated was an exciting piece of information for Allen and Jerome, but either they were so confident in their disguise that they would never be worried or it had escaped their notice that this action by the state indicated that they were on the lookout for Allen and Jerome, and they knew they had mass murderers on their hands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Like Allen Frost and Jerome Taylor, Jill and Marie had spent the previous evening searching the internet for information. They had a wonderful dinner at Nathan's house, and had both been itching to look up some new clues generated by their discussion while hiking in Yosemite. They were now on their way to the meeting with Lieutenant Moss and the task force devoted to finding these killers. Shortly after they arrived to the meeting, the group received bad news.

  Detective Banks and Capitol personnel were pulled from the meeting to make new arrangements for the families to be secure.

  "How did the news make its way to the public?" asked the lieutenant.

  Before he exited the conference room, Detective Banks replied, "Sir, a teenager from one of the families, tired of not being able to see her boyfriend called the press in hopes of being released from what she called 'her imprisonment'. She has been released from imprisonment all right; she's on her way to an aunt and uncle's farm in Iowa minus her cell phone."

  That vision received a few chuckles from the room imagining the teenager's behavior. The chuckles were short-lived with the group realizing how much work would go into securing a new location to ensure the employees' safety. The lieutenant nodded his goodbyes as a couple of task force members left the room.

  There were a few updates presented before the lieutenant got to Jill and Marie. There was still no answer as to how the two killers gathered the private medical information on each of their victims from other participants on the task force. Marie had the others in the room following her trail through social media to find more information about the two killers. It brought them no closer to their identity, but it added to the picture of them. Jill then added her intelligence gathered in the search for more information about sovereign citizen members. She ended with a link to the '60 Minutes' episode from four years ago. Jill asked if anyone had taken a look at more of the security videos from the Capitol building. She posed the question as to how the killers knew that Mr. Valencia was in his office at his desk rather than away at a meeting or perhaps even off that day. In the absence of Detective Banks, Lieutenant Moss had no answer to Jill's question. Jill added the question to their list to review and track the killers' movements.

  Jill and Marie planned to look at the tape of the Capitol building after this meeting in hopes of finding the killers surveying the Capitol and the two restaurants before killing those three victims.

  "I don't envy that personnel director," Maria mused. "To have the responsibility of keeping those families safe and on top of that the parents of the teenager are probably hated by the group because wherever they're moved, it's not likely going to be as nice as the resort hotel they were staying at in Reno. I would also think that once the general population knows about these two killers, necessary calls to 9-1-1 emergency operators are going to greatly decline as people are afraid to trust ambulances. Think of the work piling up in the Audit Division with all of these people not at their desks. I wonder whose depositing tax payment checks? Of course they are probably not sent to the Audit Division."

  "I think there will be some form of chaos once people understand the details of these two killers. I'm not sure how much was said in the media about how the deaths occurred. Hopefully the fake ambulance story hasn't been broadcasted by anyone. Worse still, I'm afraid this will ignite some sovereign citizens into exacting their own retribution against the department. And it's not just the city of Sacramento that needs to worry; these tw
o killers can easily reach the adjacent cities where there are over two million people."

  "That's a lot of people who could panic," Marie agreed. "Of course depending on how much information the media has about who the target is, people will either get in their cars and head out of this region or say I don't work for the Department of Revenue so I'm not at any risk."

  "I don't think people are necessarily rational about something like this. When I was in medical school, there was a serial killer on the loose. He would crawl into women's bedroom windows and first rape, then murder them. I took far more precautions than I ever had before and since. I was quite creeped out by the thought of a mass murderer running loose so I would bet that we would see a traffic jam leaving town. Why take a chance; what if you look like one of the victims?"

  "You know, Jill, our cases are getting stranger and stranger. Are there more crazies in the world, or is that the nature of being called in as a consultant?"

  "I think it's the media attention we've gotten from past cases," reasoned Jill. "If people Google us there's a whole body of work of cases that we've solved. I also think that we're dealing with the smartest and most psychologically ill killers. These deaths are not acts of passion, gang initiation rites, or simply random murders. Our killers have planned weeks to months in advance of who they're going to kill and why. They're very targeted in whom they kill which is good for us because it helps identify them and it reduces the general deaths that could be allocated to them."

  "We've drifted into a strange conversation. Tell me where we're heading and what we're going to do when we get there."

  "We need to check two sources for video clips of our killers. There are other cameras in and around the Capitol building and those cameras are administered by the lieutenant's division. There is a second set of cameras in and around city streets that the city operates. I want to see if our killers are surveying their kill sites before they do the deed. I would guess that they had been to each site - the Capitol and the restaurants, several times before they killed their victims to make sure their plan would work fluidly. They now know that we believe them to be serial killers or at least they know that several of their victims have been labeled homicides, so that may make them harder to find," Jill said as they entered the city maintenance yard building where the traffic cameras videos were stored. George Fellows showed them how to view footage and then left.

  "I wish we had Jack here for this search as he is so much faster at looking for a person of interest in a large amount of otherwise tedious footage," Marie bemoaned after beginning the boring task of looking through lots of video.

  "You bring up a good point," Jill agreed. "I wonder if Jack has software that we could use that would run through this looking for certain characteristics? Perhaps we could tell the computer to search for a picture of that ambulance and the two Facebook pictures of the men and see if it can find it. We would have to be careful there because we also want to look for other disguises the two might have used. I'll text Jack and Henrik to see if either has such a program."

  The two women continued viewing the video footage, blurry eyed as though watching a game like rugby or cricket where there were people moving back and forth on a field chasing some kind of a ball, not understanding the rules or the whole point of the sport. Jill looked up and was surprised to see that they had looked for an hour already and had found nothing and they had hours of film to go. She took a moment to look at her e-mail on her phone and discovered responses from both Jack and Henrik.

  After reading each e-mail, Jill looked over at Marie and said, "my best idea in the past couple days was sending that e-mail to Henrik. Essentially both Jack and Henrik said the same thing – facial recognition software would help us look for objects like an ambulance. Henrik went a step farther and had a technician send me a zipped copy of his software for us to use. I feel like we should all go visit him and thank him for assisting us with these cases. I know we're planning a vacation to the United Kingdom in the fall, but I'm so grateful for his assistance that I might take a long weekend with Nathan and visit Henrik just to thank him in person."

  "Like I said earlier, he's done a lot for our case solving and I think your idea of visiting him with Nathan is excellent. So I assume you're going to download this zip file to your laptop and load the software there. How do we then use it on the video footage in front of us?"

  "I haven't a clue and this might warrant a phone call to Jack to see if he can walk us through moving the footage through my laptop. I will not place Henrik's software on this government computer."

  "Why don't I call Jack, while you set up the software," Marie suggested. "It's in English isn't it, rather than German? That's probably a stupid question as Henrik is an international businessman and would know that we needed an English-language version."

  Jill nodded her approval to the question and smiled at Marie's asking and answering her own question. It was a large software program and Henrik had given her access through the cloud to his enormous server capacity. Marie was listening to instructions from Jack and taking notes while Jill was opening up the software for the first time trying to figure out how it worked. She thought it functioned like tax software wherein background computations and rules were hidden by a friendly front facing questionnaire. Marie ended her conversation just about the same time that Jill was ready to go with the software.

  Marie sat back in her chair in front of the video screen and looked over at Jill and said, "When I compare our investigations today to what we were doing five years ago, it feels so much more sophisticated and technological. When you first started consulting, I think you asked for the help of Angela, Jo, or me on about one of four cases. Now you need our assistance with nearly every case. Part of it is a division of labor, but over the past five years each of us has refined our own investigative skills used not in our daily jobs but in our hunt for killers. Weird. Imagine describing those skills on a resume. I'm not sure a prospective employer would believe that I have or need such skills."

  "Are you planning on changing jobs or going to work for another investigator?"

  "No, it's more a statement about the weird work we do during these investigations. I'm happy with my day job and I'm happy working for you as an investigator and my vacation bank account is very happy that you call as often as you do for assistance on your cases."

  "You're getting quite philosophical there," Jill murmured. "This feels like a two glasses of wine conversation and it's only ten-thirty in the morning here. Of course, if we were on-site in Henrik's computer lab, it would be six-thirty in the evening, which is a fine time for wine and any discussion about the vagaries of life. However, as the lead investigator here, I feel compelled to crack the whip and drive us back to the point at hand. What are Jack's instructions?"

  "Since we don't want to install the software on the government computer, he said we're going to have to transfer quantities of video footage onto a flash drive to be read on your laptop. He gave me the names of a few software programs that will consolidate the video files since they can be quite large, to transfer to the flash drive."

  Marie did a quick search of the video computer looking at its directory of programs. She found a program she was looking for and they were able to consolidate two weeks of footage onto the flash drive for use on Jill's computer.

  "Now comes the most important part, what parameters are we searching for?" questioned Jill. "Let's start with a picture of the ambulance used by the two men that committed Manuel Valencia's murder. Fortunately, I have a picture of that saved in my file of information on this case."

  Over the next hour or so, Jill and Marie were able to locate the ambulance in about thirty different film clips from around the city. Each film clip they would zoom in and verify that it was the same ambulance. Fortunately, there were distinctive scratches and dents in both the front and back so they didn't even need to zoom in enough to read the vehicle identification number in the windshield or license plate on the rear.
They learned many things from these photos including the route the ambulance traveled, the seeming comfort with each other of the two occupants of the vehicle, and the practice they made with the vehicle prior to the actual day of the murder. They also noted no instances where their suspects had on different disguises.

  "On how many different days did we see the ambulance?" asked Jill.

  "Three different days."

  "They always had the same uniforms, looked the same, had the same driver, and followed the same route to and from the Capitol building. Did I miss anything in describing the similarities of all these pictures?”

  "I think they changed the license plate for each ambulance day. I wonder if it was the correct license plate? Don't they have different plates for commercial vehicles?"

  After a short search Jill said, "It sounds like in California ambulances just have commercial license plates nothing special. Ambulance drivers have to have a special license but I don't know why our killers would seek one out - it goes against their philosophy."

  "Do you think if we look at more video feed for more streets that we might find where the ambulance was parked? It's a tall and wide vehicle so it's unlikely to fit in your standard garage."

  "It's worth a try. We could be faster if we understood the grid system in Sacramento," agreed Jill. "Let me see if Detective Chang has an officer assigned to that area that might direct us to the right streets to view. Of course, not all of the streets have cameras and we're more likely to run out of cameras before we run out of streets that the ambulance drove on."

  After a short conversation with the detective, she expected the arrival of a traffic cop to assist them with their search. The two women took a break, stretching and walking, waiting for the officer to arrive. They were both afraid to change their search parameters as they didn't want to go over the same video footage again. Fortunately the officer arrived in the time frame promised.