Sex and Murder.com

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  “No.”

  “Where were you and your husband Thursday night into Friday morning, and yesterday afternoon?”

  For the first time, her flow of words stopped. She gazed at them carefully. “What are you trying to say?”

  “We aren’t trying to say anything,” Turner said. “The question is a simple one.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I tried to get a good job and the world went to hell. I am not going to let myself be taken down for life by being accused of doing something to that man. I didn’t kill him. We were here with each other that night and yesterday afternoon.”

  “We’ll need to talk to your husband.”

  “He’s out shopping.”

  “Why not take your complaint to the press?” Fenwick asked.

  “After the press conference fiasco, we tried individual reporters. Nothing worked. The man was rich enough to insulate himself completely. If I had a cum-stained dress or a tape of something, that would be great, but I don’t. I guess they get people trying to trash celebrities all the time. One even came to the house and took some notes, but I think they all dismissed me as a disgruntled job hunter. I think somebody got to them before we did.”

  “Why didn’t you leave town afterwards?”

  “My husband landed a dream job with a financial firm in the Loop. In spite of that, I swore I’d leave town if I ever saw either Lenzati or Werberg again.”

  “Do you know anything about computer hackers or sabotage against Lenzati and Werberg’s company? Especially a guy named Eddie Homan?”

  Her eyes shifted in the classic suspect-lying-mode. “I have nothing to do with that.”

  “Why didn’t you try those investigative shows?” Fenwick asked. “Sixty Minutes, or Twenty-Twenty?”

  “We did. Nothing ever came of it. They didn’t return our calls.”

  Turner and Fenwick left, promising to return to talk to her husband.

  Turner asked, “Why did Lenzati pursue her with such fervor?”

  “She’s hot. She’s smart. She was tough to catch. Part of some games is the thrill of the chase. The harder the fight, the greater the glory.”

  Turner said, “I’d give a great deal to find this Eddie Homan guy. I want to ask him a few questions.”

  19

  It isn’t always necessary to follow someone around. Sometimes you can anticipate their moves. Sometimes you simply miss out. Sometimes you just get lucky, and sometimes you have to take whatever you can get. Sometimes you screw up and miss somebody completely. No matter how awry your planning may go, it really doesn’t make any difference, because you know somebody’s going to die eventually.

  They headed for the LaSalle Street office of Lenzati and Werberg’s accountant. Early Sunday afternoon was quiet in the financial heart of Chicago.

  Claud Vinkers they had met. The accountant, Evelyn Jasper, was a woman in her fifties who seemed to be brisk and efficient. The lawyer wore a dark business suit obviously expensively tailored. The accountant was dressed in a beige suit that was cut perfectly for her model-slender figure.

  They met in a fifty-fourth floor conference room.

  “How can we help you gentlemen?” Jasper asked.

  Turner said, “We’re wondering what financial shape Mr. Lenzati and Mr. Werberg and their company were in.”

  “All were in excellent shape. Their current business had shown a profit every year since it began, something unusual in a dot-com business. Of course, they were wealthy from the sale of the first company. They never had to touch the principal from that sale. That money was wisely invested and continued to grow. Craig in real estate and Brooks in precious metals and municipal bonds.”

  “Who inherits all this?”

  “Craig’s and Brooks’ wills were very similar. Their current company gets a half of everything. It doesn’t need it. If you’re thinking anyone needed their deaths to provide an infusion of money into the business, you would be wrong. There is no motive for murder there.”

  Turner asked, “Who inherits the rest?”

  Vinkers said, “Just like Craig’s. A variety of charities are going to be very happy. None of them knew they were getting the bequests. There is no motive there. Sorry.”

  “The relatives get nothing?” Turner asked.

  “They’d both provided for any living parents some time ago. All the other relatives of either one got the same thing: a thousand dollars. Counting distant cousins of both of them, there would be about thirty thousand. Not much to kill for, if they even knew they were going to get it, which I doubt.”

  Turner asked Vinkers, “We spoke with a woman about her sexual harassment complaint against Mr. Lenzati.”

  The lawyer said, “You’re talking about the rumors on the Internet. I can find you rumors on the Internet that would make even the toughest cops in this city quail, and those are about sweet little grandmothers who love their grandchildren.”

  “Mrs. Korleski says she couldn’t get anybody to listen to her.”

  “I know the whole story there. She was a disappointed job seeker. She wanted to work for the best and most cutting edge computer company in the world, but she didn’t get the job. She was unstable, and she kept harassing him. After a while, we had her investigated. She was a wacko.”

  “She seemed pretty sane to me,” Fenwick said.

  “You’re an expert?” Vinkers asked.

  “Enough to know that I need to be suspicious about anything a lawyer tells me,” Fenwick responded.

  “Nancy Korleski had an ax to grind,” Vinkers said. “We were suspicious that she put a lot of the rumors on the Internet herself. We could never prove it. Whoever was doing it was very clever. We also had trouble with attempted hacking and sabotage—she was suspected.”

  “Are either of you aware of late night sex parties at Lenzati’s house?”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Vinkers said.

  “Why?” Fenwick asked.

  “He was the consummate nerd. Every once in a while he’d squire around a very beautiful and very stupid woman for a short while, but he always was far more interested in his work, not sex.”

  Turner asked, “Do you know anything about a sexual conquest game the two of them played?”

  “This is getting beyond absurd,” Vinkers said. “Although I’ve never heard that bit of ridiculousness before.”

  “Unfortunately,” Fenwick said, “that little bitty-bit of ridiculousness happens to be annoyingly true.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Vinkers said.

  “We discovered a coded scoring record on Lenzati’s computer,” Turner said. “We made a copy before Mr. Werberg could erase it—he tried to. Our computer expert has broken the code, and we’ve talked with a number of people they used for their game.”

  The accountant said, “Unbelievable.”

  The lawyer asked, “They really kept score?”

  Fenwick said, “Yep.”

  Vinkers said, “They must have been out of their minds.”

  “Neither of you knew a thing about it?” Fenwick asked.

  Both insisted they hadn’t.

  Fenwick asked, “Do you have a list of properties that Mr. Lenzati owned?”

  “Yes, for here and around the world. Mostly here. Their two main residences you already know about.”

  “Can we get the addresses for all of those in the metropolitan area? We’ll want to check them out.”

  “You think a real estate deal might have gone bad?” Vinkers asked.

  “No,” Turner said, “but we have reason to believe they had a separate site for their love nest.”

  “I can make copies of the addresses for you,” Jasper said. “They’ll be the places they had to pay taxes on.”

  After she did, Turner and Fenwick left.

  On the way down in the elevator Fenwick said, “He wasn’t killed by a grasping relative waiting for an inheritance.”

  “I could have told you that,” Turner said. “That would have made this too easy, but t
his whole concept of sexual need is making this almost as gritty as you like it.”

  Fenwick said, “I can hear the crowds in the background chanting, ‘more grit, more grit, more grit.’ I want it for the mantra on my tombstone.”

  “That’s ‘epitaph,’ and ain’t nobody chanting in this neighborhood.”

  “That’s because it isn’t gritty enough.”

  “Not very ethnically diverse, either.”

  “Worse luck. And,” Fenwick added, flourishing the list of property addresses as they approached the car, “they did not own half the Loop. Not anywhere near it. Ha!”

  “I’m glad to see you feel triumphant about their lack of real estate holdings. They were still millions of dollars ahead of you or me in this city, and that ain’t bad in this day and age.”

  20

  What I’m really doing is what all the rest of you want to do, getting even. The rest of you are too frightened or too complacent. You’ve got to get beyond the fear. It’s a beautiful, pure country beyond fear.

  It was the middle of the afternoon when they returned to the station. Turner found another box on his desk, small, compact, and tightly wrapped. On the outside were the words Nutty Chocolate with the dancing cocoa bean logo.

  “What is this shit?” he demanded.

  Fenwick said, “How the hell does this keep happening?”

  Bokin from the front desk said, “It came through regular channels, departmental mail.”

  “Somebody in the department is sending this to me?”

  “Hell,” Bokin said, “somebody could walk in off the street and dump it in the interoffice mail, but they’d probably be seen.”

  “Was anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Who the hell?” Turner asked. “If this is a joke, somebody’s going to be very sorry.”

  Bokin said, “You could try and check the places where these are sold.”

  Fenwick said, “This stuff is sold in every grocery store and convenience store in the entire metropolitan area. Do you have any concept of how many that is?” To Bokin’s silence, he said, “A lot.”

  As with the others, Turner sent the package to the crime lab for analysis.

  “Better check the e-mail,” Fenwick said.

  The message this time was simple, “Eat shit and die.” Turner swiveled the computer around so Fenwick could see.

  Turner said, “I think I prefer the chocolate.”

  “We gotta get Micetic down here again,” Fenwick said.

  They called in the beat cops and detectives who had been working on the other interviews. While waiting, Turner phoned the police in the other cities where cops had been killed. In each city it took a while to connect with someone official who had worked on the investigation. It was also Sunday afternoon, and many of the cops were off duty.

  First, Fenwick and Turner confirmed the data they had. Like good cops, they were determined to verify every fact. They weren’t about to let lack of attention to detail screw up a case. Each conversation took time. All the cops who’d been killed had children under twenty living at home. Turner added the detail that they’d all had more than one child. There were no fingerprints that were unidentified at any of the scenes. He was able to confirm that all had been pissed on.

  In each city cops were scrambling to assemble details and cross-reference data based on Morgensen’s story. The reporter was cooperating with all of them.

  “Had any of the cops been getting threats or unsolicited gifts prior to the killing?” Turner asked his contact in Albany.

  “The reporter who broke the story called and asked the same thing. We’re checking it out. We all get threats once in a while. We’ll let you know.”

  After the calls, the detectives finished some paperwork. Fenwick broke the silence saying, “I don’t know if there’s much we can do to prevent an attack by an anonymous serial killer.”

  Turner leaned back in his chair. “I know. I thought of that.”

  A murder by someone not known to the victim was the toughest to solve. Discounting gang shootings, most murders are committed by someone who knows the victim, and are therefore relatively easy to solve.

  Fenwick said, “Locking up the usual suspects isn’t going to cut it?”

  “Not.”

  “Does the attack on Dwayne fit into this? I asked about attacks on cops in those other cities before the ones that succeeded. I got two yeses and one no.”

  Turner said, “I got two noes and one yes. It could have been just some random violence against a cop. The stabbings are still out of the ordinary. Violence against cops occurs almost daily. Being a cop doesn’t prevent violence from happening to you.”

  Fenwick said, “All these stabbings combined with all this piss? These can’t be just coincidences.”

  “What’s the last crime coincidence you believed in?” Turner asked.

  “Goldilocks and the three bears,” Fenwick said. “And the bitch was guilty.”

  “But that wasn’t a coincidence,” Turner pointed out.

  “Close enough for me,” Fenwick replied.

  “We still have no proof that our cop stabbing and Lenzati’s and Werberg’s deaths are connected to each other, or to the other murders around the country.”

  “We need facts,” Fenwick said.

  Turner and Fenwick met with the cops who’d been interviewing other possible sexual partners. The beat cops had questioned seven women and eight men. They had found no one who admitted knowing Lenzati or Werberg. They’d been working on the more common names on the list. Turner figured this was all they’d get.

  Turner said, “I want to concentrate on the crossovers we’ve got. Two couples in the area made it with each of them. We talked to Korleski. The other was that couple that wasn’t home earlier. We need to try them again.”

  “Questioning people about kinky sexual practices is what I’ve dreamed of being able to do,” Fenwick said.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Turner said.

  Before they left, they asked Commander Molton to permit two clerks to research every murder along Interstate 90 east of Chicago during the month prior to the deaths of the detectives in the listed cities, and to examine every injury to every cop in any city along Interstate 90.

  “Why?” Molton asked. “That’s an awful lot of possible murders and injuries.”

  “Looking for patterns,” Turner said. “There probably aren’t any, and there’s always the possibility of random chance intruding, but I want to check as much as we can.”

  Fenwick added, “Get Micetic to help: He’s got a computer. Let him use it for something besides surfing porn sites.”

  “Is that what he does?” Molton asked.

  “Isn’t that what they all do?” Turner asked.

  “And you never do?” Fenwick asked.

  “I’ve got a block on the computer so the kids can’t. It’s too much of a hassle to figure out how to undo it.”

  They grabbed fast food at Beef on the Hoof and ate it as they drove.

  The couple they wanted to interview lived in Berwyn, a near western suburb of Chicago. They took the Harlem Avenue exit from the Eisenhower Expressway and turned south. They turned left on Cermak Road and drove several blocks east, parking in front of a solid home of refurbished red brick. Alberto Zengre and his wife Conchetta were listed as having had sex with Lenzati and Werberg over five years ago.

  Steam billowed out the door when it opened. A man holding a squirming, nearly naked three-year-old glared at them. After IDs and introductions, the man said he was Alberto. Turner thought he had the most soulful puppy dog eyes he had ever seen. He was five foot six, and looked like he was in his mid-twenties. He had a dark mustache and hair cut close to the scalp on the sides, with a longer dark covering on top. His skintight black T-shirt and the left leg of his faded skintight jeans were almost completely soaked. The jeans hung low on narrow hips. He wore white socks and no shoes.

  Zengre had a mellow tenor voice. “If you want to talk, w
e’ll have to do it while I give the kids a bath. My wife’s mother is coming to get them soon to baby-sit. If I don’t have them cleaned up, I’m dead.” He scooped up a one-year-old from a playpen in the living room and led them to a bathroom on the first floor. All the furniture looked to be about five years old. At the time of purchase it must have been of the highest quality. Now it looked as if it had years of heavy use. The wall hangings were religious icons: a Jesus on a crucifix with a loincloth so low on his hips as to be nearly obscene, holy cards blown up and framed, pictures of the Virgin Mary in various poses, and one framed picture of a pieta. The floors were polished oak and looked as if they’d been restored.

  As Zengre ran some water, he asked, “What’s this about?”

  Turner said, “We’re investigating the deaths of Craig Lenzati and Brooks Werberg.” He showed him pictures of the two men. Zengre’s eyes flicked from one to the other of the cops. He tested the water, finished undressing the three-year-old, and placed him in the two inches of water in the tub. Chatting soothingly, he handed the child a brightly-colored ball, a pink plastic cube, and a bar of soap. The latter immediately skittered away. The child happily splashed about with the other two items. Zengre sat on the edge of the tub. He placed the one-year-old in a small basin inside the tub into which Zengre gently poured a stream of luke-warm water from a plastic container.

  “Did you know either of these two men?” Turner asked.

  “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think I did.”

  “Which one did you know?” Turner asked.

  “Both, actually.”

  Turner asked, “When was the last time you saw either of them?”

  “Five, maybe six years ago.”

  “Not yesterday afternoon, or Friday morning, or the night before that?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you two nights ago?” Fenwick asked.

  “Home with my wife and children.”

  “And yesterday morning?”

  “I got up early to get in the unemployment line. It took until nearly noon.”

  “How did you meet them?”

  “I met Werberg when I was part of a crew delivering some furniture to his house.”