Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  As at his workplace, Wilton’s apartment had a view of the lake—so close that he hadn’t bothered with blinds on his windows. His only possible voyeurs would be seagulls or someone with a boat and one hell of a telephoto lens.

  Jerry Wilton had apparently used the guest room as an office. There they found Herald circulation reports, advertising revenue statements, a laptop, and all manner of memos, printed e-mails, meeting agendas, and notes scribbled on Post-its, bar tabs, and the occasional paper towel. The organization Jerry Wilton applied to his physical shape didn’t extend to his paperwork, and the room drowned in it. Maggie wondered if any item there could explain his death, and if so, how she would be able to tell.

  She returned to the body.

  “Whaddya think, Maggie?” Riley asked. Jack was back to pretending he barely knew her. He had even dropped her a block from the Justice Center so it would appear that she had walked from her loft as usual. Not that she blamed him. She felt every bit as invested in keeping their secret as he did.

  “Same as before. Strangled—there’s one furrow—and then hung. Tossed the strap over the top bar, looped once around the frame here and gave it a heave-ho.”

  “Not as easy as tossing off the printer platform.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Give me a lever—then he took the guy’s own knife from that block in the kitchen and tried a little disembowelment.”

  “What’s the point?” Jack asked. “Why cut up someone who’s already dead?”

  Riley added, “Especially if you’re trying to make it look like a suicide. We’d hardly buy the guy gutting himself when he’s swinging from a rope.”

  “Because we already knew he isn’t,” Maggie said. “He tried that with Robert Davis, but we knew it wasn’t suicide but homicide. We would know this wasn’t suicide, either. He added the slashing just to make it clear that he knows we know.”

  “You’re making my head swim,” Riley said.

  Jack said, “He’s playing with us.”

  Maggie said, “Yeah.”

  Chapter 15

  Maggie taped the clothing—just the back, obviously the front was a lost cause, soaked in still-damp blood—where it hung. Technically this was not kosher, since the Medical Examiner’s investigator hadn’t arrived yet, but she wanted the most pristine sample possible before the clothing came into contact with body snatchers and their sheets and bags. Since she didn’t move the body, it couldn’t really be considered molestation of same. And she doubted they would care anyway. Much.

  Under the thin T-shirt, Jerry Wilton’s body felt like a slab of marble.

  “Who found him?” she asked.

  “Buddy who lives on another floor came over to watch the game. He knocks, the door swings open. These places were built to look fancy, but some things are cheaper than they appear, and the door never fit the jamb quite right. You have to pull it to get it to latch. Apparently the killer didn’t know that, or didn’t care.”

  Maggie looked around at the fashionably sparse apartment. “No signs of a struggle, but he’s got this open area here, space cleared to work out in. He could have thrashed around by the weights here and not been able to reach anything to kick over. Or the killer put everything back. The weights are willy-nilly, but they might have been like that anyway. Or”—she stretched upward, standing on her toes to reach the back of Wilton’s head with her gloved fingers—“someone used one of those weights to clock him in the skull.”

  “That makes the strangling part go so much more smoothly,” Riley said.

  “It does indeed. But I can’t be sure. We’ll have to wait for the pathologist.”

  “What about the strap?”

  “Looks the same as with Davis. White nylon, and clean.”

  “He really wants us to know it’s him. The same guy.”

  Maggie said, “And he doesn’t care about appearing premeditated. Maybe, maybe, he was carrying a strap around the Herald offices for some other reason and got into a fight with Davis. But he wouldn’t still be toting it around afterward, and he certainly wouldn’t have brought it here except for the express purpose of doing exactly what he did.”

  “Boats,” Riley said.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking, who uses rope for anything anymore? Especially clean white nylon like that. Tying up boats, that’s the only place you still use rope.”

  “True. But you can still get it in any hardware store.”

  Jack had been poking through the papers in Wilton’s home office and walked in holding some clippings and an index card. The clippings were the Herald stories on the alternative high school, written by L. Russo. “A guy with no kids interested in education? And this—” Jack held out the index card. Right after oil change and M Bday, it read: TM mtg GL 9:30.

  “Fascinating,” Riley said. “What the hell does it mean?”

  “It means the Herald’s circulation manager was talking to someone from TM. TransMedia.”

  “Who’s TransMedia?” Maggie asked.

  Riley said, “The hated enemy, according to Correa. But hardly a secret. He had the TM exec’s social schedule committed to memory.”

  Jack studied the index card as if it were the Rosetta Stone. “Well, there are secrets and then there are secrets.”

  “That’s profound, partner.”

  “Come look at this.”

  They followed him into the home office.

  He sat at a wide, flat desk and put on a pair of reading glasses that made him look more like a professor to Maggie than a cop . . . or a killer. She wondered if that had been the Jack his victims had seen . . . until they didn’t. He had already separated pages into two piles. He tapped one with a finger.

  “These all seem to be circulation reports printed off the Herald’s system—same dates in the upper left corner, same number in the bottom right that I’m guessing is the asset tag for his printer. February fourth—311,605. February fourth Dig—I’m guessing that means online hits or views or whatever—296, 462. February fifth—that’s a Sunday—431,465. Digital 354,002.”

  “Who says newspapers are dying?” Riley said.

  “Out of 3.8 million people in the area? Those aren’t great numbers.”

  Riley argued, “That’s people. You have to go by families. A house only gets one paper.”

  “Yeah, true—anyway, my point is, then we have this stack. No dates of the printouts in the corner. No asset numbers in the other corner. Different font. Paper looks like the paper in that printer in the corner over there, but then copy paper is copy paper is copy paper.”

  “Mr. Sherlock Holmes here,” Riley said.

  She watched over his shoulder.

  “These also seem to be circulation numbers. We find February fourth—788,528. Digital, February fourth—902,549. February fifth—1,599,610. Digital—”

  “He was cooking the books,” Maggie said.

  “Looks that way.”

  “And then the killer found out.”

  Jack said, “Or the killer didn’t want anyone else to find out.”

  “But then he left the papers here, for us to find.”

  Riley said, “Or the killer was cooking the books, and Wilton found out. That’s a powerful motive.”

  Maggie said, “Still, then he leaves the evidence here.”

  Jack said, “Didn’t Correa say this guy met with his TransMedia counterpart in Atlantic City?”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “Maybe we should ask him which set of numbers Wilton gave him.”

  “But we still don’t know when Wilton found out what. And where does Davis fit in? He was a copy editor. What would he have to do with circulation reports?”

  The three considered this in silence.

  Jack pulled over yet another series of papers. “Then there’s this. Stock reports for the Herald mixed in with stock reports for TransMedia. No cooking there—these are printed off Hoovers.com. No comparison, either. TM is trading at thirty-three dollars a share. Herald Enterprises is four d
ollars and thirteen cents.”

  Riley said, “But if TM bought it—”

  “Stock would soar. Or at least vastly improve.”

  “Maybe Wilton was looking to make a killing and retire to Aruba.”

  “Dunno. If you buy stock in your own company, is that insider trading?”

  “You’re asking me? To me, stock is stuff that moos and gets ground up into hamburger.”

  Maggie read the framed certificates on the wall. “He knew numbers. CPA, MBA from OSU—not surprising that he would be paying attention to the stock prices.”

  Riley snapped his fingers. “Davis’s widow said he’d been talking about someone named Wilson. Could she have heard Wilton instead?”

  Jack said, “Yeah, but if Davis and Wilton were working at cross-purposes, why are they both dead?”

  “Cell phone,” Riley said.

  “Can’t find it,” Jack told him. “Not even the charger for it. Three old models in the drawer over there.”

  Riley looked at Maggie.

  “It’s not in his pocket,” she said.

  “Home phone?”

  “Doesn’t have one,” Jack told him.

  “Kids these days. Maybe it’s in his car.”

  “Nobody leaves their phone in their car,” Maggie said. “And he didn’t have keys in his pocket, either. They weren’t in the kitchen. There’s a basketful of them stuck in one of the drawers, but from the dust I’d say they were old spares.”

  Riley dispatched the patrol officer to ask the buddy from the other floor what Wilton drove and where it might be right then. Then he rubbed his head, a set of fingers on each temple, and walked around in a small circle. “So this guy kills people, then takes their phones. He leaves everything else—Davis’s layouts, Wilton’s laptop. We’ve got to see what’s on that laptop.”

  “No,” Maggie said.

  “We can’t wait for EI,” he whined, referring to the electronics investigators who handled the complex tasks of cracking computers, cell phones, tablets, GPSs, and all the other gizmos that had become so necessary to everyday life. “They’ll take days. A week, probably.”

  “If you so much as turn it on, you might trigger an erasure. This is a young guy, probably tech savvy, maybe with something to hide. He might have thought ahead to an SEC investigation. He could have set a booby trap.”

  Riley sighed.

  “And on top of that, Zoe would yell at you. You don’t want that.”

  “All right. At least I got to hear you say ‘booby.’”

  She gave him the expected look of exasperation.

  Jack said, “The cell phone thing is weird, but if the motive is some sort of shady business dealings, then why leave it here for us to find? This could all still come down to somebody French-kissing somebody else’s wife, and the business end of it is irrelevant to the murders.”

  Riley said, “The difference in the circulation reports is definitely interesting. Something is up at that paper—we need to figure out who was trying to fool whom. And who found out about it.”

  “That’s profound,” Jack said, “partner.”

  “Obviously the cell phones are important to this guy. We need to get the search warrants in motion so we can see what he’s seeing. I’ll go write them. You want to stay here and poke around some more?”

  Jack surveyed the room, the heaps of paperwork he hadn’t yet touched. Then they both looked at Maggie.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Chapter 16

  The body snatchers came and removed the corpse of Jerry Wilton, and a patrol officer remained stationed at the door. No one disturbed Jack and Maggie as they sorted through Wilton’s home. They checked Wilton’s Lexus but found it locked and undisturbed. The victim had kept his car even neater than his home, and no cell phone rested on the seat. They couldn’t do any more without a key, so Maggie and Jack had returned to the quiet apartment.

  They did not use the silence for further tête-à-têtes. Maggie supposed they had already addressed any issue they could and said anything they could say about this deeply weird situation. She did not believe that Jack had not killed Ronald Soltis—he had no reason to tell her the truth and every reason not to—but she didn’t quite believe that he had. Aside from the similar MO, she had no proof of his involvement. She mentally shelved the topic until more evidence appeared. For two hours they barely spoke, other than to make comments such as: “I’m putting these here.”

  Jerry Wilton had not only been monitoring the Herald’s circulation, but—reasonably—that of other newspapers as well. He had a semiannual report from the NAA, Newspaper Association of America, showing how dailies in other major cities were faring. Most of them seemed much more robust than the Herald.

  “Jack.”

  “Mmm?”

  “This circulation report comes out every six months. This one is dated over four months ago.”

  “So? He probably sends the figures to the NAA or whatever, so he could send whatever he wanted.”

  “But at the bottom it says that all numbers are independently verified by outside auditors. A firm called Media Audit Incorporated.”

  He got it. “So if Wilton had been cooking up the circulation data, he’d only have another month and a half, say, to keep it up before the next report comes out. But are figures automatically audited, or only when requested? That could buy him a few more months.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One way or another, he couldn’t have kept it up for long.”

  They sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, stacks of paper between them. Problem was, they had very little idea what any of it meant.

  Some papers mentioned TransMedia. Wilton had circled some of the circulation data and written TM next to the circles. He had also taken interest in the vagaries of their stock prices.

  Maggie said, “We don’t know if Wilton was the one cooking books, or he’s the one who discovered it.”

  “Or whom he told either way.”

  “And the only people we can ask might be coconspirators.”

  “Who will know that this is no longer a routine investigation of a suicide. The guts on the floor in there kind of made that clear.”

  “On the other hand, coconspirators now have a motive to talk—if they think they might be next.”

  “Unless they’re the ones doing the killing,” he pointed out.

  * * *

  They moved to the Herald offices, where the printing crew toiled through the run. Rebecca, the security guard, let them in with a weary air as if she had been expecting them. It turned out she had—Managing Editor Franklin Roth had beat them to the place and waited in his office to assist. The older man looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week and had aged at least five years since the previous evening. But he was still an ex-crime beat reporter. “What the hell is going on?” he asked without preamble.

  “Someone is killing your employees,” Jack told him. “We need to find out who and why.”

  Roth asked a number of questions as he guided them to Wilton’s office, again betraying the who-what-where-when pattern of reporters everywhere. He got little for his troubles, however. Jack would only tell him that both Davis and Wilton had been murdered by person or persons unknown. He did not describe Wilton’s gory tableau. Maggie said nothing.

  Roth pulled out a set of keys as they walked. Apparently the main doors of the building had gone to the more modern proximity-sensor key cards, but the upper offices that ringed the perimeter of the atrium-like space still opened the old-fashioned way. Maggie thought the clear Plexiglas barrier and railing quite fashionable until she stopped and tried to look down on the reporters’ bullpen. The barrier only reached to the upper thigh, and the clear acrylic railing wobbled when she put her hands on it. She jumped back in alarm.

  “Yeah,” Roth said as he paused in front of Wilton’s office. “Stylish design. Absolutely useless in keeping people from plunging twenty or thirty feet. Luckily OSHA inspectors are more concerned ab
out people falling into the printing press than falling over the railing.”

  Maggie stayed to the center of the walkway but couldn’t resist a cautious peek over. The reporters’ desks appeared even more chaotic when viewed from above.

  “I don’t get it,” Roth said, more to himself than to them. “Davis was a copy editor. Wilton was a numbers man, frankly, a bean counter. A downstairs man. They probably never even met each other.”

  “Downstairs?” Maggie asked. Clearly the rank-and-file reporters were downstairs, where the higher-ups with private offices could gaze down at their hive of activity like senators at the Colosseum.

  “The business and writing sides of a newspaper were always kept separate. Publishers and advertising execs were one side—we call that downstairs, I forget what paper that originated with. Then the reporters and editors were the other half—upstairs. There used to be a Chinese wall in between the two floors, so that editors and writers could report what needed to be reported without worrying about ticking off an advertiser. But those days are long over and publishers and editors are essentially the same thing. Now I edit this paper while caring very much what the advertisers think. I have to. Or there isn’t going to be a paper at all.”

  Roth had opened a door bearing a number instead of Wilton’s name—183. Maggie took one glance and knew this could not be the domain of the more than passably tidy Wilton. His home office might not have been perfectly organized, but it didn’t look the way this did, as if a maelstrom had passed through.

  “I think someone beat us to it,” she said.

  Chapter 17

  Riley was off trying to locate members of Jerry Wilton’s family while Jack knocked on the door of Herald reporter L. Russo. Not only had Wilton’s home office contained clippings of Russo’s articles, but his office at the paper had as well. Either a shut-down alternative high school had been very important to Jerry Wilton, or L. Russo had.