The Cleanest Kill

by Rick Reed

  He parked behind Two Jakes and was energized now. When he walked inside he could smell freshly cooked bacon and homemade biscuits. Jake Brady hailed him from the kitchen. “You’d better get in there before your partner eats the tables and chairs.”

  “What? Again?” Jack said and Brady chuckled.

  Angelina was sitting behind a bank of computer screens, a BLT sandwich in one hand, typing with the other. Corporal Tim Morris had arrived and was arm wrestling Liddell for the last piece of bacon and Angelina was laughing at their antics. A woman had just been murdered, but Jack didn’t see this behavior as callous. This case was a political hot potato to begin with and it had just taken a deadly bent. That made it all the more important for the team to be able to blow off steam. The possible endgame of the cases could mean an end to any one, or all of their careers.

  “All right, you can have the last damn piece,” Morris said, and rubbed at his arm where Liddell had given him a noogie.

  Jack interrupted them. “We still have a guard on Reina Day. She’ll be in the hospital a little while. That’s good for us because we can keep a better eye on her.”

  Liddell said, “We’ve got to get ahead of this, pod’na.”

  “Here’s the plan,” Jack said. “We take the gloves off. Politics or no politics. If we have to arrest the damn governor, we do it. We can apologize later if we’re wrong. Right now, I just want to shake the bushes, start fires, bring the fight back to the bastard that’s doing this. I believe attacking Reina was a warning and when we didn’t drop the investigation, he or she decided to up the ante. You’d better believe the pressure will come down hard now. I don’t care how the news media got Mrs. Day’s story. I want their next story to be that we strung this guy up from a streetlight.”

  Liddell raised his hand. “Are we going to talk to Double Dick now?”

  “Damn right,” Jack said. “Angelina, can you give me a list of people we’ll need to talk to? Addresses, phone numbers, employment, and the like?”

  “Way ahead of you, boss man.” She handed him a sheaf of papers. “Current address, personal info, telephones, employment, and vehicle they drive, including registered license plates. I’m still running criminal and tax histories, phone records.”

  “If I wasn’t married, I’d kiss you,” Jack said.

  “If you kissed me, Mark would kick your ass,” she said and everyone chuckled. “You seem extra-happy this morning. What’s up?”

  Jack was absently flipping through the papers.

  Angelina nudged him and said, “Hey. You seem extra-happy.”

  Jack put the papers down. “What? I’m just happy. And this is good work, Angelina. Just what we needed.”

  “You’re never happy,” Angelina said. “Where’s Jack? Who the hell are you, mister?”

  Liddell said, “Leave him alone. He got lucky last night.”

  Jack turned his back to them. “I’m trying to read this damn stuff and make some connections.”

  “There’s the Jack we all know and love,” Liddell said. “Welcome back, pod’na.”

  Jack turned around. “You want to know why I’m happy? I’ll tell you.”

  Angelina said, “Let’s hear it.”

  Jack put the papers on the table and picked up a mug of coffee. He took his time and sipped at his coffee.

  “Jesus, Jack! Say something,” Angelina said.

  “I asked Katie to marry me last night.”

  Liddell wrapped Jack in a ferocious hug, spilling coffee everywhere. “My man.”

  Angelina turned it into a group hug and kissed Jack on the cheek. “I assume she said yes. I’m happy for you two.”

  Jack struggled to extricate himself and when he could breathe, he said, “I’m going to be a daddy too. We’re—she’s—pregnant.”

  “Damn, you work fast,” Angelina said admiringly. “You did all that last night?”

  Jack allowed them to squeeze him to death again and when they stopped, he said, “Okay, let’s get back to work. I want to go home sometime and see my soon-to-be and very-expectant wife.”

  “I’m gonna be his best man,” Liddell informed Angelina.

  “Okay, let’s get to work. You’re on, Angelina. Tell us what’s in this stack of papers that you didn’t let me concentrate on,” Jack said.

  “Well, my news isn’t as good as yours, but I think it’s a step forward. I numbered the cases. Max, Harry, Mrs. Day—I put Reina in a separate category. I created a master list of every name mentioned in the reports. These names are broken down by the cases they were involved in and I’ve got their personal information. Some of the names came up in three or more cases, so I put these on top. The last pages are the victims and their personal information.”

  Jack was flipping through the pages while she talked. They weren’t assigned the case, but he was glad she had included the murder of Mrs. Day. There were a couple of dozen names that came up more than once. He was surprised there wasn’t more, since they now had three murder investigations and a shooting.

  Ted Mattingly’s name was on three of the cases, Max, Harry, and Reina. He was also someone the family trusted. He would have access to all of them, but what would his motive have been to hurt them?

  “Angelina, can you dig a little deeper into Ted Mattingly’s past? I want financial, lawsuits, anything you can find that may have connected him in some way to Max or Harry,” Jack said.

  “You want me to search for drugs? Gunrunning? That kind of stuff?” she asked.

  “See if he has had a big infusion of cash at any time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you got the sheriff’s department reports on Amelia Day’s murder?” Jack asked her.

  She handed him a small stack of papers. “This is what I have on her so far. Elkins hasn’t filed the offense report yet and there’s not much except a report entered by one of their crime scene guys. You might want to take a gander at that.”

  Jack found the report. “They recovered the slug that killed Mrs. Day,” he said. “It was buried in the living room wall.”

  Corporal Morris said, “I’ll call them and see if they can get a rush on the comparison with what you gave me this morning.”

  “They have a .50 caliber shell casing too,” Jack said.

  “Got it.”

  “And can you tell them and the state lab that the results are not to be released to anyone but you, me, or Sergeant Elkins?

  “And if you can find any paperwork on Max’s or Harry’s case, that would be something.”

  “I better get downtown and get on this,” Morris said and left.

  Jack flipped through the scant file on Mrs. Amelia Day and noticed his own name on that list.

  “I’m on here?” he asked Angelina.

  “You were the last person to see her alive,” Angelina answered. “Sergeant Elkins will put that fact in his supplementary report and on the offense report, so I thought you should be on the list.”

  She was right, of course. The last person to see the victim alive, the one to find the body, and the relatives or significant others, were always the first suspects. He waited for her to continue.

  “This Olson guy is a weird duck,” she said. “He retired as a sergeant but has a substantial bank account. Over 200 K. I checked and didn’t find a 401K plan and I know he didn’t get much from his retirement pay. He owns his house. Owns his car, albeit it’s fifteen years old. He’s divorced. Four times. He paid support of nine-hundred dollars for twenty years until about ten years ago. I checked his exes out and they don’t stand out in any way, except they were stupid to marry this greaseball.”

  “Have you met him?” Jack asked.

  “No. I put his picture in your papers there. He’s a greaseball.”

  Jack flipped to Olson’s photo. He was a greaseball.

  “Mattingly is divorced and has
one child. I say child, but she’s twenty now and in school at Purdue. Psych major. She’s doing pretty good too. Hey, maybe she can talk to the Yeti and find out why he wants to be your bridesmaid.”

  “Ha-ha,” Liddell said, and Jack made a twirling motion with his finger for her to continue.

  “I’ve got a lot on Mattingly in your file, but I will need to do some more digging. But I just started my check on Mrs. Day and, financially speaking, she’s had a hard time. She didn’t get squat from the sale of her husband’s gun shop. It barely paid for Reina’s medical school training. She was on Social Security and was living on that and a small life insurance policy from Harry. There’s a second mortgage on the house, but it wasn’t much. I couldn’t trace what happened to that money. Nothing from Max, as you’d expect. I don’t think parents had life insurance on their kids back in your day.”

  Jack said, “My parents had life insurance on me.”

  “Well, pardon me.”

  “Did the gun shop have insurance?” Liddell asked.

  “Good question,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, but Harry let it lapse and they didn’t pay out,” Angelina said.

  Jack filled Angelina in on the conversation they had with Sergeant Mattingly yesterday to bring her up to date.

  “So, Sergeant Mattingly was bribed to drop the investigation,” she said.

  “Technically he wasn’t assigned to the investigations. It was more a threat than a bribe. He was assigned to the area where Max was killed, so it follows that he would be first to arrive there. He was assigned to check on traffic and crowd control down at the river on the night Harry was killed. We can’t check that because there are no dispatch records that go back that far. According to Officer Steinburg, when Reina was attacked Mattingly showed up after he’d heard her name called in to dispatch. Understandable, also. But what doesn’t jibe is that motor patrol sergeants, like detective sergeants, tend to stay available at headquarters most of the time. They were dispatched on runs when they were requested or a sergeant was needed. Mattingly seems to do patrol as well as administrative duties.”

  Liddell said, “We’ve known Mattingly a while, pod’na. You can’t really suspect him, can you?”

  “I suspect everyone until they aren’t a suspect,” Jack answered.

  Jake Brady had attached a large whiteboard to a wall in the war room and a couple of blue markers were on a table nearby. Jack picked up a marker and printed on the board:

  VICTIMS

  1-MAX 2-HARRY 3-REINA 4-AMELIA

  SUSPECTS:

  MATTINGLY (1-2-3)

  R. DICK (1)

  CARL NEEDHAM (1)

  DENNIS JAMES (1)

  LEAD INVESTIGATORS:

  DET. DAN OLSON (1-2)

  MURPHY AND BLANCHARD (3-4)

  OTHERS:

  CAPT. THOMAS DICK(1-2)

  PROPERTY ROOM SERGEANT

  ??

  Jack turned to Angelina and asked, “Do you have the name of the property room sergeant during the first two cases?”

  “Deceased,” she said. “I ran the name but there wasn’t anything that stood out.”

  “What’s missing?” Jack asked the group.

  Angelina said, “Obviously, the names of the crime scene techs involved. And the crime scene logs, so you know who was at each scene. But you asked Morris for all that. If there’s something there, he may find it. I can’t tell from the personnel records you gave me. Keep in mind that computers weren’t used for the first two cases. Someone will have to go through records manually.”

  Jack told her, “Sergeant Mattingly said he found parts of broken beer bottles and a bloody tire iron at the cemetery where Max’s car would have been. We checked with the property room and the evidence from that index card had been blacked and the property marked destroyed.”

  “You don’t destroy evidence in a murder case, do you?” Angelina asked.

  “Not supposed to,” Liddell said. “But a lot of things are missing from these cases. I doubt Olson did much work.”

  “Greaseball,” Angelina said as if that explained that.

  “These are the next people we need to talk to,” Jack said. He drew a red circle around Carl Needham, Dennis James, and Double Dick’s names.

  “Dennis James is going to be the tough one,” Angelina pointed out. “I found a lot of information, but I couldn’t find him. He has a record for criminal recklessness with a handgun. I pulled the affidavit of probable cause on that one and it’s in the file. It was a Smith and Wesson .357. But there’s something else more interesting in there.”

  Jack sat down and spread the sheets of paper on the table in front of him. Angelina had been very thorough. He wouldn’t have expected anything less. Dennis James’s data trail started with his Indiana driver’s license. The address on the license was in the North Park area. The license was suspended and had expired a year ago. He had a police record. Drunk driving, battery, public intoxication, public indecency, possession of marijuana, and then about eight years ago Dennis decided to step it up in his criminal career: Possession and distribution of heroin, possession of cocaine. He’d somehow managed to get into a rehab program for the drug charges. He’d walked away from a rehab program and committed a home invasion robbery and that’s where the criminal reckless charge came from. He was sentenced to four years and did two. He was released and promptly rearrested and convicted of felon in possession of a handgun. A .50 caliber semiautomatic Desert Eagle.

  “Do we know where that gun is now?” Jack asked and Angelina shrugged. Jack remembered the condition of the property room and doubted the gun would be found even if it hadn’t been destroyed.

  “He just moved to the top of the list. We need to run him down before he talks to Needham or Dick,” Jack said.

  “You think these three boys are behind all of this?” Liddell asked.

  “We have to start somewhere. We need to find Dennis James. Let’s concentrate on Max’s murder for now. I think that will lead us to the other killings, including the attack on Reina Day. Either these boys are involved or they’re not. We need to know.”

  “James is my choice,” Liddell said. “He has the background. He likes .50 caliber handguns. He’s a troublemaker with a drug problem. And he’s disappeared.”

  Angelina got busy on the computer and said, “I’m with Liddell on this one. I just found that James closed his Old National Bank account on Main Street two days ago. Twenty thousand was deposited in the account the morning he closed it. He doesn’t have credit cards, employment records, and I can’t find a vehicle registered to him. His cell phone number was on his bank account, but it’s been discontinued. As of two days ago he went dark again.”

  “I’ll call a friend at the bank,” Jack said. “We can get security camera footage of him when he closed the account.”

  “Where does a guy like that get twenty thousand dollars?” Angelina asked.

  “Good question. Let’s find out.” Jack picked up the phone to call his banker friend before he realized it was six in the morning.

  “Drugs,” Liddell said. “James made a big score.”

  “I don’t think his buyer would deposit the money into his account. I may be wrong. Angelina, can you call narcotics to see what they have on him? Everyone knows what we’re doing, but you can tell them it’s for a background check for one of your clients. I don’t want to release any more of this than I have to.”

  She jotted a note.

  “Okay, on to Needham. Tell me what you can about him,” Jack said to Angelina.

  “What I have is in the folder,” Angelina said. “He’s in Columbus. He’s a bigwig now. An Ohio state senator and a lawyer.”

  “Of course he is,” Jack said.

  “He went to law school in Ohio. Worked for a big firm and later ran for office. Got elected. He has a private practice, but
I don’t see where it made much money last year. I pulled his financials and the guy is loaded. I mean, really loaded. No wife. No kids. Parents were killed in a house fire here in Evansville seventeen years ago. I’m checking to see if he inherited. He owns a horse farm just outside Columbus. No property here in town that I can find.”

  “What’s his zodiac sign?” Liddell asked with a smile.

  Angelina ignored him. “His current address is in the file. He has an office in the state office building in Columbus. The address is in the file. The address for his law practice is his home.” She struck a few more keys. “And he has a federal firearms license, Ohio unlimited concealed carry permit, NRA member. He’s a big voice in the recent movement to train and arm teachers.”

  “Any guns registered to Needham?”

  “A Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver.”

  Jack was incredulous. “The guy can legally buy and own a fully automatic arsenal and he registers a peashooter revolver.”

  Angelina said, “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t own an arsenal. He’s just careful about what he registers.”

  “We’ll do Needham before we get to Double Dick, but we need to focus on Dennis James,” Jack said.

  “The autopsy on Mrs. Day will be this morning, pod’na. Maybe we should go to that and while we’re there we can see if they have any records on Max or Harry’s autopsies.”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” Jack said.

  Angelina said she was going to run home and check on Mark, who was in bed with the flu. She reminded them she had a husband and a life.

  That reminded Jack of how his life had changed overnight. He was engaged and he was going to be a father. Maybe Kate or Katie if the baby is a girl. Or Maureen, after Katie’s mother. If the kid was like him that would lead to fistfights. He’d have to teach him to fight dirty.

  Chapter 23

  Dennis James was living the dream. He’d closed his old account at the bank as he’d been advised and took the money out in cash. Twenty thousand large was a lot of cash to carry around, especially in some of the places he went. He’d gone to the bus station and stored half the money in a locker. Then on to the casino, where he promptly lost a little over five thousand at the craps tables. One of the cocktail waitresses—Suzy, her name was Suzy—had kept bringing him drinks and she let him feel her up a little. He knew it was a ploy to get his money, but he didn’t care. Suzy was cute. Then he’d won a thousand and decided to quit. Four grand down the toilet. He’d never do that again. It was a shame. He could have bought Suzy and a room for the night with that much.