Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (17 page)

“So much for security,” Turner said.

“Doing that took more than a couple of minutes,” Fenwick said.

“Wrecking the console might have, but not grabbing the tapes themselves,” Micetic said. “You just rip ’em all out.” He went back to his work.

Turner said, “We’re going to have to push for quick DNA results on both of these deaths. If each of these guys had sex with their killers, then it is possible to assume we’ve got two killers. Lenzati is presumably straight and would have had sex with a woman. Werberg, from our information, is gay. Assumedly he’d have had sex with a guy. Unless the sexual residue on Lenzati was simply from beating off.”

“Maybe we’ve got an anti-masturbation killer,” Fenwick said.

Turner replied, “He’d wear himself out trying to murder everybody on the planet. At any rate, we don’t have proof that Werberg was having sex with his killer. Although I doubt that he entertained visitors in his underwear.”

Fenwick said. “We might as well go over some of this computer stuff right now. It could be the key to this whole thing.”

“Unless it’s sex,” Turner said.

“Give me some time here,” Micetic said. “I can begin getting information for you in fifteen minutes or so.”

While Micetic worked, they examined the rest of the upstairs and downstairs thoroughly. They had the sheets and pillows from the master bedroom and the cushions from the living room furniture taken to be examined for possible traces of DNA.

Next to the master bedroom suite they found a room with leather-lined walls and lit by electric lights with nineteenth century wall fixtures spaced evenly around the sides. Against each of the four walls were large antique mahogany dressers. The one on the east wall contained different styles and sizes of men’s boxers and briefs. Most of these were in their original packages or were pristinely clean as if they’d never been worn, perhaps leftovers from packages that had been opened and partially used. A wide variety of types and styles and sizes of jeans filled the one on the west wall. The dresser to the north had only leather accouterments: pants, chaps, vests, belts, wrist bands, bicep bands, hoods, and head bands. The south dresser contained swimming suits and rubber gear, again, as in the other three, in various sizes.

Fenwick asked, “Why does he have all these sizes? His pants in his closet are all size thirty waist. The shirts might vary a little—sixteen and a half or seventeen and a half—but not like this.”

Turner said, “My guess is, he liked the men he brought home to dress up for him.”

In one of the large rooms they found state-of-the-art exercise machines and a small running track. Halfway through the inspection, a beat cop brought in a woman who he introduced as Werberg’s sister, Brenda Darium.

Brenda Darium was nearly six feet tall. She wore dark blue jeans, a heavy beige sweater, and a down winter coat.

She said, “There was a news flash on the radio that something had happened to my brother.”

Turner and Fenwick found a quiet corner and sat down with her. Turner said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Darium, your brother is dead.”

She wept. “This is so hard,” she whispered after gaining some modicum of control. She dabbed at her tears with tissue she took from her purse. “How did?” She gasped and drew a deep breath. “What happened?”

“I’m afraid he was murdered,” Turner said.

“My god! Just like Craig Lenzati. What is happening?”

“We’re not sure, Ms. Darium,” Turner said. “If you could answer a few questions, you might be able to help us find the killer.”

She continued speaking as if she had not heard him. “My mother is quite ill, but she is still lucid. This is going to be toughest on her. She doted on him. I told him he needed to be more careful.”

“More careful about what?” Turner asked.

“That stupid, silly sex game he played with Craig Lenzati. I told him it would lead to trouble. He wouldn’t listen to me.”

“What was the game?” Fenwick asked.

She heaved a deep sigh. “The two of them had an extremely hard time growing up. They were picked on unmercifully for being such nerds.” She gulped. “Well, they were nerds. Brooks was three years older than I was, but I still found him embarrassing. I never brought friends home. Craig Lenzati was pure evil from the time I met him as a child.”

“How was he pure evil?” Turner asked.

“He didn’t hurt little puppies or anything. He just wasn’t right. You just knew something was awfully odd about him. I didn’t like him.”

“How much did you know about this game?”

“My brother and I weren’t very close growing up, but after he went away to college he started to open up. I was the first one he told he was gay, even before he told that slime bucket Lenzati. I loved him and our bond grew over time. As for that stupid game, I’m not sure what it was all about. He bragged to me about it in this kind of obscure way, but he never gave me details. I knew it was about sex, I knew it was about money, and I knew it sounded dangerous and stupid. I warned him and warned him. Paying strangers for sex was a wide-open invitation to violence. One time I asked him if he was ever going to settle down. In his whole life he never actually dated anyone seriously. His longest relationship lasted less than three months, which was probably longer than any Craig Lenzati ever had.”

Turner said, “Among the items we found on Mr. Lenzati’s computer was a coded list.” Turner showed her the printout Dylan Micetic had given them. Brenda Darium barely glanced at it. Turner said, “It’s in a code that our computer people have managed to break some of. Do you know what it is?”

Darium said, “I told my brother over and over again it was stupid, stupid, stupid. He told me several times they had this encrypted method of keeping track.” She pointed at the paper. “That might be it. I don’t know.”

“What were they doing exactly?” Turner asked.

Darium said, “I think they were just so desperate, so lonely. I think that’s why Brooks confided in me and I think that’s why I listened. He had to have somebody real to talk to. I was appalled by what he hinted at, but I was willing to listen. I felt so sorry for my brother, hanging around with that creep Lenzati and not having any other friends.”

Turner said, “The records we found go back twelve years.”

“I suppose they might. I really don’t know when they actually started.” She sniffed a few times and wiped her nose.

Turner held out the list to her. “There are a lot of names here. We’re going to have to interview all of them. Do you recognize any of them?”

It took several minutes for her to scan the entire document. She shook her head and handed back the list. “I don’t recognize anyone. You aren’t going to try and ruin my brother’s reputation?”

“We have no reason to leak this information to the press,” Turner said, “but if we can find it out, my guess is there are reporters who would be able to do so as well.”

Darium said, “I warned him and I warned him. If this gets out, it will break Mother’s heart.”

Turner said, “We were told Lenzati had late night parties. Do you know anything about them?”

“No. He was such a jerk. He was creepy to be around. He leered at you in a very repressed, absolute nerd kind of way It took them both years of intense workouts to change their body shape. What they really needed was intense psychotherapy. They never could or would do anything to improve their social skills for attracting an intimate partner. When they got rich, they figured cash was the best aphrodisiac. Maybe they weren’t all that wrong.”

“Did Lenzati ever make advances to you or your friends?” Fenwick asked.

“Never. Back then, he might look at a woman for a few seconds, but then he’d run for his computer.”

“We were told they were the toast of the town here in Chicago,” Fenwick said.

“Money attracts friends, doesn’t it?” she said. “No, my brother and Craig Lenzati never had many real friends. Except each other. Even the rest of my family didn’t have much to do with Brooks. I was the one who maintained the connection between Brooks and our relatives. He didn’t care for them, and to be honest, they didn’t care much for him. They didn’t hate each other or anything. He just never gave them much time. When he made a lot of money, a few of them expected jobs and fabulous gifts and presents. Nobody but my mother got anything. That was fine with me. Mom has private nursing care at home. She has a live-in nurse and every possible part-time caregiver, all hired by my brother to satisfy her every whim. My mother has a lot of whims. He is very generous to her.”

“We found all different sizes and kinds of men’s clothes in your brother’s bedroom,” Turner said. “Do you know what they were for?”

“No. He’s been the same size for years. When he started working out, he lost one pants size, but he was never heavy.”

They asked her to look at the names of people in Werberg’s address book. She was able to confirm only a handful of people who the police might be able to talk to about his private life. A few minutes after she left, the detectives finished inspecting the house. Micetic said he’d stay and go through as much as he could on the computers. They agreed to meet late the next morning.

They did a canvass of the near neighbors. No one had seen anything. They got several beat cops to do the rest of the neighborhood.

14

I think sex is dirty I think public displays of affection are ghastly. Why people can’t leave each other alone is beyond me.

As they drove back to headquarters, Turner gazed at the score sheet. “We need to talk to these folks. How the hell are we supposed to find them? While a plurality are probably from Chicago, we can’t be sure of that. For all we know, they were from all around the country and the world. We don’t even have full names for all of them. For many we have only first names.” He peered closely at the print out. “We’ve got to get those third and sixth columns translated.”

Fenwick said, “Let’s stop at the paper and see if Morgensen’s got all his data ready for us.” They called and caught the reporter just as he was ready to leave. They met at the newspaper’s offices in a small conference room with a computer terminal.

“Have you found any more connections?” Morgensen asked.

“Nothing we’re even close to sure on,” Turner said. “We’d like to see all of yours.”

“My editor said it was okay for me to show you this stuff because I got a lot of the initial information from newspaper stories and other public records. The rest was from interviews I did. Telling you who I got it from isn’t possible, but giving you the results is. Watch.” He tapped a few buttons on the computer and the screen filled with a spreadsheet with wide columns.

“Someday I’m going to be able to do one of those,” Fenwick said.

Morgensen made the comment that has driven computer students nearly mad for years: “It’s easy.” To his credit, contrary to his many vows in the past to shoot the next person who made such a crack, Fenwick restrained himself.

Morgensen pointed at the screen. “Here’s all the victims, and everything I could find out about them personally, and then everything I could find out connected with their deaths. I cross-referenced each bit of data in as many ways as I could. I’ve got one page for each crime, with an index at the end.”

They got their copies and left.

Back at Area Ten another tiny parcel had arrived for Turner. This one had been sent by Federal Express. It had been posted at a drop box in the middle of the Loop.

“What is this shit?” he demanded. A small crowd of detectives gathered around his desk. He flipped the box in the air and caught it.

“Do you think you should do that?” Judy Wilson asked. “Maybe it’s somebody’s idea of a joke that’s gone sour, or maybe it’s really explosives.”

“I’m not sure why it has to mean something sinister,” her partner Roosevelt said. The other detectives glared at him. He added quickly, “Although, it certainly opens itself up to that interpretation.”

Turner held the box out to all of them and said, “Boo!”

Wilson drew back slightly. “I expect that kind of flippant braggadocio from Fenwick, but not you.”

“I’ve been taking lessons,” Turner said.

“What about the cities where cops were killed?” Fenwick asked. “Is there any pattern of gifts there?”

They tacked the spreadsheets from Morgensen to the corkboard that covered the entire north wall of the room. They used space opposite pictures of a partially dismembered corpse, a case that Roosevelt and Wilson had solved that morning.

All of them pored over the documents, trying to find patterns that had not revealed themselves before. Nowhere was there mention of gifts to the cops who had been killed.

After fifteen minutes Fenwick announced, “There’s nothing here.”

When they were done looking, Turner called to get results of the analysis of the previous boxes. He hung up and announced, “None of them have had prints on them. This one won’t either.” Turner tossed the box up and down several times.

Wilson said, “Maybe there’d be prints on that one. If there are, you’re destroying any that exist.”

Turner took the box and flung it as hard as he could against the nearest wall. There was a small pop and a smoky foof.

“This one was a bomb?” Wilson asked.

They rushed to the remnants to find that it had been filled with white powder.

Fenwick said, “At least the others had chocolate in them.”

Commander Molton strode over to where they were all gazing at the box and its contents. When they finished explaining, he said, “The heat has been turned up on the Lenzati case. I’ve had my job threatened if we don’t get results. I’ve gotten complaints that Fenwick has been abusive to witnesses.”

“They wanted more or less abuse?” Fenwick asked.

Wilson said, “You always get those kinds of complaints, especially from anyone who’s heard any of his jokes.”

“At least I didn’t shoot any crippled kids,” Fenwick said.

“One of the complaints comes directly from the superintendent’s office, which means it is most likely coming directly from the mayor’s office.”

“The mayor himself?”