Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (27 page)

Fenwick said, “Your name wasn’t on their list, but there are some anonymous entries. It is possible they had some history of sexual harassment when hiring.”

“In this day and age? They’d get their asses sued faster than you could say equal opportunity.”

“Who did you interview with?” Turner asked.

“Both of them.”

“Neither one ever came on to you?” Turner asked.

“Certainly not. I would never have accepted a job from a firm where I had to sleep with someone to be hired.”

“A lot of people said they were desperate to work for these guys. You weren’t hot to get a job with them?”

“Of course I was. That doesn’t mean I’m a moral cipher. They needed someone with a lot of brains who could add and subtract. They made lots of money, and they needed a watchdog. That’s what I did. I never heard any mention of sex in the office. I never saw either man ever make an unwanted advance on anybody, ever.”

“We’ll need to go over Werberg’s office at work,” Turner said.

“That’s fine with me. You’ll find it’s just like Craig’s. Pretty barren.”

“Still, we’ll notify you when we need to inspect it. There should already be a guard posted at his office door.” Turner had issued this order last night. “We’ll bring the department’s computer expert with us.”

“Fine with me. I was in charge of the books. The books are in perfect order.”

“We found a warehouse out on Grand Avenue.”

Waldron looked blank.

“Lenzati and Werberg had immense offices there. Perhaps there was a good reason they didn’t need spacious quarters at your location. They had something vast on Grand Avenue. They seemed to be doing a lot of illegal things from that spot.”

“I know nothing about any warehouse, and certainly nothing about anything illegal.”

Fenwick said, “Eddie Homan is dead. We found him murdered.”

“I never met the man. I heard of him as a problem at the job. I know we had to take action against him as a cracker. That’s all I know.” He admitted to having been alone at all the significant moments when crimes were committed. He said, “I spent most of today playing chess with my computer.”

Turner’s phone rang and Waldron left. It was Bryant Karnetis, the detective from Area One. “I got something for you guys already. I’ve got a connection with your stuff and Smythe’s. When Dwayne was first found, they discovered piss stains on his pants. It was assumed he’d pissed his pants. Nobody made an issue out of it. Nobody wanted to embarrass the guy. Now I think maybe it came from the killer.”

“I don’t see how he would have had the time,” Turner said. “He didn’t finish killing him. Why risk pissing if he’s only half dead?”

“Maybe he thought he was dead,” Karnetis suggested. “Or maybe it was more important for him to send a message, to feel powerful, or whatever sicko shit the killer was into.”

“Or it could be Dwayne’s,” Turner said.

“Yeah,” Karnetis said. “Whatever, it will have to be checked, if we saved his pants. Nobody figured it was important. He was the victim, and he was alive. We’ll have to check his house and his hospital room. I doubt if they’d have them in the morgue or the evidence lockup.”

“Better find out,” Turner said. He reported all this to Fenwick. “Whatever you do, Buck, don’t say this investigation is starting to piss you off.”

“Why ever not?”

“There could be more than one dead cop in this city.”

“I am offended. The thought crossed my mind, but I was holding back.”

“You don’t usually.”

“I’m learning restraint.”

Turner said, “That would probably be a bigger headline than Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell naked, holding hands, and running down the middle of an expressway.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“But accurate.”

Fenwick said, “We have a killer or killers pissing on people. It’s a start, but I want more connections—zillions of connections—or I want to know which of these killings is not connected to bodily functions.”

24

I wish I was a knife. If I were, the moment I would enjoy the best would be the instant I entered a body. The millisecond when rushing through air changes to penetrating flesh, that’s what I’d like to experience.

The phone on Turner’s desk rang again. A voice said, “One down, and you’re next.” Then there was a dial tone. Turner immediately called the department’s communications center. “Where did the call come from that I just received on this line?”

“Lemme check.” The clerk didn’t sound anywhere near as hurried and anxious as Turner wanted him to. Half a minute later the casual voice got back on the line. “Is this some kind of joke?” it asked.

“Where did it come from?” Turner demanded.

“The pay phone in the lobby of the police station you’re in. Downstairs from where you are now.”

Turner banged the phone down. He rushed for the stairs. Fenwick called out as he followed his partner. “What the hell is going on?”

Halfway down the stairs, Turner stopped. Huffing and puffing, Fenwick pulled up beside him. Turner gazed at the large crush of reporters, along with the usual hangers-on, the people coming in to complain, the criminals being taken into custody, the cops on duty. He could see the pay phones. All three of them were in use: a woman who looked to be in her twenties, another woman in her fifties or sixties, and a teenage boy.

Turner said, “I got another threatening call. Communications said it originated from the pay phones in here.”

“Urban legend time,” Fenwick said. “The killer’s in the house.” He hummed a few notes from the “Twilight Zone” television theme.

Turner and Fenwick hurried through the mob. They waited for all three callers to finish. The older woman was in tears. They asked to speak to each of them in turn as they finished their conversations. None of the voices was remotely like the one Turner had heard.

“We got another pay phone in this dump?” Turner asked.

“Not that I know about,” Fenwick said.

They asked everyone in the vicinity if they’d noticed anyone making a call in the past few minutes. The woman who was crying said, “I waited for a man in a dark outfit. I wasn’t paying much attention to him. He was kind of muffled from the cold. I guess he was white. I’m not sure about much else. He was taller than me, but I’m not sure by how much. I didn’t see where he went.”

No one else reported seeing this man.

Turner and Fenwick went back upstairs. “That takes one hell of a nerve,” Fenwick said.

Turner had a mixed feeling of dread and anticipation as he turned on his computer monitor. There was a new icon on his desktop: a red question mark.

“Am I going to click on this?” Turner asked.

“Get Micetic up here first,” Fenwick advised. “Don’t touch anything.”

They sent for Micetic. They made more phone calls to the other cities with cop murders and caught up on paperwork. Since it was early Sunday evening, their calls were less successful than usual.

When Micetic arrived, he worked his magic and said, “There is a message connected with this question mark.”

“What is it?” Turner asked.

Micetic pressed a couple of buttons.

In bright red, the message said, “More cops need to die.” Turner called up his e-mail. A new note said, “More fear.”

“Take the damn machine apart if you have to,” Turner said. “Find out where the goddamn message came from.”

“We may never know,” Micetic said. “I know you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.”

Fenwick said, “I wish we had a computer shredder, just like we have paper shredders. I’d get great satisfaction out of watching the things die.”

“It’s not the computer’s fault,” Micetic said. “A human sent these notes. For some reason an electronic message on a screen seems more imposing than a simple hand-written note. I’ll keep on it.”

They adjourned to the conference room for the next few interviews. Rian Davis, the head of creativity at Lenzati and Werberg’s company was next.

“This is hideous!” she said. “Hideous! I got into computers because it wasn’t violent. I never had any of those stupid games that are all about shooting and dying. I just wanted to create new vistas and make the world easier to live in. This is just hideous. How can someone want these people to die?”

“We learned they had some odd hiring practices,” Turner said.

“You mean that suit from Nancy Korleski?” Davis asked.

“Yes.”

“It was bogus. I knew her from before when she and her husband were working on their little company. They had no business sense. They tried to take it public, but they made every mistake you possibly could when putting together a technology business. They were lucky the two of them didn’t starve to death. They’d have both been hired if they were among the best. They weren’t.”

Turner said, “You mentioned Eddie Homan in our first interview.”

“The rat,” Davis grumbled.

“He’s dead,” Fenwick said.

“What?”

“Do you know anything about a work place Mr. Lenzati and Mr. Werberg had on Grand Avenue?”

“No. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Eddie is dead?”

“He was stabbed to death,” Turner said. “We found evidence there that Lenzati and Werberg were engaged in significant criminal activity based from that location.”

“I know nothing about that place.”

“They never mentioned it?” Turner asked.

“Never.”

“You talked about security and hackers and crackers,” Turner said. “It seems that they were heavily engaged in hacking themselves.”

“Whatever on earth for? They didn’t need to.”

“They had hacked into companies that were smaller, or were possible rivals. They didn’t necessarily ruin them or take them over when they hacked in. When a company bought the anti-hacker devices from your company, Lenzati and Werberg planted programs in them so that they could break into that company’s computers any time they wanted.”

“The cops were the crooks,” Davis said.

“You knew nothing about any of this?” Fenwick asked.

“Most certainly not. I dealt with creativity. Security is not creativity.”

“You and your husband’s company fit the profile, a small firm they could have hacked into and ruined.”

“I’m afraid we did that all by ourselves. Our incompetence needed no assistance.”

The Davis’s company had not been among those listed as broken into in the records.

She could account for her whereabouts at the time of the murders; spent with her husband, but uncorroborated by anyone else.

Turner stopped at his desk as the next person entered the third floor to be interviewed.

Micetic said, “You’re not gonna like this.”

“What?” Turner asked.

“You’re getting inundated with e-mail.”

Turner said, “Before this week, half the time the e-mail didn’t even work.”

“Well, it’s working now. You’re getting literally hundreds of these every second.” Micetic pointed to the stark, black, seventy-two point size message: “YOU’RE NEXT.”

“Shut it down,” Turner said.

“It’s probably going to crash in a few seconds anyway,” Micetic said. “You’ve got too much data coming in. This thing is going to be overwhelmed.” Before Micetic could press the escape button or close the computer down in any way, the screen completely froze.

Turner reached down and pulled the plug. He said, “Sometimes Fenwick has the right idea.”

Nancy and Charley Korleski strode into the room. Mr. Korleski was short and thin, the type Werberg often seemed sexually interested in.

Turner ushered them into the conference room. He said, “You were known to harbor resentments against Mr. Lenzati.”

Nancy Korleski said, “We filed a suit against Mr. Lenzati. If everyone who filed a suit was suspected of murder, there’d have to be even more lawyers than we have now.”

“We were told you started rumors about them on the Internet,” Turner said.

“We didn’t need to start them,” she said. “They were already there and well established.”

“That maybe you yourselves were into hacking,” Turner added.

“No way,” Nancy Korleski said. “Never. No way.” Her husband nodded agreement.

Turner said, “Eddie Homan is dead. Did you know him?”

“We knew of him. He’s one of the most famous hackers in the world. He worked for Lenzati and Werberg. That’s all we know. I never met him.”

Turner said, “On our list of sexual conquests, we have you as well Mr. Korleski.”

He said, “It was miserable.”

“What happened?” Turner asked.

Charley Korleski said, “He made me do sexual stuff. Not much, really.” Korleski described the same general pattern the other men had been asked to perform.

“We need to ask you about your business as well,” Turner said. “We have evidence that Lenzati and Werberg, possibly in league with Eddie Homan, set about destroying their competition.”

“How?” Nancy Korleski asked.

“They were crackers of the first order. Sometimes they sold security programs to companies which contained bugs that allowed them to hack into companies whenever they wished. They could get huge jumps on the competition that way.”

“Wouldn’t someone have noticed a pattern of failures?” Nancy Korleski asked.

“As far as we can figure out,” Turner said, “just because they had access didn’t mean they used it. They didn’t do any raids on products or services or programs or games that would lead directly back to them. Or they timed their attacks so there would be no suspicion aroused. Sometimes they altered other’s work to increase frustration, sometimes to cause direct failure. On other occasions they just delayed the competition’s product until they could get their own on the market. Were you aware of Lenzati and Werberg committing industrial sabotage to your business?”

“They ruined us,” Charley Korleski said. “I knew we didn’t fail just because we were inexperienced. I knew there was something behind it. We worked so hard, and they ruined us. Why? What shits they were.”

After five minutes Turner interrupted their fulminating about Lenzati and Werberg. He asked the Korleskis to provide their whereabouts at the times of the murders. Their alibis were bland and unverifiable outside their two person unit; twice at home, this Sunday, at an afternoon movie.