If Looks Could Kill (13 page)

Detective Melissa Williams caught up with the guy Jeff had supposedly taken a bike trip with to West Virginia between June 8 and June 13. No sooner had Williams flashed her badge and explained why she was at the guy’s work, then he came clean and said he and Jeff never took that bike trip. “It was just a cover so Jeff could go to Las Vegas and see this girl.”

Detective Williams, just to be sure, asked Jeff’s friend if he was talking about the same woman everyone else had been.

“No, this is not Jeff’s mistress, who he has been seeing for ten years.”

So the question became, then, how in the heck did Jeff know a woman in Las Vegas? How many girlfriends did the guy have?

Apparently, while Jeff was on his way out to Arizona to visit his mother for Mother’s Day—that weekend everyone had said he was not himself, making amends and apologizing for his previous behavior—he met a woman on the plane ride out there, sweet-talked her, and ended up not only sleeping with her, but spending a better part of the week with her.

Williams took notes, prodding. “Tell me about this ‘mistress,’ as you call her.”

“All I know is that Bonnie knew about her [Cynthia George].” They were standing in a warehouse. It was noisy. Machines buzzing. Loudspeaker. The guy asked Williams to step into the lunchroom, where it was quieter, adding as they entered the room, “And so did the woman’s husband.”

“What did Jeff say about the husband?”

“That he was in the mafia.”

“Was Jeff concerned?”

“I don’t think so. It had been going on for so long and nothing happened. Jeff really didn’t think it was a problem.” Then the guy explained that Jeff and “his mistress” had recently split up.

“You know why—did Jeff ever say why?” Williams asked.

“I believe Jeff wanted to make things better with his family.”

Bonnie Zack had given Ed Moriarty and the CAPU several photographs of the George family Jeff had either taken himself, or Cynthia had given him. One of those photographs had struck Moriarty as particularly strange ever since he saw it that first time. There was something different about the photo, no doubt about it. Not the image itself, a simple family portrait: Ed, Cynthia and their seven children standing in rows on the stairs of their home like grammar-school kids on a podium posing for their class picture. From the image, the Georges appeared to be a happy, close family. But it was one of the kids, Moriarty thought. Five of Cynthia and Ed’s children looked alike—with the exception of one, a child they had adopted. Yet the seventh child, born just recently, didn’t quite match up with the other children, who were all dark-skinned and dark-haired, obviously taking on the bulk of Ed George’s Lebanese genes.

Moriarty called several of his colleagues together and asked, “Do you see anything in that photo that seems significantly inconsistent?”

Everyone agreed. That one child, the youngest, looked remarkably different from the others.

But what did it mean?

By June 21, Detective Williams was able to find Jeff’s Las Vegas lover. After speaking with Jeff’s friend, the one who had unearthed the Las Vegas connection, in a smart piece of police work, Williams figured Jeff had likely called the woman from his cell phone. So she went through the long-distance calls Jeff had made during that time period—June 8 through June 13—and found several calls to a number with the name
Lisa
scribed in the cell phone’s directory. But when Williams called the number, she got a voice mail message: “Hi, this is [Lisa], I’m not available right now….”

So she left a message.

A short while later, the woman called back.

“It is my number,” Lisa said. “I’m in [another state] with my aunt. She’s sick.” Lisa, who lived in Arizona, sounded beaten, like,
OK, you caught me.
She had been anticipating the call, she admitted.

“You know why I’m calling you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you know that Jeff Zack has been killed?”

“Yes, I heard.”

“I’m going to have to ask you some questions about your relationship with Mr. Zack—” Williams started to say as Lisa interrupted.

“I know. I understand. I’ve already decided to be open and forthcoming about it all. But it will be difficult.”

Williams was curious. “Why?”

“I’m married. My husband doesn’t know a thing about my relationship with Jeff.”

“Can you give me your full name and address, Social Security number and date of birth?”

Lisa gave Williams her address and name, but declined to give up her Social Security number or date of birth. She was worried. It was in her voice. Her entire world—which she had kept hidden from her husband—was about to collapse. How many lives an affair could ruin—but people still felt the need to do it, rather than divorcing and moving on.

Jeff and Lisa had hooked up on that flight Jeff took to Arizona. She was on her way home from a business trip. They talked, she said, and bonded instantly. She believed after spending just a few days with Jeff in Phoenix after the flight that she had “found [her] soul mate.” Isn’t that always the case? The inevitable life partner—the adultery excuse of the twenty-first century:
I met my soul mate. I couldn’t help it.
A spiritual connection, one that her husband wasn’t giving her.

After the flight, she and Jeff exchanged business cards. “Call me,” she said.

“I will,” said Jeff, smiling.

The next day, Jeff called and asked Lisa about purchasing some of the equipment she sold.

“We became inseparable after that,” Lisa explained to Williams over the telephone. “We spent every day together while he was in Phoenix visiting his family. I had never done anything like that in my life, but I had no control over it. I was devastated by Jeff’s death when I heard.”

When they parted in Phoenix, Lisa told Jeff about a business trip she had planned for Las Vegas a week and a half later. Jeff was thrilled. He said he’d meet her there.

“When you were in Vegas together,” Williams wondered, “did you guys talk…I mean, did Jeff open up about his life?”

“Sure. We talked about
everything
. He told me about his affair with Cindy.”

“He did. What did he say about it?”

It was shocking that Jeff was honest with his new lover about his affair with Cynthia—yet he hadn’t been truthful in respect to the details of it. “He said he and Cindy ended it about two years ago. He said it had been on and off for about ten years.”

It was a lie. Cynthia had told Jeff it was over about a month before he was murdered. Jeff never ended it.

“What can you tell me about Cindy? What would Jeff say about her?”

“Her husband, I know, was older. Jeff said he was very wealthy and he and Cindy were hoping maybe he would die soon so they could be together. Jeff also mentioned that Cindy had seven kids with her husband.”

Williams could tell from Lisa’s voice she knew more—that she was perhaps holding something back, especially when the conversation turned to Cynthia’s kids. Although she had no proof and it was just a hunch at this point, Williams took a wild shot: “One of them kids was Jeff’s, huh?”

Silence.

“Yes,” Lisa said.
“Ruby…”

“Isn’t she the youngest?”

“Yes.”

“Did Bonnie know about the child?”

“I think so. I think Jeff told her during an argument one night in the heat of it, you know what I mean.”

“Sure. But let me ask you, did Ed George, Cindy’s husband, know?”

“I don’t think he did.”

This was substantial to the investigation. So many possibilities had now opened up. The Ed George motive had gone from a simple, however complicated, extramarital affair to Jeff Zack possibly fathering one of Cynthia George’s children. Was there a better motive for murder? News that Jeff had fathered one of Ed George’s kids could destroy the man’s reputation. Maybe Jeff even threatened Ed, the CAPU considered, and tried extorting money from him to keep quiet. Who knew at this point?

Later, while Ed Moriarty was in the office musing over the new information, he couldn’t help but think of something Jeff Zack had said to Bonnie one day regarding Ashton:
“I’ll take the kid and move to Israel if you even try to divorce me and take him away.”

Had Jeff said the same thing to Cynthia? Had Ed George found out about the child and, not realizing Cynthia was even having an affair, snapped? Once again, the more the CAPU learned about Jeff Zack, the more complicated the case became.

“A true-to-life whodunit,” Moriarty said later. “This was it.”

Detective Williams was only a half hour into her interview with Lisa and she had truly put more on the table in the form of relevant information than any of the dozens of witnesses the CAPU had interviewed over the past few days.

Still, as Williams continued pumping Lisa for information, Lisa would drop yet another bombshell.

There was no doubt in Ed Moriarty’s mind that Bonnie Zack had more information to share with police. For all he knew, Bonnie could have suspected that Jeff fathered a child with Cynthia and, fed up with being treated like “the other woman” for the past decade, had her husband killed. If true, it wasn’t too incredible to ponder, considering the circumstances of Jeff Zack’s life and how he was killed.

Moriarty headed over to Bonnie’s Temple Trail address late on Tuesday afternoon, June 19. She’d had a few days to deal with her emotions and allow Jeff’s death to settle on her. In no way did Moriarty believe she had gotten through the initial impact of it all. But her mind was still fresh with details. It was important the CAPU continue to put itself in a position to allow Bonnie to talk.

“Hi, Bonnie,” Moriarty said pleasantly, walking in.

Bonnie shook her head, but didn’t say much. It was obvious she was still in a lot of pain.

“There are a few things we need to go over. You OK with that?”

Bonnie said, “Come in. Yes, sure.”

After going through a bit of Jeff’s financial history, Moriarty asked, “Listen, what do
you
think happened to Jeff?”

“I just don’t have a clue. I don’t know. Jeff was
so
secretive. He was always telling me that I didn’t need to know what he was doing and he would take care of everything.” She stopped and thought about it. “I can tell you this—I know it’s not road rage,” Bonnie said, shaking her head, “like everyone else is saying.”

“What makes you say that?”

Bonnie took a moment. She had tears in her eyes. This was difficult. Looking squarely at Moriarty, she managed to say, “Jeff told me Ed George was getting sick of the relationship he had with Cindy.
This
is what’s behind his death.”

Moriarty had to be careful. He felt Bonnie was sincere. But he had to keep his objectivity in check. Bonnie was still a suspect—a prime suspect at that. There would come a time, he knew, when he would have to ask her to take a polygraph.

“Is there any other reason you can think of that might have led to Jeff’s murder?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that whole thing with [Seth and Carl]. I didn’t like [Seth] the first time I saw him.”

Money. That worked, too. But it didn’t seem to fit here. Jeff had burned people in his life before. Why now? Why
this
time?

For the next few minutes, Bonnie explained all she could about Jeff’s youth in Detroit. But, she admitted, it was hard for her to believe anything Jeff said because he had told so many lies over the years. “He did say that his time in the Israeli Army was the best time of his life.”

“Did he ever talk about being in combat?”

There was that Arab connection Moriarty couldn’t abandon. A few of Jeff’s friends thought for sure there had been a hit put on Jeff by someone with a link to the Middle East. It didn’t make sense to Moriarty, but he needed to explore it and, if anything, cross it off the CAPU’s list.

“He said he was involved in some combat, but again,” Bonnie said, shaking her head, more in disgust, Moriarty felt, than sorrow, “I don’t know if that was true or not.”

By this point, Bonnie was quivering so violently from head to toe Moriarty couldn’t write it off as pure stress. It wasn’t out of fear, he thought, but emotional bondage. She was scared of talking, sitting there weighing the past ten years, the life she’d had with the guy, and how it all had turned out. Ashton was going to grow up without a father. When the toll of Jeff’s death hit the boy, it was going to devastate him—same as it had for Jeff, perhaps, when his own father left him. Bonnie knew that. Trying to hold back the tears best she could had internalized it all. Moriarty understood. He had interviewed scores of witnesses under the same duress. “You don’t know what that emotion is like or what it can do to you,” he said later, “until you’ve had to go in and tell a father that his only child is dead and he falls into your arms, holding on, hugging you and crying his eyes out…. Until you’ve gone through that, you don’t know how extended victims are in one murder.”

After allowing Bonnie a few minutes to collect herself, Moriarty asked, “Do you know how long Jeff was in the Israeli Army?”

“If he did tell me, it wouldn’t mean anything. One year. Two years. Three. Who knows?” she said, throwing up her arms. “I’m not really sure.”

“Just a bit more of your time, Bonnie,” Moriarty said. He could sense she was getting uncomfortable and wanted to stop. “Jeff ever mention any problems with the Arab community because of his service in Israel?”

Bonnie shifted a bit, noting the seriousness of the question. Looking down at the floor, then up toward the ceiling, she said, “Jeff told me he was involved in the Mossad. But he said I didn’t need to know any more than that. Listen, I’ll say it again. Jeff led a
very
secretive life.” She stopped herself. Then, getting up, “I’m done with this for now.”

According to the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, the Mossad is an “institute for Intelligence and Special Operations…appointed by the State of Israel to collect information, analyze intelligence and perform special covert operations beyond its borders.” In other words, the Mossad is Israel’s version of the CIA. Jeff had mentioned to several people that he was an agent for the Mossad. He couldn’t talk about it, he claimed, because his work was top secret. Some believed him, others didn’t.

Moriarty wasn’t sure what Bonnie had implied by mentioning the Mossad, or if she was covering up something for Jeff. Nevertheless, it was time to send a few investigators back out to track down anyone who could tell the CAPU about the Mossad and the possibility that Jeff got himself caught up in an international conspiracy that ended in his death.

“It was a long shot, sure,” Moriarty said later. “But that is what we were dealing with. We had to check out every possible lead and connection. In the end, when we found out who was responsible, none of it mattered. But we didn’t know it then.”