Judged (12 page)

“While I was waiting for you guys to get here, I ran the other camera angles. Glen Scobee is in the cab. He leaves the taxi, walks around the building for his car, and you’ll see him driving past on the video in just a minute or so here,” Joe said.

Beth and I watched the screen as the taxi that Scobee had arrived in pulled from the lot. A minute or so passed without any other cars in view, and then the screen seemed to illuminate from a pair of headlights off frame. We watched as a car passed the parked van.

“Scobee?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Our guy doesn’t follow him, though. He waits for another few minutes and drives off. It’s too long of a time gap. Scobee would be a mile away or more.”

“Okay,” I said.

The van remained where it had parked and left roughly five minutes later, as Joe stated.

“What do you think?” Beth asked.

“Making sure his Tuesday nights are the same every week. I’m betting that he didn’t follow him because he knew where he was going already. From the looks of things, he also knew when he’d get back to the dealership.”

“I’m done with this over here. The image should be coming up now,” Mark said. He rolled his chair a bit away from his workstation so we could gather around and look. The image came up on the screen. While still not crystal clear, the digits were recognizable on the glass—eight numbers total, separated in a group of two, then three, then three more numbers. I saw a word or a group of words below the numbers that was two small to make out.

Beth rattled off the numbers. “Some kind of business registration numbers?” she asked. “Not enough numbers for a phone number and no dashes between the number groups.”

I stared at the numbers, focusing on the way they were arranged. I could see what looked like the faint outline of something else at the front of the numbers and again at the end. I pulled my head back a little from the screen and squinted a bit.

“No. It’s a phone number with the three for the Miami area code and another number at the tail missing. Hyphens are probably just missing as well or were just never there.” I looked at Joe. “Let’s find out who owns these ten possible phone numbers. We’ll cross-reference their names with vehicles.”

“Yup. It should just be a few minutes.” Joe minimized the screen he had before him and went to work.

My ear caught the sound of the tech-department door opening. I turned to see Couch entering.

He walked up. “It’s our van?” he asked.

“It is. We’re running the numbers that were on the rear glass now. It looks like it’s a phone number with some missing digits. One of the missing numbers is for the area code, so we only have ten possibles,” I said.

“Local?” Couch asked.

“Three oh five, yeah.”

The printer at the edge of the room came alive and kicked out a sheet.

“That should be your first phone owner there,” Joe said. “You’ll have to log into the system to pull them up and see what they have as far as registered vehicles. More coming,”

I walked to the printer and removed the sheet. The phone number belonged to a woman. I took one of the workstations nearest the printer, logged into the Bureau’s database, and ran the name. She did not have a Ford van—or any van—registered to her. Her age was sixty-six, her record clean—she wasn’t our vigilante.

Beth brought me another sheet from the printer and stood over my shoulder as I ran it. The man’s name was Douglas Bering—no van registered and no reason to think it was him. We continued.

The next sheet I ran belonged to a Timothy Wendell. His information came up as I punched in his name: age, forty-two; height, five foot eleven; weight, one ninety; hair, brown; eyes, brown. I looked at his driver’s license photo. The man had a thin face and was clean shaven and had finger-length hair parted on one side. Looking me dead in the face was a registered 2015 Ford Transit van, color silver.

“Got him,” I said. “Timothy Wendell. Let’s get a warrant in place and get over there.”

“Last name with two
l
s?” Beth asked.

I confirmed.

“Let me see if the last name shows up anywhere on our list of possibles. Maybe this guy is related to someone there.” Beth left to get the file of potentials.

“Where does he live?” Couch asked.

“The address is listed as SW 144th Court in Miami.”

“Hold on.” Couch clicked some buttons on the screen of his phone. “It’s a forty-five-minute drive,” he said. “I’ll get the wheels turning for that warrant. Why don’t you call your guy, Harrington at Miami Dade, and have him get something going for getting local units out there. Nobody does anything until we arrive, though.”

“Got it,” I said.

I pulled out my phone and dialed Lieutenant Harrington.

Tim had carried the unconscious woman upstairs, thoroughly bound her hands and feet, and barricaded her into the master bathroom. He was sitting on Jensen’s living-room couch, staring over at the doctor, who was lying flat and bound to the chaise underneath him with two rolls of duct tape from the garage. Tim’s bag sat next to him on the couch.

“Wake your ass up,” Tim said.

The doctor had been grumbling and making noise for the past twenty minutes—the drugs were starting to wear off.

“I said wake up. We have things to talk about.”

Tim stood, dug through a pocket, and grabbed a bottle. He popped the lid under the doctor’s nose. After no more than a second, Jensen opened his eyes and yanked his head back.

“What the hell,” Jensen said.

Tim snickered, placed the cap back on the bottle of the ammonia inhalant and retook his seat on the couch. “Smelling salts,” he said. “Apparently, they work at waking the dead—or the soon to be.”

Jensen groaned, moving his arms as if he was trying to reach for his face, but they were stopped immediately by the restraints. He writhed back and forth. “What the hell is this?” The doctor put his chin to his chest and looked down at the tape securing him. “Why am I taped to the chair?”

“Because I taped you to it. Now, your money, where is it?”

“Is that what this is about? Money?”

“In part,” Tim said. “How much do you have accessible at this moment? I want every last cent.”

“There’s no money here, but I could get you some. Let’s just talk this out.”

“I don’t want some of your money. I want all of it,” Tim said.

“But it’s not here. It’s all at the bank or tied up in investments.”

Tim reached into the bag beside him and removed a large white envelope. “See, there’s a little something off with that. I have your bank statements and some of your monthly investment-account statements.”

“How did you get that?”

“I’ve been intercepting your mail. That’s not important.” Tim pulled some of the paperwork from the envelope. “It looks like you only have about twenty thousand in the bank and about a hundred thousand in investments. That’s far too little for someone in your tax bracket. So if I had to guess, you probably keep a sizable amount on hand. Why would a reputable, upstanding psychiatrist do that?”

“I keep money offshore. Tax haven,” Jensen said.

Tim looked at him and shook his head. “We both know that’s bullshit. You made a little over two million dollars last year. All of your taxes on everything have been paid and look like they were in order. You don’t even try to write anything off to get a tax break. This house, paid for. The car, paid for. You don’t really have much debt and have a huge income. I find it hard to believe that you would dump all of your money overseas into any kind of interest-bearing account and then not pay the taxes for any interest generated. Which would be illegal, by the way.”

Jensen didn’t respond.

“So where is the money in the house?”

“There isn’t any. Look, let’s go to the bank, I’ll drain the account and give it to you.”

“The bank is closed,” Tim said. “I just want whatever you have here now.”

“I swear I don’t have anything here,” Jensen said.

Tim went to the doctor and went through his pockets until he found his wallet. He opened it and took the cash from inside, about a hundred dollars. “What about small items? Jewelry, watches, things like that. Your clothes and car say you like the finer things in life.” Tim yanked up Jensen’s shirt sleeve and looked at the doctor’s watch. “IWC watch, huh? Looks nice. What’s something like this go for?”

“About ten grand,” Jensen mumbled.

Tim took it from Jensen’s wrist and put it on his own. He rolled his hand back and forth for a look as he wore it. “I think it looks better on me than you. Have any more? I figure you probably have a Rolex or two floating around here just because it was the wealthy-person thing to do.”

Jensen said nothing.

“I’ll go take a look.”

Tim left the doctor restrained to the chaise and walked upstairs to the master bedroom. He rifled through dresser drawers until he found a watch case. Tim glanced at the six watches inside the glass-topped case—while he wasn’t familiar with any of the watches other than the Rolex he’d correctly assumed was there, Tim imagined none of them were cheap. He tossed the watch case onto the bed and continued going through drawers and cabinets, looking for valuables. He found nothing else that looked to be of value or easily fenced at a pawn shop. Tim grabbed the watch case from the bed and tucked it under his arm. He stared down at the bed itself, reached out, and lifted the side of the mattress to see if anything was tucked between it and the bedspring.

“Ha.” Tim smiled at five yellow-banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills—ten thousand dollars each. He shook his head and said, “I’m betting you have more.” He continued searching in the closet, scanning the floor and shelves. He reached up and pulled down a shoe box that was unusually heavy. Tim flipped open the top.

“Holy sh—” Tim cut his sentence short.

Stacks of yellow-banded hundreds completely filled the box. Tim’s eyes rose back to the shelf, where he spotted two additional shoe boxes that looked similar. Tim set the box he was holding, along with the watches, on the carpet of the closet floor and pulled down the two additional boxes. Each weighed the same as the first, and each was filled with money.

Tim laughed at the sight of hundreds of thousands of dollars before him. For a moment, he imagined sitting on an island somewhere the dollar went far, sipping rum for his remaining years. A sound through the wall to his right quickly broke his daydreaming.

“Looks like the woman is awake,” he said to himself. “I better go finish up before she finds a way out.”

Tim grabbed the money from the bed and jammed it into his pockets. Then he went back to the closet and stacked the boxes on top of each other. He balanced the watch case on top as he carried them back downstairs. He set them in the kitchen and returned to Jensen, who was trying to squirm out of his restraints.

“Fight all you want. You won’t break free.” Tim took a seat next to his bag on the couch. “I just want you to know that I found your money in the shoe boxes and your watch case. Both will be leaving with me.”

Jensen’s face scrunched and he sniffed hard. “So you have what you came for.”

“Not at all. Oh, and your woman friend will be just fine, in case you were wondering, which I’m sure that you weren’t.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs, locked in your bathroom. She can’t help you, though.”

“Look you have my money and watches. What more do you want?”

“I want your confession.”

“For what?”

“Esther Germain, to begin with,” Tim said.

“Esther Germain? What about her?”

“How you got seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of her money.”

“Is that what this is about? Are you a family member of hers or something?”

“I am not.”

“I don’t understand the problem, then. Ms. Germain left me money in her will. I’m assuming that me seeing her for years helped her, and with no immediate family to leave an inheritance to, she chose me for some reason. I didn’t even know she did it until I was contacted by her attorney.”

“Why don’t you tell me how she died,” Tim said.

Jensen was silent for a second. “In hospice.”

“And what led up to that?”

“She took a turn for the worse, I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t see her much after her health deteriorated.”

“Did you ever diagnose her with anything?”

“Just depression. We spoke of her emotional issues of growing old and outliving her husband, mostly.”

“Ever prescribe her anything?” Tim asked.

“Just alprazolam.”

“What about maybe giving her a little something in office that you didn’t write out a script for? Something like, say, haloperidol?”

“Haloperidol? I’ve never given that to anyone.”

“What about prochlorperazine and thioridazine?” Tim asked.

“Never. Those kinds of drugs aren’t recommended for use in the elderly. She was also seeing another doctor at the time. They could have been prescribed by him, or maybe she acquired them herself.”

“An eighty-nine-year-old woman out acquiring drugs for herself and self-medicating. Really? I would suggest you quit playing stupid.”

Jensen was silent.

“We’ll get back to that. Let’s move on, shall we? How about Maria Norman? What can you tell me about her?”

“She passed away.”

“And you were in her will?”

“Yes.”

“How much money there?”

“A little over one point four million after everything.”

“Weird. Another patient of yours that passed away and left you a sizable fortune. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall to hear how you convinced these patients of yours to leave you what they did.”

“I would never do such a thing. I mean, I understand that it’s odd for them to leave me in their wills, but I help these people. It must be their way of returning the favor after they go,” Jensen said.

“Return the favor, huh?”

“Possibly. Like I said, I have no control over other people’s last wishes.”

“Right,” Tim said. “Okay. I have a couple more names, but I have a hunch this is going to continue this way unless we shake things up a bit. So your story is that you never gave these elderly women anything and never tried to influence them into leaving you any inheritance?”