Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (15 page)

“What about the murder weapon?” Turner asked.

“Big damn thing. One of those knives with a serrated edge. Lots of damage inside from twisting from one of those things.”

Here was another connection with the cop killings around the country.

“Be sure to check the state of his bladder,” Turner said, “as well as the DNA for the piss. We think it could be important. It could be his or maybe the killer’s.”

“DNA in urine might not give you what you need. You don’t always get cells that are helpful.”

“Try anyway,” Fenwick said.

“Speaking of the male reproductive system,” the ME said, “your boy had an orgasm within an hour of his death.”

“He fucked his killer?” Fenwick asked.

“I can tell you we’ve got residue of semen. He might have beat off. He might have had wild sex beyond your imagination with fifty chorus girls.”

“I can imagine some pretty wild sex,” Fenwick said.

“What precisely he did, I have no idea. That he did come is a certainty.”

“Sex and grit,” Fenwick said. “I’m in heaven.”

The ME said, “You’ve got a stabbing, torturing killer who pisses on his victims? We’re beginning to move beyond really nuts.”

“And if it be true, it would be a wonderful clue,” Turner said.

“I thought Fenwick was the poet,” the ME said.

“I could never write a rhyme that sublime,” Fenwick said.

The ME said, “Go away.”

Turner said, “The piss might be part of a pattern connected with the cop killings that reporter wrote about in the
Trib
.” He explained what they’d learned.

“You’ve got possibilities,” the ME said. “What you’ve got here is a healthy male in his mid-thirties. He has all his own teeth. He must see a dentist regularly. No scars, no broken bones, barely a scrape or a scratch, prior to this.”

They returned to Area Ten headquarters.

Turner found a box with the Nutty Chocolates logo on his desk. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded of the room at large.

“You sound like me,” Fenwick said.

“This could piss me off,” Turner said.

“Not in a case like this.”

Once again Turner sent the box to the crime lab. This time, the box had been left on the admitting desk downstairs. With the usual crowds in the station, no one could pinpoint who had left it there.

They talked to the evidence tech on a conference call.

Turner asked, “Have you found anybody’s blood besides the victim’s?”

The evidence technician said, “We’re still going over a lot of it. So far it’s only his. We’ll have to wait for DNA samples from the bedrooms to see what they indicate about other partners. Of course, the downstairs bedroom might simply have been for guests, and we’d only get DNA from people who were non-sexual visitors. Also, anything we find could have come from days or weeks before, depending on how often he washes his sheets. If he’s rich, maybe somebody else puts them on for him. We’re likely to find traces of a maid. After we examine for human tissues, we’ll have to go over all the fibers and every speck of dust. This is gonna take a while.”

Fenwick said, “We don’t have ‘a while.’ The rich die and people want answers. For this case, the department is willing to pay for lots of expensive tests.”

“When the remnants of the dead show up here, it doesn’t matter how rich they were.”

“If you could get on it, we’d appreciate it,” Turner said.

“I’ll do my best like I always do.”

“Was the piss his?” Turner asked

“We haven’t examined it. You have reason to believe it isn’t?” the evidence tech asked.

“We need to be sure.”

They spent an hour going over the tapes from Lenzati’s security cameras. They saw mostly nothing. No solicitors showed up at the front gate trying to sell encyclopedias. No possible identifiable suspects appeared on camera.

“I don’t see any late night visitors,” Turner said. All the tapes had time codes on them. “We don’t have any for the last week. A good guess would be that the killer took them. Presumably, there is something incriminating on them.”

Fenwick said, “There weren’t many tapes. I bet they simply recorded over them numerous times. Maybe there weren’t a lot of visitors or parties. It wouldn’t take the killer long to grab the ones that might be incriminating.”

They indulged in a mountain of paperwork. Dylan Micetic showed up an hour later. He wore a black peacoat, faded jeans, a white, bulky-knit fisherman’s sweater, and grubby sneakers. The sweater almost made him look less than scrawny. His hair was flattened in several places, as if he’d slept on it, or had his hand pressed against it for a long time, or he had worn a knit stocking cap for too long.

Micetic swung over a chair on rollers and plunked himself next to Turner’s desk. “I’ve got something for you.” His scrawny wrist stuck out of the sweater and coat as he handed sheaves of paper to Turner. All of the pages had the same six-column structure, but with different contents. The first column was a list of names. The second a date or dates. The third was still gibberish, which often continued for four or five lines. Columns four, five, and six repeated the same pattern: names, dates, gibberish. Turner glanced at every page and saw they were similar. The first few pieces of paper were only about a third to half filled. The later pages were filled nearly to the bottom. Next to a few of the names in the first and third columns were small red dots. Turner tossed them over to Fenwick.

“What is it?” Turner asked.

Micetic said, “I’m not sure what it is, but I finally cracked the code, or most of it, anyway. I still haven’t got the third column. The problem is that each word in each column has its own code.”

“You’re kidding,” Fenwick said.

“Nope. My encryption program was barely able to figure out some basics. I even got hold of one of my teachers, and he helped me with some of it. I knew there were lots of codes, but it dawned on me an hour ago that there was a separate code for each word. This guy was a computer genius. He could make up codes the way Fenwick makes up poetry.”

“Make another crack like that,” Fenwick warned, “and I’ll write another poem and read it to you.”

“A truly notable threat,” Turner said.

To Micetic, Fenwick said, “I thought we were the ones not supposed to be razzing people?”

“I figured I’d give it a try,” Micetic said. “Maybe you’d beat me up or throw me against a wall.”

“You’d enjoy it too much.”

“Probably not enough. Anyway, once I had the first insight, things began to fall into place. After a while the codes for each word in the first two columns weren’t all that different, as if maybe he got overconfident, or lazy, or didn’t care as much. Once I figured out there were columns and the first one was names, it became much simpler.”

“Why are there six columns?”

“That’s how it broke down on the master file. I tried to replicate the original exactly. None of the names are duplicates.”

Turner picked the papers from off Fenwick’s desk. “Who are these people?”

Micetic shrugged. “I cross-referenced it with the Chicago phone directory. There are a lot of names that match. I highlighted them with a red dot. They are most likely coincidental. You could try universal searches on the Internet, but not knowing what city a person lives in makes that a pretty useless activity. Even knowing the city doesn’t help much if they’re really common names.”

Turner asked, “Why are most of the ones in the first column men and most of the ones in the fourth column women? Although a few of the names in both are nongender specific.”

“Nothing in what I found explained that.”

Turner inspected the dates in the second and fifth columns and said, “Some years there are more men than women. Some it’s the opposite. There’s only eleven for the first year and …” he counted, “a total of thirty-eight, nineteen each, for the last year. The last entry is in the column with male names. It was for the night Lenzati was killed.”

“The dates go back twelve years,” Fenwick said.

“Yeah, I made a separate page for each year. The code put them chronologically. It’s going to take me a while longer to uncover the meaning in columns three and six.”

“I think we need to talk to Mr. Werberg about these in general,” Turner said, “and to find out how this disappeared from Lenzati’s computer.”

“It was downloaded from a remote computer. I traced it.”

“You’ve been busy,” Turner said.

“And successful. The computer in the house is connected to Lenzati’s office at work and to Mr. Werberg’s home computer. I got into the computer’s memory and traced where connections had been made to. It was turned on by a computer at Mr. Werberg’s address. I’ll keep working on columns three and six. How’s your computer been working?”

Turner said, “I haven’t plugged it back in.”

“You want to try it while I’m here?”

Turner got the nasty little message that his computer had been turned off incorrectly or that if he was experiencing frequent crashes he should call a special number. He pressed the return key.

After it booted up, no message appeared on the screen. “This is good,” Micetic said. He had Turner log in and check his e-mail. The department had gotten them all e-mail accounts at some fantastic discount. They had hoped to improve departmental efficiency with faster communications. So far that was still a fantasy. There was one message. The sender was unidentified. It said, “Don’t turn this thing off again.”

“Can you trace it?” Turner asked.

“Give me a couple minutes,” Micetic said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Turner and Fenwick used the time to make multiple duplicates of each page of the half broken code. The copy machine jammed three times while they were working.

“This place must be cursed,” Fenwick said. “And if it isn’t, it should be. Doesn’t anything in this building work for more than five minutes?”

Turner said, “Remember when we chipped in for the new coffee maker? It worked for two days before it broke.”

“There must be an arson guy in this city who could burn down this place so no one would ever notice.”

Micetic shook his head when they returned. “No luck. I got frozen out completely when I tried to follow where it came from. Sorry. This thing is pretty screwed up inside. My guess is you’re going to have to get a whole new computer.”

“It’s brand new. How could it be destroyed?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Micetic said. “Have you gotten any e-mails recently?”

“A few memos from police headquarters.”

“I didn’t get any e-mails from police headquarters,” Fenwick said.

Micetic nodded. “I think I found your problem. It’s a simple one. Everyone knows not to open e-mail from somebody or someplace they don’t know. If you got an e-mail, supposedly from headquarters, you went and opened it. Perfectly natural. All the person who wants to ruin your computer has to do is include an attachment to that e-mail. You wouldn’t know it was there. Whoever did this got in through the back door. I can do a few things that might help for a while.”

“But can’t you trace where the e-mail comes from?” Turner asked.

“I doubt it. If whoever’s doing this is good they’ll know lots of ways to hide who they are. Remember, most of the computer crackers who get caught brag about what they’ve done. They want to be noticed and get praise. They’re stupid. You could hide yourself simply by sending each one from a different public library. If you were rich enough, you could have multiple DSL lines in different parts of the city or multiple IP addresses with fake ID’s.”

“Lenzati and Werberg would have been rich enough,” Turner said.

“All you have to do is figure out how Lenzati would send you e-mail after he was dead.” He paused a moment. “Of course, he could have some kind of timing device.”

“Let’s not get too nuts here,” Fenwick said. “Is this like when they broke into those commercial sites?”

“No, that was denial of service. For that a hacker runs a program that scans for computers vulnerable to a break-in program.”

“They have break-in programs?” Fenwick asked.

“Sure. Then they find a vulnerable host. Sometimes they break into complete strangers’ computers and launch the attacks from those machines. Once they get in, they install a distributed DOS program on the hacked computer. Maybe they toss in corrupted packets trying to crash a computer.”

“Is that still English?” Fenwick asked.

Micetic smiled. He worked on Turner’s computer for a few minutes then left after warning him not to use the machine for anything remotely important.

When they had reassembled the newly decoded papers, and were sitting back at their desks, Turner said, “I think I’d like to contact a few of these people before we talk to Werberg.”

Fenwick asked, “How can we be sure if we’re talking to the actual person on the list or a random name that happens to be the same?”

“Dull, boring, police work. We go to everyone. We start with the more unusual names. Then if we have to, everybody with the same last name in the city and in the metropolitan area. We can try and get a couple of detectives and beat cops to help us out. Everybody’s screaming about how important this case is. Perhaps that will cause them to unbend a little in our direction.”

Turner’s phone rang. It was the reporter Morgensen. “I talked to my editor. He said I should give all this stuff to you.” They agreed to try and pick it up later that day.

They walked into Commander Molton’s office and showed him the printouts.

“This has got to mean something,” Molton said. He agreed to give them whatever personnel they needed. “I’m getting flooded with calls on this one. If we’re ever going to make an arrest, I’d like to do it soon.”

“Me too,” said Fenwick.

13

I feel serenity and peace for at least a little while after I’ve killed them. The pain goes away for at least a few brief moments. It just hurts too much not to do something about it.

Dan Bokin walked up from downstairs. He stuck his head in Molton’s office and announced, “I just got a call that Brooks Werberg is dead. We’ve got beat cops at his house on the north side.”