Murder At The Podium Read online

  Chapter Thirteen

  The hotel shuttle bus driver had been surprised when Jill asked him to stop at a grocery store on the way to police headquarters. She purchased both the pans and bowls to make the muffins as well as the baking ingredients that she would need. While she was there she also grabbed three dozen donuts for the officers near detective Castillo and those in the crime lab.

  When Jill arrived in the homicide unit, Castillo raised an eyebrow at the bags of groceries in one hand and a huge box of donuts in the other.

  “Trying to buy your way into the favor of the homicide division, Dr. Quint?”

  “Yes and that of the crime scene unit as well. Where can I go to work making poisonous blueberry muffins? Have you found an oven for me? I have everything I need except arsenic and I'm hoping your crime lab has some in stock otherwise my baking experiment will be delayed a day while I find that special ingredient.”

  “Let me take you up to the crime lab and see if those folks can help you with the oven and the arsenic. Did you learn anything else from the video?”

  Jill decided to keep her little scare on the hotel roof last night to herself. For a seasoned detective such as Castillo, he had probably been in lots of dangerous situations.

  “Before I came over here this morning, I briefly met with Rob Gallagher who is the head of security for the hotel. He's looking into key card issues and the roof video footage. His answers to my questions will likely provide me with some new avenues to explore. I sent the best image I could find of the room service guy to your e-mail address. I thought you might want to add him to the murder board as a person of interest.”

  “Already done,” Castillo noted. “So besides making poisonous blueberry muffins, what else are you running down today? Have you told Adam Johnson that you're back on his wife's case?”

  "For several reasons, I'm delaying notifying Adam that I’m back on the case, but he'll know eventually. Someone needs to ask if his wife brought a blueberry muffin from home to the conference. For now I want to understand what it took to make poisonous blueberry muffins. Then I'm going to call Barb Jordan who was the co-presenter of Stacy’s at the conference. She's an old friend of mine dating back ten or fifteen years and I’ll feel her out to see if she had a vibe about Stacy. She mentioned they’d had several phone calls to jointly prepare the presentation. So I thought I’d pick her brain to see if I learn anything new. After that I wanted to see if the Dallas police can obtain the DNA of El Chapo. I would like to compare Stacy's DNA to that of El Chapo. I bet the DEA or FBI has a copy of it. And then I'm going on a deep dive into Stacy's background. My team originally did some research on her and she appeared fully formed around age eighteen. I want to determine why her identity is so well hidden before she reached eighteen.”

  “You want me to obtain El Chapo’s DNA? I thought that finding you an oven was going to be my most difficult task today. I see I've greatly underestimated your chutzpah in that you want me to battle a bigger bureaucracy than my own to get one of the most famous criminals in the world’s DNA.”

  “I have a backup plan if you can’t get it through your own channels,” Jill offered.

  “I'll take you up to the crime lab and leave them to help you make your poison muffins.”

  While Jill and the detective had been chatting about the case, at least half of the contents of the donut box had disappeared. Jill just shrugged and thought ‘it's lighter to carry without all those donuts in it’. Gathering up the box and her groceries she followed Castillo out of the unit and over to the crime lab. He made introductions and then left her to her own devices. As she had guessed, the lab had arsenic and an oven. She got to work marinating the blueberries in a strong arsenic solution, one that was guaranteed to cause death in humans within three hours. Once the blueberries sat in the solution for fifteen minutes she again measured the strength of the arsenic. Ten blueberries equaled a fatal dose. She continued with the baking mix and was soon pouring batter into muffin tins. After thirty minutes in a four hundred degree oven she removed the blueberry muffins. Again she analyzed the arsenic content of the muffin. Looking at the blueberries, she was unable to tell they’d been marinated in a poisonous substance. She wondered at the taste but knew she would be foolhardy to satisfy her curiosity on the flavor. She did her final measurement on the strength of the arsenic and thought that consumption of just half of the muffin would lead to death.

  The murderer had either been lucky that their muffin concoction contained a deadly amount of arsenic or he or she was an amateur chemist and re-created the Marsh test to determine the arsenic content in order to make sure the dose was fatal. Given how well designed the muffin delivery to Stacy's hotel room was, Jill tended to believe that the poisoner had tested the muffins ahead of time to know they were deadly.

  Jill placed a call to Barb Jordan to get her take on Stacy. The last time they spoke, Jill had asked her questions more from the curiosity point of view rather than an investigator. Now she wanted to see if she could learn anything new about Stacy from Barb.

  “Hey Barb, it’s Jill Quint. Do you have a moment to talk right now?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got time. I just finished a call with the client of mine in Indiana. What's up? Did you solve the murder of Stacy Johnson?”

  “Actually that's why I’ve called. Her husband terminated my services, but now Dallas PD has hired me and I have a hundred hours to solve the case. How's that for pressure?”

  “Frankly I'm surprised you didn't solve the case already,” Barb said cheekily. “Why did Adam terminate your contract?”

  “I determined that Stacy was poisoned by arsenic in a blueberry muffin that she ate that morning before the conference began. That apparently was enough information for him and he wanted to leave the rest of the case in the hands of the police. Perhaps with the cost of his wife's funeral and possible legal costs associated with settling her death, he decided he couldn't afford my services anymore. Doesn't matter, because I'm still going to find Stacy's killer.”

  “So where are you now? Geographically I mean - California or Texas?”

  “I'm in your time zone in Dallas.”

  “Blueberry muffins, huh? I remember seeing them at the breakfast buffet before the start of our seminar. I went for the eggs. But that's strange that they served blueberry muffins and no one else got sick.”

  “That's interesting information about your conference serving blueberry muffins. We believe that Stacy ate a blueberry muffin in her room prior to heading to the conference room where your presentation was supposed to take place.”

  “Stacy and I probably had four or five phone calls to plan our presentation. I remember her saying in one of the calls that she planned to practice her presentation one more time that morning in her hotel room. So maybe she came down early and got a muffin and went back up to her room but that still doesn't explain why no one else got sick.”

  “We actually think the muffin was delivered to the room prior to Stacy even checking into the hotel. Perhaps the murderer left a friendly note, something like ‘welcome to the quality convention and the hotel staff hopes you enjoy this muffin as you prepare your presentation’. If someone left such a note in my room, I would likely eat the muffin and give silent thanks to their thoughtfulness.”

  “Certainly that would explain why no one else got sick at the convention.”

  “So you say you spoke with Stacy about five times to prepare your presentation. Did she share anything of her background with you? Were you aware she was married and had children? What about her education and work experience? What city was she from? Did you learn any personal information about her?”

  “Let me think,” Barb replied and there was silence on the phone line for a minute while she thought about her interactions with Stacy. “I remember she was married and that she had three children. Her kids and my grandkids were roughly the same age. She named the University of Texas as the school that she got her nursing degree at, but I don't know the schoo
ls of that state very well so it didn’t stick in my head.”

  “Was she happy in her job? Did you sense any discontent with being a mother or a wife? What emotions come to mind when you think of Stacy?” Jill asked wishing she'd offloaded these questions to Angela who was so much better at interviewing than she was.

  “She was happy in her job and proud of her kids. She mentioned Adam but I don't recall it being favorable or unfavorable. After we’ve finished with this call, I’ll think about the conversations I had with her and see if I can come up with any gut feelings. What’s your cell phone number so I can call you back?”

  Jill provided her number then ended the call. It was time to circle back to Rob Gallagher and hotel security.

  “Rob, it’s Jill Quint, is this a good time to chat?”

  “I was just about to call you. I took a look at the footage of the room service delivery and you’re correct to be suspicious, it’s not one of our employees. I was quite disturbed by the ease with which he entered the guest room. I checked our room card key system. When a guest checks out of the hotel, a piece of computer code directs our room key software to deactivate the card key. The last person to stay in that room was a female and her card key was deactivated.”

  “What if I don’t formally check-out? I leave in a rush for the airport and forget to check-out?”

  “Our guest services staff begin checking in with guests thirty minutes prior to check-out to see what their plans are and we get a variety of responses - some want an extra hour to check-out, others are in another state and forgot to check-out, and occasionally we wake someone up who forgot to set their alarm. If we get no response then our housekeeping supervisor knocks on the door. If the room has been vacated, then housekeeping checks-out the guest. It’s tricky if the room hasn’t been vacated and there’s personal property in the room.”

  “I’ve always left a hotel within two hours of check-out on my prescribed day. What do you do with your last scenario?”

  “In legal terms we evict a guest who doesn’t or can’t pay, or is drunk and disorderly, overstays their original reservation, or is doing something illegal. We then have the right to change the locks once the guest leaves the room. Then we video tape the possessions and our boxing up of them for our own protection later and we store the stuff.”

  “So back to the room in question, the previous guest left on time and her card-key was deactivated. The room was prepped for the next guest, but that guest didn’t show up and had no access to the room.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So where did the pass-key come from?”

  “It took me a while to figure that out but I have your answer. Earlier in the day, the fake room service guy was also a fake maintenance person. He had a cart just like our staff use and a similar uniform, but that was cover for him using a magnetic card reader. He changed the door pass card reader then simply made a pass card to match that new code. Our housekeeping staff didn’t notice as they use a master pass key.”

  “Were you able to follow him through the hotel to see where he went?”

  “No. Just like the room service episode, he left his cart in the hotel elevator lobby room and housekeeping removed it. He walked out of the room and left through the same stairwell. We don’t see him leaving the building. We’re still looking through all of the footage thinking that perhaps he waited a few hours or maybe tampered with a specific camera, but we haven’t seen anything yet. That makes me think that he was a hotel guest who had opportunity to watch our processes.”

  “That’s an interesting notion. If he exited that stairwell, then changed clothes and returned to whatever floor was his, you probably wouldn’t see that on camera.”

  “Yes that’s a partial explanation, but the guy had to have hacked into our hotel software to know which room Stacy Johnson was planning on staying in. We are a six-hundred room hotel and he couldn’t have just gotten lucky. I checked Mrs. Johnson’s reservation and there was nothing in her reservation that required she stay in any particular room number.”

  “Yes, but he knew which room she was staying in before she checked in,” Jill noted. “Does your room reservation system show rooms by the week or something? I guess you’re always trying to mix and match the length of a reservation to an unoccupied room.”

  “Yeah our reservation system lays out the reservation lengths at all times. That’s the only way you can book a hotel three months from now and know whether rooms are sold-out.”

  “Got it. So our suspect has a chemistry background to have developed the process for the deadly blueberry muffin and he has some computer skills in that he could both make a new pass key and enter your registration system to know where Stacy Johnson was staying. Our perpetrator also has a way with disguises as he changed his appearance multiple times.”

  “That’s assuming you’re only dealing with one person for this murder,” Rob suggested.

  “That’s an interesting thought. Can you send me the footage for the maintenance guy? Is it possible to be on the hotel’s roof at night and escape camera detection? I thought it was pretty dark up there.”

  “Will do and as the head of security I would say that you’re not able to avoid the cameras on the roof, but I’ll offer my guys pizza on the night shift if they can walk across the roof and not be seen on the camera. That should be enough incentive for them to be creative.”

  Jill ended the call with Rob and moved on to the background check of Stacy Johnson. She was going to ask Marie and Angela to also look into Stacy’s background with the thought that three friends are better than one. Marie was superior to all of them in this area, but she hadn’t found anything when she had searched for background on her last week. Jill would have to give them some new information about Stacy so they had new avenues to look in. Perhaps she would see if Castillo could look into her background to assure them she didn’t have a sealed juvenile record or some other legal reason.

  She’d been thinking hard about that new angle when an idea came to her. In her email to Marie, Jill asked if she could perform an ancestry search. If they looked at the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, could all of their family members be accounted for? If one seemed to disappear then maybe that would be a clue about Stacy. She posed the question to Marie, but knew it would be several hours before she got a response.

  In regards to her own search of Stacy’s background, Jill was going to try starting at her first year of college and working backward. She would check her high school diploma and college entrance exam score and then look at her college records to see if she graduated with honors or some other special recognition. If you graduated in college with honors for your grades, then there was a good chance that you also did that in high school. Maybe she could look at Texas state high school graduate records.

  Jill had another brilliant idea come to her thinking about Stacy’s background. What if she did ancestry testing on Stacy’s DNA? If her DNA lacked a match for a Mexican or Spanish background that would go a long way to eliminating her as a relative of the bosses of the cartel. She knew there were several companies in the US that did that kind of testing for the average citizen to identify their background, but in the case of a murder investigation, would they be able to turn it around quickly? She picked up the phone to call a few of the agencies to see what turnaround time she could get from them.

  An hour later she held a conference call with Castillo and Dr. Albright. They liked her idea of genetic testing and Jill had found a lab in Austin that they could fly the specimen to that afternoon for testing. They would know in the morning if Stacy had DNA of someone from a Mexican family. Castillo was excited to test Stacy’s blood since he believed from the beginning that her murder wasn’t related to the Cartel.

  It was getting late in the afternoon, so she called the shuttle bus for her ride back to the hotel. She had hours more of work, but she was more comfortable working in her hotel room especially since she wanted to get in a run in the middle of that work. She
was debating running the two figures through facial recognition software but she thought that both the maintenance and the room service guy were one in the same but each had a different disguise and they had not been caught on camera with a full frontal facial view, so she thought she had an inadequate picture at this time. It was too early in the investigation.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Settling into her hotel sofa, she was pinged with an email from the medical examiner that the specimen had arrived for DNA testing. She was really anxious to see the result of that test and thinking of doing that test might be her greatest contribution to the case so far, although Castillo was also excited to note the as yet unidentified room service and maintenance guy from the security footage. It gave Jill a feeling that she was earning her consultant’s fee.

  Now it was about researching Stacy Johnson. She was sitting back staring at the screen thinking about what she’d been told about Stacy’s life. She looked over at her phone when she heard the email ping and saw it was from Marie.

  Couldn’t give it more than thirty minutes tonight, but I did discover something new. Stacy rushed for a sorority on her college campus. Her freshman year sorority book lists her as having a hometown of The Woodlands. You might want to spend some time searching in that city.