Murder At The Podium Read online

  She purchased a Katy Perry wig of shoulder length black hair as well as a few hats. She also bought a few plaid shirts, in style at the moment; but something Jill never wore. A new can of bug spray and sunglasses and she was ready to travel. She put the wig on trying to grasp how long she could tolerate it being on her head. She was hot in five minutes, but then she imagined her ski helmet and just pretended that the wig was just like that helmet. That helped and she soon forgot she was wearing it and startled herself in the rear view mirror when she caught sight of the black hair framing her face. It was a good thing she had trimmed her long hair just prior to coming to Texas, she wasn’t sure what she would have done with a long blond ponytail sticking out the back of the wig.

  It was a pretty boring drive, a four lane highway shared with flat landscape and lots of semi-trucks. The drive seemed to be changing from prairie to desert. She made a stop for gas and a bathroom break but otherwise keep the cruise control on at seventy-six miles per hour. Her niece had received a very expensive speeding ticket while moving to Texas and Jill didn’t want to add any more family money to the Texas State Troopers.

  Arriving in Midland, she checked into a moderate hotel. She had searched for a hotel with a good fitness center and found a hotel that offered her daily entrance to a fitness chain for fifteen dollars. She thought it terrible that she would have to spend fifteen dollars to run on a treadmill, but for her own safety, she needed to work out somewhere with a crowd. If she hadn’t found this alternative she would’ve located a high school track or decided to be a couch potato for her stay in Midland. Since she was going to be doing a lot of sitting and surveillance, she wanted an outlet for stretching her legs. The fitness center they’d lined her up with had lockers, so she could walk in wearing her wig and leave it in the locker, run and lift weights, shower, then exit looking like Katy Perry’s aunt. Her hotel room had a small kitchenette and she grabbed a few groceries so she could limit extraneous visits to restaurants for food. Of course there were always drive-through fast food restaurants, but when confronted with the smell of French fries and hamburgers, she was usually incapable of ordering a healthy alternative like a salad.

  On her way west to Midland she’d had a phone conversation with the officers involved in the surveillance of Adam. They would meet her at the police department which was next to the Municipal court building on business route 20 the same highway that had brought her from Dallas to Midland and Midland to Odessa. It was hard to get lost in this state of Texas. Just before five in the afternoon, she found herself in the lobby of the police department awaiting the arrival of the officers.

  Two men in plain clothes approached and introduced themselves as Detective Robert Guerrero and Officer David Rogers.

  “Hi, I’m Jill Quint, a forensic pathologist by training but hired by the Dallas PD to help with this homicide.”

  “That’s a little unusual, I can’t recall ever hearing about a doctor being hired as a murder consultant,” Guerrero commented.

  “I’ve been consulting to families for murder investigations for the past five years. I also have a team behind me that does some special investigations like reviewing financial records or social media data searches.”

  “At Detective Castillo’s request we have been surveilling Adam Johnson at regular intervals,” Guerrero began. “We don’t have the resources to watch him all day and night or even for eight straight hours so our observations are spotty at best. He seems to have hired a nanny for his three children and either he or she are moving them around in the morning and I haven’t observed when they come home in the afternoon or evening.”

  “Why do you say nanny?” Jill asked. “Could it be a girlfriend?”

  “She is an older woman and I see nothing lover like in their interactions.”

  “Okay.”

  “He either goes straight to work or drops his kids off at school and then goes to work,” Rogers said. “We have only surveilled him for a little more than two days and so far there hasn’t been much variation. He seems to come home in the evening by five each day and one of his kids is playing soccer in the evening. There has been no suspicious behavior or people around Adam Johnson. What makes you and Castillo so sure he’s involved in his wife’s murder?”

  “I can’t speak for Castillo, but in my case it’s because he’s told a few enormous lies. I happened to be in Dallas for a convention; I live in California. Adam hired me to look into his wife’s murder. The moment I clarified that she’d died from arsenic poisoning, he ended my services saying he had faith in the police getting to the bottom of Stacy’s murder. It’s the first time my services have been terminated before the end of the case, but it was Adam’s decision. No harm, no foul and I was grateful on some level to exit a case that allegedly involved the Sinaloa cartel.”

  “Sinaloa cartel?” Guerrero exclaimed. “What do they have to do with this case?”

  “When Adam hired me, he was convinced that the cartel killed his wife. When they had married after college, she told him she was related to the leaders of the cartel, but she had escaped, changed her name and had surgery to hide her identity. With some investigation we discovered holes in this story. Then I located their wedding announcement from a Houston newspaper more than a decade ago and we verified that her DNA excluded any heritage from the peoples of Central or South America, or Mexico. So that was a whopper of a lie for Adam to have told.”

  “So you’re basing your suspicion of murder on a few large lies?” Guerrero asked one skeptical eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline. “They sure must do things differently in California.”

  “I’ve never found in my twenty year career in the justice system, a spouse telling such strange lies at the time of death. Yes, different people react differently to death. He’s also making every move possible to keep Stacy’s parents apart from their grandchildren,” Jill raised a hand and added, “It’s weak but it’s my gut feeling that something big is going on with Adam. Even members of my team couldn’t place it but thought there was something that Adam was covering up. I’ve never had my gut screaming so loudly despite not a shred of court ready evidence that Adam is guilty. Detective Castillo may have something more, but I think he thought Adam was the murderer long before I did based on his experience and gut feeling. So I’m here to observe Adam and understand some inconsistencies in his background. The oil company that he works for has some strangely successful financials and Adam has a Texas license to drive semi-trucks. What do those two facts have to do with this case?”

  The two men looked unconvinced, but they thought it would be interesting to watch her work. Then Rogers reached out a hand with a card in it and said, “Here are my contact details feel free to call me at any time.” and Guerrero did likewise. Jill ended with the story of the three men approaching her at the convention center. She showed them her new can of bug spray.

  Guerrero observed that it was easier to just carry a gun, but Jill could call him day or night if she found herself in a tight situation and Rogers seconded the remark.

  She was just about to leave the station when she paused and asked, “Do you have cameras on the roads here?”

  “On some roads, yes,” replied Rogers. “Why?”

  “I would like to find footage of Adam Johnson driving a truck to satisfy my curiosity on that question. Where can I get a copy of the footage for the past week?”

  “We can request that footage from the state and have it probably by tomorrow morning if we mention it may be linked to solving a homicide,” Rogers said. “I’ll take care of that for you and let you know when the information arrives.”

  “Since you know the city well, if you can think of any other cameras near Adam’s oil company that you would have access to the footage, let me know,” Jill said and then they shook hands and ended the conversation. As Jill left the police building, she glanced over at the municipal courts. She wondered if she would have access to Stacy Johnson’s will, had it been filed in the courts? After a quick se
arch, she determined that Adam, as surviving spouse would not have to file their will in order to probate their joint holdings. He would also need nothing more than the death certificate to gain access to any life insurance money.

  Jill decided she would do a few hours of surveillance of Adam tonight then head back to Midland. As she was driving down his street, he was piling two of the kids into the car. She circled around the block to prepare to follow them. A short time later she observed him pulling into a park where one of the kids in a sports uniform ran out on the field. Adam took the younger child over to a different group that he seemed to be the coach of and they practiced soccer moves. Thinking that this was it for the night, she started the truck’s engine and headed back to Midland. She was a one woman show and she’d have to be careful in how she spent her surveillance time. Since there was something unusual with Adam’s employer, she thought she would be better served following him to work and watching his company, so she promised herself to be in place at seven the next morning and see where the day took her. Castillo could avoid interviewing Adam for perhaps two more days at the most, and then it would appear to be bad detecting if Adam wasn’t sought out for a second interview.

  Jill arrived back at the hotel and made herself a large salad from the supplies she had purchased earlier. It was time to summarize where she was with the case. She felt like she had loose ends that she had lost tract of. She had the murder weapon, but no identification of the two men that might be the murderers. The hotel had not provided any information as to how someone might know which hotel room Stacy was assigned or how a man got himself assigned to that same room in advance of her stay and who so conveniently hadn’t shown up the night before Stacy’s stay. She had over one hundred facial matches for her two suspects and she hadn’t figured out how to narrow it down. She had nothing on the three men that accosted her near the convention center. She didn’t know how they’d been informed that she would be walking at that time. She didn’t know why Adam had a special driver’s license that allowed him to operate large tanker-trailers.

  If Adam was the murderer, what was his motive? Was he angry at something Stacy had done? Was there a financial gain for him with Stacy’s death? Sure there might have been a life insurance policy, but then he’d also lost Stacy’s salary. Was Adam into the power or thrill of killing? What was the cause of his alienation of Stacy’s parents? He seemed like a loving father but wasn’t it a bit premature to return to his coaching duties in under two weeks since his wife’s death? Maybe he was trying to give his kids a sense of normalcy; since she wasn’t a parent, she could only speculate what she would have done, but she thought she would at least take a few weeks off from normal activities.

  Jill decided she needed to work the motive angle. If he killed Stacy and banned her parents from seeing the grandkids that suggested to her - anger. What did Adam have to be angry about? Was Stacy cheating on him, did they fight over finances? Given that they had no debt that Jill had discovered, there probably wasn’t a shortage of cash. Did they fight over their parenting of the kids? Jill tried to think about things that couples fought over and there were a multitude of reasons, but after ten plus years of marriage and three children, some of the reasons should have gone away. She doubted it was ideology; they couldn’t have stayed together as long as they had if they were fighting over religion or politics or some other ideology mindset.

  She revisited the police report to track Stacy’s movements. She had taken a flight from Odessa to Dallas the day before her presentation. She’d checked into the hotel about four in the afternoon and had met with Barb Jordan at 4:30 to go over their presentation the following day. Stacy then went out to dinner with other staff from her company attending the conference. Her co-workers said the dinner broke up at about 7:30 and they all returned to their hotel rooms. Dallas Police obtained Stacy’s cell phone records for the twenty-four hours prior to her murder and noted that she called home and that was her only call until the next morning. She called home again before the conference started the morning of her death and that was it. She’d not received any texts and the police had a subpoena for Stacy’s private email, but had not worked through the legal issues of gaining access to her work emails. There had been no threatening communication from any source the police had access to.

  Jill thought about the room again and questioned if the fake room service dude had circled back to Stacy’s room after she left it but prior to her death to remove any evidence of the muffin? She dropped off an email to Rob Gallagher to get a copy of the tape of Stacy’s room after she left it the morning of her death. She couldn’t recall if she had looked at the hallway videos for any time after Stacy’s death.

  At this point, as in all of her cases, Jill always felt like pulling her hair out. There was no action going on, she had small extraneous questions unanswered, and not at all a clear path to follow. It happened in every case - that moment in time when she questioned whether she would be able to solve who Stacy’s murderer was. Usually, if she had the patience to wait long enough, something happened, to direct her further in an investigation. She’d shut down her mind and computer and do something completely different that would give her brain a break from the investigation. She looked up movie times at the local theatres and settled on the latest James Bond movie. She’d been planning to see it with Nathan, but she knew she enjoyed that movie series far more than he did. There was a showing in thirty minutes, so she gathered her purse, hopped in the truck, set the GPS for the movie theatre and bought a ticket fifteen minutes later. Buttered popcorn in one hand and a soda in the other, she sat comfortably by herself in the theatre prepared to be maximally entertained for the next ninety minutes.

  It was late by the time she returned to her hotel room, refreshed but with no plan for the next day other than to watch Adam Johnson drive to work, and then park her truck near the entrance to the business and wait for something to happen. She knew she would also receive the highway video footage sometime and she hoped that had something useful on it. She was soon asleep after replaying her favorite James Bond on skis chase scene from the movie.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Guerrero and Rogers had given her an approximate time that Adam seemed to be leaving for work. Jill parked the truck on the first street that Adam turned on after leaving the street on which his home was located. In a previous case, a suspect had surprised her by coming upon her surveying his house. The cops in that town had told her she was lousy at surveillance, so in her spare time between cases she had read a few books on surveillance and now applied those techniques.

  A few minutes later she saw Adam’s car drive by. She let two additional cars pass her before pulling out and following him. He appeared to be taking the path to work. She’d checked it out and knew what his most direct route to work was. She’d also studied where she could park to observe his employer, looking for answers as to where their profits were coming from. Adam’s company seemed divided into two functions - a corporate brick office building and a dusty truck depot with petroleum trucks seeming to come and go with regularity. She did a little research and determined that as a petrochemical engineer, Adam would be designing ways to extract oil or gas from the ground. His company seemed to own oil wells, retrieve oil out of the ground and transport the oil from the rig to somewhere else. Jill would have to follow a transport rig to see where they went but she bet it was to a refinery or to the oil rig. Maybe in the afternoon she’d follow a few trucks. If she was lucky Adam with his semi-truck license would be driving an oil tanker. Were they such a small company that the Chief Operating Officer found himself driving rigs?

  Jill had a pair of small high power binoculars so she could look at every face entering and leaving the company. She didn’t know what she was looking for other than the fake hotel maintenance or room service men or perhaps one of the three men that had accosted her near the convention center. Luck was with her when two hours after she arrived, she found Adam in the driver’s seat of an o
il tanker pulling out of the company’s yard. Okay she would follow at a discrete distance and see how he contributed to his company’s profits. Perhaps he had an engineering task at the oil rig and as long as he was driving out to the rig he may as well take an empty tanker with him.

  Jill dropped behind the tanker truck and tried to stay as far back as possible. After following the truck for some twenty minutes mostly accompanied by other vehicle traffic, she saw him pull up to an oil rig with the truck. She continued driving past the rig wondering where she could hide and watch what he was doing. According to her satellite map there weren’t any mountains or hills nearby. There seemed to be some ramshackle houses that perhaps she could draw cover from. She turned into the driveway of the first house and it appeared deserted or perhaps the occupant was off at work. Taking her purse and binoculars, she walked around the back of the building to check out her view of Adam. She was dressed in khaki colored clothing as that seemed to be the color of the landscape and perhaps the best way to fit in.

  She saw Adam examining the machinery, writing a few numbers down, and then flipping a few valves to write some more things down. Then he finished, moving everything back to its original position. He walked over to the oil tanker truck, climbed in, and was soon driving back down the highway from where they came. Jill quickly returned to her truck and waited a suitable amount of time before following in the tanker’s wake. She discovered that she’d waited too long to tail the tanker-truck and now it was gone from sight. Darn. What to do now?