Murder At The Podium Read online

  Nathan watched her for a few more seconds before someone new walked up to him. Then he shrugged and decided to take her at face value. They stayed for another hour at the reception with him passing his business card out to at least thirty people interested in some way in his work. Jill passed her own business card out to one particularly obnoxious investor in a winery that had presumed to tell her about the sugar content in wine. Since he so obviously did not understand the chemistry involved in wine production, Jill decided it was time to set him straight based on her expertise in both chemistry and vineyard ownership. Nathan, taking his cue from Jill, introduced her as a winery owner from there on out.

  An hour later, they drove to a small but renowned Texas Barbeque restaurant. Jill hesitated calling it a restaurant as they shared picnic tables with other customers and had a choice of soda out of a can or beer in the bottle to accompany their meal.

  “You know I’m not fond of barbeque, but I have to admit that this is pretty wonderful food. I’ll have to hit the hotel’s fitness center tomorrow to get in a run before the convention starts.”

  “If you like, we could go outdoors and run around this area,” Nathan suggested.

  “The hotel is in a city center area that means a lot of car traffic and stop lights that get in the way of a smooth run so I would rather retreat indoors to a treadmill. You know me, just about anything is an excuse not to run and I am afraid that the wait at two stoplights would be all the incentive I need to end my run.”

  “I’ll probably take to the streets then and sleep in since my first presentation is at eleven. Knowing you, you’ll be at the 7:30 breakfast and 8am plenary session.”

  “You bet!” said Jill with a grin. “I paid my registration and flew all this way; the least I can do is come away smarter on the subject of growing grapes. I’ll even do you a big favor and shower and change in the gym’s locker room so I don’t disturb your beauty rest.”

  “Wow, I’m honored you would go so far just to make sure I get rest. What do you say we head back to the hotel and put the bed to good use?” replied Nathan with a hug and a kiss.

  The evening ended on a pleasurable note and Jill’s natural alarm clock had her up the next morning for her gym workout. Jill got her workout in and attended several sessions designed for the new vintner like herself.

  She planned to attend Nathan’s session and then they would go to lunch. Jill hoped to get an afternoon nap and then there was another reception to attend with Nathan followed by dinner somewhere in Dallas. The next day was expected to be a repeat and then the following day, her friends would arrive. She planned to miss the final two days of the conference, preferring to spend time with her friends. What a relaxing yet educational couple of days. After the long day, and mellowed by some great food and wine, she drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Jill was just sitting down to breakfast when her cell phone ring tone rang out.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Dr. Quint?”

  “Yes, how can I help you?”

  There was a pause, and then the male voice said, “Hello, Dr. Quint, my name is Adam Johnson. I am the husband of Stacy Johnson.” There was a pause as though the speaker was waiting for Jill to recognize the name immediately. When she didn’t, he continued, “My wife was murdered at the Dallas convention center two days ago and I was given your name by her co-presenter, Barbara Jordan.”

  “Ah yes Mr. Johnson. I’m so sorry for your loss. How may I help you?”

  “I’m here in Dallas to speak with the police and take Stacy home. I was trying to understand what happened and spoke with Ms. Jordan for about half an hour. At the end, she mentioned you and your background and I wondered if you could meet with me to discuss my wife’s death.”

  “Sure I can meet with you. Are you staying at the convention center hotel?”

  “Yes, I have Stacy’s room,” Adam replied in a pained voice.

  “How about if we meet later at the lobby bar? For a hotel bar, it has some remarkably quiet tables.”

  “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me on such short notice and I'll see you in two hours.”

  Jill went on to provide him with a description of her appearance so he could identify her at the bar. She’d looked at the convention schedule as soon as Adam Johnson identified himself. She'd had a feeling that he wanted to meet in person. There was a seminar starting in half an hour on organic pest-control which was a topic that Jill was highly interested in. The subsequent seminar was on increasing vine production and she knew based on industry statistics that she already had highly productive vines and so would pass on that educational seminar to meet with Mr. Johnson.

  Two hours later she found herself shaking hands with a thirty-something man, who was tall to Jill’s five foot three stature, with perhaps a hint of Swedish ancestry. He was pale skinned and likely handsome when his face wasn’t wearing deep grief.

  “Hello Mr. Johnson, I’m Dr. Quint, please call me Jill,” she said as she sat down at a quiet bar table.

  “Hello Jill, and please call me Adam. Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice.”

  Jill had found that sometimes family members didn’t know how to breach the subject of a suspicious death once they met her for the first time. So she began the conversation.

  “Barbara Jordan is a friend of mine and she described the details of your wife’s death. As you know, I’m a forensic pathologist. Do you want some help understanding something with your wife’s death or perhaps something the police said to you?”

  Jill liked to break the ice with these statements as often clients that hired her felt awkward negotiating a contract with her. It was bad enough talking about the death of a loved one without the business of hiring her getting in the way of a crucial conversation.

  “Frankly I don’t know what I want,” Adam replied. “I’m horrified about my wife’s murder and worried for our three children that are at the present staying with my mother.”

  Jill thought that the second part of his sentence was intriguing. Why was he worried about his children in regards to his wife’s murder?

  “Why are you worried for your children? Did the police give you some indication that you or they were also targets of whomever murdered your wife?”

  “I don’t know that the police are thinking that far ahead. Let me tell you about my family. Stacy and I have been married for nearly ten years and our kids are ages 7, 5, and 4. She’s a nurse and I’m a petrochemical engineer. We’re both native Texans and her family is from the southern region of the state near the border with Mexico. My family is from the Houston area. Stacy has not been in contact with her family throughout our marriage. I’ve never met them and the little I know about them was provided by Stacy before we married. None of Stacy’s family members attended our wedding.”

  Now Jill was brimming with curiosity as to who this family was. She had never started out a meeting with a potential client with this strange reference to a family that the surviving spouse knew nothing about. When there was a pause in Adam's explanation, she got in her question.

  “What’s special about Stacy’s family?” asked Jill clearly puzzled.

  “They are somehow related to Mexico’s Sinaloa Drug cartel. As soon as she turned eighteen years of age she changed her name, began wearing blue contact lenses and had facial plastic surgery. One of her high school girlfriends had an older brother in law enforcement and he assisted Stacy leaving the family.”

  The air went out of the bar area where Jill and Adam were seated. Jill didn’t pay attention to the Mexican drug wars, but she knew that the drug gangs could be as ruthless and murderous as ISIS. This was a group she didn’t want to fool with. She paused to think about potentially turning down her first client in her career as a consultant. If Adam wanted to hire her for private investigator services as there seemed to be no doubt by her or anyone else on the cause of death, she would have to discuss that with Nathan and her team. All of the
ir lives might be at risk if they came to the attention of the Sinaloa Cartel.

  “I’m convinced that the Sinaloa Cartel is behind Stacy’s death and I’m worried about the health and safety of our children and I need to do something but I’m not sure what,” Adam said, sharing his thoughts out loud with Jill.

  “The police are focused on finding Stacy’s killer. I think they think I’m just a paranoid husband of a murder victim and Stacy did such a good job of hiding her identity twenty years ago that they can’t link her to the drug cartel now.”

  “How about DNA testing? They could match Stacy to some of the captured Sinaloa cartel members. Isn’t the cartel’s El Chapo in custody? I thought they did DNA testing on him to be sure they had the right man,” Jill suggested.

  “I’m not sure who Stacy is related to in the cartel. It could be El Chapo, or one of his henchmen, or even one of his wives, she mentioned a name, but it’s been ten years and I don’t remember. I don’t know if we need the permission of the Mexican authorities to do DNA sampling against any of their leaders. I’m also afraid that making such a request would alert the cartel of our existence.”

  “True, but if they’re behind finding Stacy and poisoning her at this conference, then they likely already know of your existence, right?” Jill reasoned.

  With Jill’s statement, Adam’s brows furrowed and his sad face became consumed with desperate worry.

  “Crap, I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. I’d better hire security and send the kids to my sister. Let me do that and then I would like to meet you later to finish our conversation. Do you have time to meet again in say three hours?”

  “I can, but I’m not really sure what you want to discuss with me. It seems that Stacy’s death by poison is not being questioned by you or the police. So you don’t need me for a second opinion on the cause of death. That leaves my investigative services and I have to frankly tell you that the cartel scares me. We can discuss that later, now just go ahead and make arrangements to protect your children.”

  With the conversation at an end, they parted ways and Jill watched the back of Adam Johnson as he hurried off, cell phone at his ear, talking presumably to whomever was taking care of his children at the moment.

  Jill was conflicted about the case. She genuinely wanted to help Adam, but she wasn’t sure her forensic knowledge was of any help. Furthermore, just the words ‘Sinaloa Cartel’ scared her. Maybe she could wait and see what the police uncovered in their investigation. Jill and her team were increasingly being threatened in each recent case by the murderers. As she accepted each previous case, she and her friends hadn’t expected to become targets. If she went to work for Adam Johnson, it would be with the knowledge that the cartel was involved and that they had a long and bloody reputation for killing people. A quick internet search revealed that the State of Texas estimated that about ten deaths a year were due to the drug cartel. She wondered how many other deaths were attributed to the cartel in other states. They weren’t in just the border states either; they ran narcotics into Chicago and other major cities.

  Chapter Four

  Jill returned to the grape growers’ conference and attended a seminar on starting a tasting room. She was strictly gathering concepts at this time as she wasn’t planning a tasting room for at least another year. Later that evening, she and Nathan were trying another uniquely Texan meal experience; this time it was Tex-Mex. Her mouth was on fire from the hot chilies in the sauce of the enchiladas and salsa. Adam hadn’t set a time up and so she was in standby mode. She had been giving thought as to how she could help Adam and had come up with a few meaningful ideas. She’d also been thinking about how to break the news to Nathan and her team. She was fairly confident that they’d want to decline the case out of fear of the cartel. In the end she decided there was no good way to break the news to them.

  “Adam Johnson called me this morning and asked to meet with me this afternoon,” Jill told Nathan, deciding it was time to let him in on Adam and his problems.

  Nathan just looked puzzled and asked, “Who is Adam Johnson?”

  With an ‘oh’, Jill realized that Nathan had put the death at Barb’s convention two days ago out of his mind; so she added, “He’s the husband of the woman who drank the poison water at the seminar two days ago.”

  “Oh, right. I thought you said you weren’t involved with that case?”

  “I wasn’t, but apparently the husband met with Barb to hear from her what happened and Barb passed my business card on to him. I skipped the seminar on increasing vine production and met with him.”

  “Okay, got it. What did he say that has made you uneasy? I could tell that something was on your mind, but I thought it was something you heard in one of the seminars. I should have known better. What’s up?”

  “You know me so well. I have been brooding over what he told me since we met. There’s no controversy over his wife’s death. She was clearly poisoned and the police have identified the agent. Adam thinks his wife’s murder is linked to the Sinaloa Cartel and so far the police aren’t in agreement with his suggestion.”

  “The Sinaloa Cartel? Are you talking about a Mexican drug cartel? Jill, you need to stay away from this murder case; those drug cartels are very violent. They’ll make all your previous killers look like amateurs. You can’t get involved with this case,” Nathan stated emphatically.

  “I know what you mean since my heart started pounding the moment he mentioned who he thought the murderers were. I don’t know if Angela, Marie, and Jo would even help me on this case if I took it or if I would even ask them. Adam was supposed to call me back today after he made arrangements to step up the security on his children and so far I haven’t heard from him. This may all be a moot point.”

  “As this isn’t a cause of death case, what could you do for Adam? Investigate the cartel? Why aren’t the police doing that? You really don’t want to investigate the Sinaloa Cartel.”

  Jill could tell that Nathan was very dismayed and he didn’t want her to have anything to do with Adam. “Adam mentioned that when he and Stacy got married that she confessed that she was related to someone high up in the cartel, but at the age of eighteen, she had left that life and with the assistance of plastic surgery and a couple of new identities, she disappeared from sight of the cartel.”

  “Before you talk about the case, let’s discuss the cartel. I’ll admit I don’t know anything about their behavior in the United States, but in Mexico, they routinely kill politicians, judges, and police officers. They have a reputation for slaughtering small villages in the way of the drug trade routes. They have automatic weapons, machetes, and who knows what other weapons. This isn’t a single madman or even two; there are thousands of cartel members. I’m sure if I did some research, I could tell you other bad statistics about these guys. You need to refuse to get involved in this case.”

  “So tell me what you really think,” Jill said with a sigh. “All of those same thoughts were running through my head - the danger to me, you, and my friends. Then the flip side of me wonders what I could do to help this grieving husband with children to protect. Since I wouldn’t cross into Mexico to investigate, how would the cartel even know about me? If I did electronic research, do they have the sophistication to detect my interest? Perhaps I could just advise Adam for his conversations with the police and he could say he did the research and found the leads. He likely already has the eye of the cartel on him so it wouldn’t put him in any more danger. At the moment, though, I don’t even have a guess as to how I could help him.”

  “So is that your way of saying you haven’t ruled out helping Adam?”

  After a pause, Jill replied, “I guess you’re right. If I did decide to help him, then I would go it alone - no contract, no payment, no involving my friends in any of the work. I might even set up a false name to operate under for this case. I would also do some investigation on the cartel’s behavior in the U.S. to get a better assessment of my risk.”

>   “I’d really prefer that you decide not to assist Adam Johnson, but if you do assist him, I’ll watch your back,” said Nathan heaving a huge sigh.

  “Have I told you I love you recently? You’re a really special man and thanks for your support,” Jill said as she moved in close to hug Nathan.

  The next morning, Jill was up early for the 8am conference start while Nathan planned on attending after eleven. He wasn’t an early riser and the conference was oriented to vineyard owners which he wasn’t and so he didn’t want to waste his time attending seminars that had no useful value in his work life.

  Jill received a call from Adam shortly after nine with a request that they meet. They agreed to meet in the same location as they had the previous day around eleven. Jill was curious as to what she could do for the man. Other than a little internet research, she had drawn a blank on how she could help him. After their discussion the previous night, she wanted to be upfront with Nathan as to what she was doing with this case so she texted him to let him know of the scheduled meeting. She then went back to her seminar, titled ‘fermentation in steel versus oak barrels’.