Murder with a Twist (23 page)

Duncan saw what I was doing and he moved closer to Meg, putting himself between her and me should she turn around. As soon as he did so, I grabbed the
A
tab on the Rolodex and flipped it over. I quickly paged through several cards until I reached one that made my heart skip a beat. I flipped it over so it wouldn't be the first thing Meg saw when she next used the Rolodex, but the name on the following card made my heart skip again. So I grabbed the
W
tab and returned the roll to that section. It was a move made none too soon. Meg was on the move.

She turned and marched over to the door of her office and stood there looking at the two of us. “I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about, Detective,” she said, her tone now haughty. “So I would appreciate it if you would leave. Unless you have a search warrant.”

It was a gutsy move, and given her legal background, I suspected it was also a knowing one.

Duncan didn't move and I stood beside him, trying not to look guilty, and hoping Meg hadn't seen me pawing through her Rolodex.

“Do I need to call the mayor?” Meg said, clearly irritated now. “Because my husband is a good friend of his. I'm sure he'd be interested in hearing how the Milwaukee police now get to bring assistants along when they go out and harass innocent people.”

“Fine, have it your way,” Duncan said coldly. He turned and headed for the door, while I followed on his heels. I could feel the icy glare of Meg boring through my back as we stepped over the threshold and into the hallway. That's when I noticed that sound again.

I stopped and turned around abruptly, nearly causing Meg to bump into me as she trailed us into the hall.

“Mrs. Monroe, do you have a pool?”

She cocked her head to one side and gave me a curious look. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Well, do you?” I pressed.

“Yes. We have an indoor lap pool down on the ground level. Why?”

“Is it beneath this part of the house?” I turned back and saw Duncan eyeing me with curiosity.

Meg huffed her irritation. “I really don't have time for these inane questions of yours,” she said. “You need to leave. I'm a very busy woman.”

I had been right in thinking that Sharon wouldn't go far once she delivered us to Meg. She was hovering partway down the hall.

“Sharon, please see the detective and his assistant out,” Meg said, saying the word
assistant
with a mocking tone. She then turned around and went back into her office, slamming the door behind her.

Sharon showed us to the front door, closing it behind us with a little more decorum than Meg had shown. As we descended the stone steps, I looked over toward the end of the house where Meg's office was located. The land beneath that part of the house was a downward slope, allowing for a basement with an exit on ground level. Beneath the windows of Meg's office, where I was willing to bet she stood watching us, was a solarium-style room. I nodded toward the floor-to-ceiling windows and said, “Look over there. I'm betting that's where the pool is.”

Duncan waited until we were seated inside the car and pulling away before he spoke. “Did you see anything interesting in that Rolodex on her desk?”

“I sure did. I took a peek at the
A
section and guess whose name I saw on one of the cards?”

“Alvarez.”

“Bingo. She had both Juanita's and Alberto's names on it, along with their address and phone numbers. And that's not all. When I flipped that card down so it wouldn't be the first thing she saw, guess whose name was on the next one?”

I had him puzzled with this question and he frowned as he tried to think. He gave up after only a few seconds. “I have no idea. Whose?”

“It was someone we both know very well, one of my regular customers.” I waited to give him another chance, but he clearly wasn't in the mood for the game.

“Just tell me,” he said.

So I did. “It was Tad Amundsen, Milwaukee's financial advisor to the rich and famous.”

W
e drove back to the bar and fixed ourselves a late breakfast using the bar kitchen. While Duncan was cooking, I placed calls to both Cora and Tad, telling them what we needed. Tad was reluctant to help at first, stating that it would be a violation of his fiduciary responsibilities to delve into one of his client's finances and share the information with us. I handed the phone to Duncan, who assured him that we wouldn't expose him as a source in any way, and when we told him who it was we wanted him to look into, he finally agreed.

“That Monroe woman is a bitch, and she's good friends with my wife,” he said. Tad's wife was not high on his list of favorite people. “It will be a pleasure to take her down.”

Once we were settled in at a table to eat, Duncan said, “I know Meg Monroe is behind this. It figures that she would try to mess with the DNA evidence, given her legal background. She knows what the procedures are in a case like this.”

“But surely she must have known that the DNA would be compared to Belinda's.”

“Probably, but I'm guessing she either hoped we wouldn't do the comparison, or figured at the least it would complicate things and slow down our progress in the investigation.”

“It's a good thing Tad hates his rich wife so much.”

“It's also a good thing you snuck a peek at that Rolodex. I'd like to have another chat with Juanita Alvarez, but I doubt she'll cooperate. Still, I think I'm going to send someone to get her and invite her down to the station for a chat.”

Duncan made the call and we finished our breakfast. After cleaning up after ourselves, I started my morning prep for opening. A little after ten, Duncan gave me a kiss and headed out, saying he'd check back in later.

The next hour crawled by as I waited for opening time. When Pete and Debra came in at ten-thirty, I artfully dodged their questions when they asked if I had any news about the Cooper case. At eleven, we unlocked the doors and within half an hour, Carter and the Signoriello brothers had arrived. It was Wednesday, which is Larceny Day, and that meant the discounted drink of the day was a Ginger Snap made with Larceny Bourbon. Carter announced that he had come up with a riddle for the day and we listened as he recited it.

“The wealthy owner of a castle is throwing a masquerade party. There is a man who wants to rob a very valuable painting from the castle, but the entrance is guarded and in order to get inside, he needs to know the password. So he dresses as a minstrel and gets himself an empty violin case he intends to use to stash the rolled-up canvas from the picture. In order to figure out what the password is, he hides in some nearby bushes and listens as other guests arrive.

“The first guest is a woman and the guard asks her, ‘Do you know the password?'

“The woman says she does.

“So the guard says
twelve,
to which the woman responds
six
. The guard lets the woman in.

“The robber now thinks that the proper response is half of whatever number the guard says, but he decides to wait for one more guest to see if his theory holds out. The second guest is a man and when the guard says
six
, the man responds with
three
and is allowed to go inside.

“Convinced his theory is right, the robber finally approaches the door and when the guard says
ten
, the robber confidently responds with
five
. The guard tells him he is wrong and he is then immediately taken prisoner. What should his answer have been?”

Joe Signoriello jumped in with, “I know, it's the numbers on a clock. The correct answer is whatever number is opposite the one stated.”

“That can't be right,” Frank said, rolling his eyes at his brother. “If it was, the answer to six would be twelve, not three.”

“Oh, right,” Joe said, looking dejected.

Before anyone else could offer up an answer, Cora came into the bar carrying her laptop. “I have something,” she said, and despite protests from the others who wanted to know what it was she had, I ushered her into my office.

“What did you find?” I asked, as anxious as the others had been. “Any suspicious money transfers?”

Cora shook her head. “Tad was able to give me Douglas and Meg Monroe's bank account information, but I haven't been able to access them. Tad is still working on it. However, I did a little digging around online and found something interesting on Facebook.”

Cora set down her laptop on my desk and settled into my chair while I wondered how on earth a social networking site was going to be of any help. She opened the computer and, as she typed something into it, said, “I don't want to say too much because I want your take on it.”

I walked around behind the desk and peered over her shoulder. “Here we go,” she said. “It turns out that Juanita Alvarez has her Facebook security options set at the highest level, but her password was painfully easy to guess.” Cora shook her head and gave me a pitiful expression. “She uses her last name with the number one after it. I really thought she'd be smarter than that.”

I looked at the page, which had Juanita's picture at the top and some innocuous posts featuring recipes, cartoons, and pithy sayings. There were also pictures of Alberto and their daughter.

“I was looking at some of Juanita's friends,” Cora said, “and saw something interesting.”

She clicked on one of the friend links and brought up another picture. Then she let me study it.

“Wow,” I said after only a few seconds. “They taste almost exactly the same.”

Cora gave me a quizzical smile.

“Visuals sometimes manifest as tastes for me, particularly pictures, TV, and movies, where the image isn't real life. Every image has its own unique taste, but Juanita's and this girl's picture both taste like freshly picked raspberries. There is a very, very slight difference, but it's barely noticeable.”

“Good,” Cora said. “Now look at this friend.”

She clicked on another picture and within seconds of viewing it, I got another raspberry taste, though this one was also slightly different, a tiny bit tarter.

“They all taste like fresh raspberries. One is a little sweeter than Juanita's, and the other has a hint of tartness to it.”

“What does that tell you?” Cora asked.

“That they look very much alike,” I said. “They have the same shaped noses, the same dark hair, the same dark brown eyes, and even the shapes of their faces are the same. The teeth are a little different, and the haircuts aren't alike, but other than that . . .”

“What are the odds of that?”

“Well, from a visual perspective, I've seen people who look a lot alike, but other than identical twins, the only time two pictures taste so similar is when they are siblings who strongly resemble one another.”

“I saw the similarities the instant I clicked on the pictures,” Cora said. “And there's something else. Most of Juanita's posts are the typical social chatter, happy birthday wishes, congratulatory comments, responses to cute kid and animal pictures, that sort of thing. But with these two friends, she shares some private messages. Nearly all of them are like this one.” She clicked back to Juanita's page and then to a private message sent from one of the look-alike girls. The look-alike had written: Hey, do you remember Mateo Gutierrez? He married Mia Hernandez even though he is ten years older than she is. She's only eighteen. And she's pregnant already!

Juanita's response, which was posted two days later, was: Of course I do. I will send them a gift right away
.
Beneath that she had typed two rows of numbers: 01241986-2145067210 on the first line, and 10141975-3127423450 on the second line. Then Juanita had written, Tell them Consuela Garcia and Anthony Perez say hi
.

I frowned and looked at Cora. “What am I missing here?”

“Not much . . . yet. Check the date of the post. This exchange occurred nearly a year ago. Now look at this one.” She then clicked on the next message in the exchange, from the look-alike girl: Mia and Mateo got your gift and are very grateful!

“Sorry, Cora, but I'm still not seeing it. What is the significance of the numbers?”

“I wondered about that, too, at first, but when I found three more messages with an exchange like this, also with a string of numbers, I started to wonder. All three say something like:
ran into so-and-so today and his thirtieth birthday is next week.
And then Juanita says she will send a gift and lists a string of numbers. Then she includes a closing line of some sort that mentions another name. The digits appear to be two separate numbers separated by a dash. In both messages, the first string of numbers is eight digits long. The second string of numbers is ten digits long and at first I thought they might be phone numbers. But when I tried calling the first one, I got a recording telling me that the number I dialed wasn't in service. The second one was for a restaurant in Canton, Georgia, and the third one was for a construction company in Dayton, Ohio.

“Then I noticed that all of those second string numbers ended in a zero, and I started to wonder if perhaps the zero was superfluous. If you take away the zero, you have nine digits left, and what common number contains nine digits?”

“Social Security numbers?”

“Right. And the first string of numbers could easily be dates—birth dates in fact.”

“In fact? You verified this?”

“I did,” Cora said, looking very pleased with herself. “Those Social Security numbers and birth dates happen to belong to people who are dead, and not just any dead people, but babies and children who died at Milwaukee Memorial Hospital back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Except they've recently been resurrected.”

“She's creating false IDs?” I said, finally making the connection.

“That's what I think, yes. I think she's using them to bring people into the country from Mexico, because these two friends of hers on Facebook, the ones who look so much like her? Their names and birthdays—at least the day and month, which is all they have listed on Facebook—also belong to people who died at Milwaukee Memorial years ago. I bet twenty bucks those two girls are her sisters and they established fake identities so they could get into the country.”

“Juanita used her access to old medical records at the hospital to help them.”

“It sure looks that way, and since the death records are public, Duncan should be able to obtain them. There are enough coincidences here to get a search warrant, I would think. Maybe even an arrest warrant.”

“Have you told him yet?”

Cora shook her head. “I wanted to test you with those pictures first, to make sure I wasn't seeing a resemblance because I wanted to, but because there really was one. I'll call him now.”

I stood and listened as she relayed her information to Duncan over the phone. It took her awhile to explain it all and without the visual of the Facebook pages, I imagine Duncan had a hard time understanding at first. When she was done, she listened for a minute and then said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up. “Duncan was on his way here when I called him. He said he'll be here in a few minutes and to tell you he has more good news and bad news.”

“Great, that again,” I said.

Cora gave me a curious smile, and though I'm sure she would have liked me to explain further, I kept mum.

While we waited, Cora showed me the other posts on Facebook. As promised, Duncan showed up about three minutes later.

“So which one do you want first this time, the good news or the bad news?” he said as I shut my office door.

“Let's go with the good news first this time,” I decided.

“Tad has found something that might help us.”

“That's great! What's the bad news?”

“Juanita Alvarez has flown the coop.”