Saltwater in the Bluegrass (30 page)

Plenty of proof had been found. In turn, the evidence had brought me into the case.

With this, the options I intended to use were vanilla in color. Basic in all schemes, with a tint of extreme anger pushing at my dead-end dilemma, I remained diligent, straight to the course with my actions. In time, I would play all my cards, but not yet. I still wanted to smooth out a few of the rough edges. I wanted to add to my own collection of proof before I turned on the filter and caught the crap floating in the sink.

Earlier I had received information from the Police Department in Pompano Beach County. The officer who had called back mentioned over the phone that the car used had been found, that, yes, someone had pushed the Audi with Buddy in it off the pier and into the canal. This much I had already figured out on my own.

The information was left on my answering machine in the room where I was staying, and I had listened to it not long after getting back from my evening with Charlie and Jenny.

The car used as a bulldozer to push Buddy in into the water was a 1972 Ford LTD Crown Royale, dark two-tone metallic blue in color. The owner of the vehicle was a man named Russell Metszer. He was a twice-convicted drug dealer in the intercity area of Fort Lauderdale. Apparently he had ties to all kinds of criminal activity in Florida.

“Local trash,” the message stated.

Russell had apparently been killed by whoever had stolen his car and used it to push the Audi into the canal. By now, I had enough proof that it was Patrick and Owen.

After these men had used the car to rear end the Audi, they had driven northeast towards Fort Lauderdale. They had ditched the vehicle and then jumped into a rental car waiting to take them back to the airport. Clean except for one thing: Katherine and her two accomplices did not know that Texi had uncovered their travel arrangements from the Bowman Field Airport a few days ago. The police officers in Pompano Beach had discovered that the rental car was equipped with a Never Lost System. Without either man knowing it, the system had recorded the last twenty locations and times where the Chrysler Millennium had been turned off for more than ten minutes at a time.

This little piece of information proved that the two men had parked at the same location as the 1972 Ford Crown Royale.

Loose ends had once again stayed loose. Big mistake!

Metszer’s charred remains had been found in the trunk of the vehicle. It was apparent that the car had been burned to cover fingerprints. All of this coming due to the traces of fuel particles and resins that had been spilled on the ground around the vehicle before it had been torched. Bumper markings on the car were found to match the dents and scrapes on the back bumper of the Audi Kristina had rented.

My strategy, the plan I had built on, was to put these two men away for a long time, along with the lady who was responsible for their actions.

It is obvious working around these types of cases that most closetdwelling thugs are not smart enough to plan and carry out the objectives of a scheme all by themselves. Someone had to have planned the mission. Katherine Ingram had obviously plotted their course of action.

One, several people knew of her hatred for Kristina. Two, the transportation Lane and Hensley had used to get to Florida and back was owned by Katherine. Three, the car was rented with Katherine’s credit card.

She would go down with these two men, and when she did it was going to be for a long time. Little did I realize at the time how far and how hard she was going to fall.

Katherine was involved. She was caught up in a much broader scale of the production than even I had imagined. For now, her part was still encased in circumstantial evidence. I had to tie her into a conviction that would hold.

When I was first told by Texi about the plane and who had been on it, I felt certain I would get these two men. Now, after listening to the message on the recorder, I felt confident that I would be able to link Katherine in as well.

Patrick Lane and Owen
Hensley
were store-bought hoods. Both had been raised on the west side of Louisville. Neither one had found a good reason to stay in school. Instead, they received their education on the streets, running numbers and drugs for the local bookies and dealers in the Shawnee Park area.

Greg Miller recruited Lane and Hensley. He was the area pimp known as the “Trash Collector.” This had all taken place during Lane and Hensley’s short but illustrious stint at Cassius Clay Middle School. Both were thirteen at the time.

On the streets, Lane was known as “Traffic” for his drug influence, and Hensley was known as “Talker” for never keeping his mouth shut.

Ten years later they were still street punks but much older and much wiser in the depths of public relations and attitude, especially around the neighborhood they had grown up in.

Katherine knew a friend who knew a friend, and somewhere down the chain she met up with these two candidates. Within several meetings, Katherine took both men under her wing. Her new-found acquaintances were now working for her. They were executive enforcers. They were armed and accomplished in the field of hatefulness and informality. They followed instructions implicitly. Katherine expected loyalty, and she received it. There were no questions.

Lane and Hensley had no problem living the back-room lifestyle. They had no problem only being called when ethical business formalities did not seem to be getting the job done.

This is when Katherine would call the two men into action. She would negate the feelings of diplomacy, pull her controllable puppets out of the closet, and have them do what they did best: create a work environment pleasing to Katherine and no one else. It was a very good job assignment. The benefits worked out for both sides of the arrangement.

That was, until I found out what was going on. I would see that things changed. It was only a matter of time now, and the lid was going to be closed tight.

Katherine had my attention. She now had me angry and even more determined.

After being here for eight days, I was getting cramped up with the thought of waiting things out. I wanted to get home. I needed to speed things up. From where I was standing, it was time to start pushing and see where it took me.

Outside, it was beginning to look like inclement weather was on the way, not only from the mess that I was working on, but also from the storm that was now brewing in the northern sky. Clouds were darkening, and rain was beginning to fall. The storm was heading east, following the path of the river. Thunder and lightning could be seen bouncing off in the distance towards Floyd Knobs, Indiana.
Kristina and Sally
found more than just pleasure in their new idea. It was a well-thought-out and calculated risk they were both willing to take. Under normal circumstances, the two might have brought out a group of underachievers to attain the success needed for the task at hand, but not this time. This time they knew what they were doing.

For this diabolical plan to work, they needed a team of professionals. They needed a calculated plan that would reach a higher level of capacity and competence, a well-designed level of polished aptitude. Proficiency was the key for dealing with such an antagonistic adversary as Katherine Ingram.

It was crude and idealistic, and only time would tell if they could pull it off.

Kristina and Sally would convene with the help of several trusted friends. They would embark on their premeditated plans for Katherine Ingram.

The thought of Katherine’s hold on people angered Kristina. The more she thought about it, the more she became enraged. Kristina’s face began taking on an expression of distaste that only a woman could feel with the thought of malice and mischievousness. For now Kristina would stay reserved in her hatred. She would bide her time. Instead of talking, she stared into the blackness of the night. The darkness would tell the story.

Sally had driven her car down the darkened road away from the club and into the lobby parking lot of the Ingram Towers. She stopped the car, parking in one of the four marked visitor spaces. Beside Sally, Kristina sat patiently waiting.

The two women began to laugh, in sarcastic disapproval as the alcohol flowed through their bodies, about what they were going to do when they got the chance.

Looking up into the shadows of the building cast by the fading sunset, the two women could see the building beginning to come alive. Tenants on different floors began turning on their lights as evening fell. Streetlights were now reflecting against the brick blocks and the architectural lines of the building’s structure. Lights were filtering through the branches of trees and scrubs in the sculptured landscaping that lay below.

Gazing from the seats of the car, both women looked upward. Floor by floor they began to count. Soon they were able, by pointing with their fingers, to discover the sixteenth floor, the darkness revealing its uninhabited existence.

There was a coldness Kristina felt. It was running up the back of her neck as she looked at the upper floors of the building. She knew that soon she would be taking on the characteristics of her sister-inlaw. It would be a preventable risk, trying to infiltrate the life of Katherine Ingram. It was a risk that she was willing to take, especially if it might cost Katherine a minute of uneasiness and suffering. From the sixteenth floor, Kristina and Sally cast their eyes higher, to the top penthouse suite of the building. Suddenly they saw movement from above. Katherine was looking out her window. Not down at them, but still it stopped them in their conversation. It wasn’t the fear of being spotted, but it was more just startled by the look Katherine gave as she looked out over the skyline of the city. It was her city.

Katherine acted as though she owned the town. She was standing their peering out into the darkness with drink in hand. She was acting the part of the queen looking out over her kingdom. It was as though Katherine had never done anything wrong. And even if she had, it didn’t really matter.

Kristina was determined this would change. She was resolved in her desire to drive as many wedges into Katherine’s life as she could, as uncomfortably as she could. With her confidence building, she was going to do it as soon as possible. How could she lose?

From the approval that Kristina’s friend Sally was giving, she felt more and more convinced. With the help of her favorite cousin Jimmy Chase, she felt capable of pulling off this task. She felt capable of moving into Katherine’s building without Katherine ever knowing that it had happened. The idea was foolproof.

Well-established businessmen
and women, leaders in the financial community, high flyers in their respected fields of corporate headhunting, were considered the customary cliental for the Ingram Towers. It was what the Board of Tenants looked for when opening a condominium to the public for sale.

Money, stature, influence, and a sense of power were all considered long before someone was allowed to purchase a unit. Price was only one condition. When it came to allowing someone the chance to buy into this real estate location, the board members were a group of tenant owners whose sole purpose in life was to keep the garbage out and to sell only to their kind.

The lower five floors of the Ingram Towers had three units, each with approximately twenty thousand square feet of living space. Each valued at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars when new. On the sixth through fifteenth floor, there were two units per floor with a measured three thousand two hundred square feet. Each came with a sticker price of three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars per unit.

Above that, on floors sixteen through twenty-four, there was only one unit per floor. Each of these units was finished with sixty-two hundred square feet of living space. With a base cost of five hundred thousand dollars for the sixteenth floor and an additional fifty thousand for each floor above that, the twenty-fourth floor that Katherine Ingram owned and occupied had an estimated value of a mere nine hundred thousand at the time of purchase.

Association bylaws dictated a unanimous vote by each of the three board members to allow any new applicant to become a resident of the building. The only way to be on this board was to be one of the tenants that lived on the sixteen through twenty-forth floors. The elite of the elite; the very best, as they liked to call themselves. Even the rich have a pecking order.

With the open-book, open-door policies of real estate agents, it did not take long for Texi to find the agent selling the most units in the Ingram Towers. Through published records, sold property declarations, and advertisements on the public access channels of current brokerage houses, Texi was able to track sales back to the grand opening in June 2004.

Six units had sold since the first wave of buyers. Four units had resold in the summer of 2005, and two units had resold in the spring of the next year. All with a resale value of five to ten percent declared markup over the original sale price.

The condo on the sixteenth floor had become available in the first week of March and was still on the market. Bill Lynberry had apparently died of an overdose of sleeping pills after a breakup with his lover. He was not found until two days later by the maid service. Due to this story playing out, several people had looked at the place, but none of them felt comfortable living in the unit that someone had died in.

This is where Kristina’s luck came into play. Kristina did not care about the dead guy, the fact that he was gay, or the fact that he had problems. She had enough of her own problems to worry about. She wanted the unit. She wanted the unit for living space in the circus of thrills and spills and because of the games she was going to play on Katherine.

Kristina’s first objective was to get into the building as a tenant before Katherine knew she was there. This would take some planning and ingenuity. It would take getting past the board of acceptance and the bylaws of the tenants’ association.

The one thing Kristina had going for her was the fact that the unit had not sold to one of the first few groups of people looking. This had helped reduce the price of the unit. It had also brought the price back down to where it was when the unit first sold two years previously. Also, this would help Kristina get past any lose ends when her representative met with the board, especially when the board started looking at her background application.