Judged (9 page)

Tim flipped through the file his sister had put together, rehashing the doctor’s past crimes once again. His elderly patients, mainly female with no immediate family present, apparently liked to include the doctor in their will—the doctor, in return, gave them a deadly cocktail of psychiatric drugs. In the past six years, four patients had died from some complication or side effect of the drugs, netting Jensen millions in inheritance.

Tim’s eyes went to the clock on the van’s dash and then to the main vehicle exit of the building. The doctor always took his lunch at the same time and normally would return to his 1920s estate, a twelve-minute drive away. Tim waited, planning to follow the psychiatrist and kill him during his lunch break. The hour he took for lunch was the only part of his routine that was somewhat predictable—nights had passed without the doctor returning home, and when he did, he would often have a different woman with him. His playboy lifestyle and odd hours left a middle-of-the-night encounter at the doctor’s residence a bit of a gamble.

The nose of the doctor’s shiny new white Aston Martin broke from the darkness of the building’s exit. Dr. Jensen pulled past the sidewalk, flicked on his turn signal, opposite the way of his home, and pulled out.

“Where the hell is he going?” Tim muttered.

Jensen pulled past Tim’s van parked on the street and headed in the opposite direction. A dark-haired woman with big sunglasses covering her eyes was riding in the passenger seat of the doctor’s car.

“Damn,” Tim said.

He debated following the doctor but couldn’t make a decision before Jensen’s vehicle was out of view.

Tim brought his fist down on the steering wheel, sounding the horn. He let out a hard breath and thought back over the last few weeks of his surveillance. The doctor had been a little more regular at his home overnight, often accompanied by a young brunette woman, which may have been the woman in the car.

“Well, Doc, looks like I’ll be at your place tonight. We’ll see if you are, I guess.”

Tim started the van and pulled away from the curb.

I fired off a text message to Beth, stating that we had another mention of a similar van. I included the new details that it might have been equipped for wheelchairs and that someone was stopping into the field office later to go through some photos. I told her I’d fill her in on the rest when I returned. Beth responded that she’d pass the information along. I put my phone back in my pocket and waited at the front desk for Prassey, who hadn’t been in his office when I walked back downstairs. Then I saw him approaching from down the hall, and he waved me over.

“Our security office is back here,” he said. “I was just letting our guy know what you were looking for, and he’s working on getting that footage pulled up.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“This way.” Prassey turned back toward the hallway.

I followed him toward where the hall dead-ended near the dealership’s parts counter. Prassey pointed me inside a small room, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. Two computer towers were stacked in the right corner, next to a small desk with a twenty-some-inch monitor sitting on the desk’s surface. The walls were covered in cork boards with miscellaneous papers thumbtacked to them. A man was seated in an office chair with his back toward us.

“Chuck, this is the FBI agent who needs to see that footage,” Prassey said.

The man, Chuck, turned on his chair to face us. He looked to be in his thirties and was dressed in street clothes. “Sure, come on over. I’m just getting set up to have a look at what’s been recorded.”

I walked toward the man, who motioned to the empty chair beside him, and took a seat. The cramped space allowed us about two inches between our shoulders.

“Get him whatever he needs,” Prassey said.

Chuck nodded. “Sure,” he said.

Prassey left the doorway.

“He said you wanted some footage in regards to our old general manager?” Chuck asked.

“Correct. Ideally, I’d like to see whatever footage you have from last Tuesday around eleven o’clock at night. Maybe we could start around ten thirty and work from there.”

“Sure. Let me get that pulled up.” Chuck clicked away at the keyboard sitting in front of the monitor and tapped the mouse buttons. “Okay. This is going to be Tuesday night. We have a bunch of cameras. Any idea what camera you were looking for, specifically? We have a couple covering the lot and another couple that cover the entrances to the building as well as interior cameras.”

“Um.” I rubbed at the back of my neck with my left hand—if I’d tried it with my right, I would have elbowed the guy in the face. “I’m trying to think what would be easiest. I guess pull up the main camera that covers the entrance to the dealership here. Let’s look for a taxi from in between, say, ten thirty and a little after eleven.”

“Taxi?”

“Scobee was picked up.”

“Oh, okay.” Chuck pointed at the monitor in front of us. “This should be the main entrance starting at ten thirty, Tuesday.”

The screen started blue, but then the footage began to roll, with a time-stamp in the lower-right corner and a camera number in the top left. He fast forwarded the footage until a taxi made an appearance, pulling into the lot at 10:52 p.m. We followed the cab on screen until it left the camera’s view, pulling up toward the service entry of the dealership.

“One second,” Chuck said.

He switched camera views, and we watched as the cab waited and Scobee emerged from the service door, got in the cab, and pulled away. We switched camera views back to the original one where we’d spotted the cab entering the dealership, and we watched as the cab left the parking lot.

“Let it play for a bit,” I said.

“What are we looking for here?” Chuck asked.

“I want to see if anyone follows him.”

“Sure.”

He let the footage play for another minute, but we didn’t see any other vehicle, more specifically, a van.

“It doesn’t look like anyone went out after him,” Chuck said.

“Can we try the previous Tuesday? Does your system go back that far?”

“This is all on storage online through our security company. I’m not sure how far back it goes, but I’ve never tried to look something up and not found it. Hold on,” Chuck said.

He pulled up the prior week, and we watched the footage—a taxi pulled up and waited, Scobee entered, and they pulled from the lot. No vehicles followed.

“Looks damn near identical,” he said.

“Spin that footage until about two thirty in the morning.”

He pulled up the time, and a couple minutes after two thirty, a taxi pulled back into the dealership and dropped Scobee off. We followed him on camera as he walked around the side of the building to the back corner of the parking lot, got in his vehicle, and pulled away. I saw no suspicious vehicles or people follow. Nothing looked off—other than a guy returning home after cheating on his wife.

“Do you know what time Scobee normally left during the week?” I asked.

“He only worked late one or two nights a week, Tuesdays obviously being one of them. I think normally he probably worked close to banker hours—nine to five.”

“Let’s try another day. Maybe a Monday or something. Maybe with it still being light out, we’ll have a little better of a view.”

“Okay,” Chuck said.

We sat through another twenty minutes of video, only to get nowhere. I had a feeling in my gut that somewhere on their footage, I would see a wheelchair van with numbers on the windows, but I had no intention of watching weeks’ worth of footage in a cramped security room of a car dealership.

“Is there a way my tech guys could access this to go through different dates and things like that? We’re looking for a specific vehicle on one of the videos. I have a pretty good hunch it will show up somewhere.”

“I’m sure our security company could give you guys access though I don’t know if they’ll require some kind of official paperwork. I can give you all the contact information we have for them and let you take it from there, I guess.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said.

He gave me the name of the company, a phone number, and a contact. I thanked him, popped in by Prassey to thank him for his help as well, and left the dealership for the Miramar office. My mind bubbled with thoughts of the investigation, only to be broken up by my phone ringing in my pocket—Beth.

“I’m heading back now,” I answered.

“Oh, okay. I’m just leaving. I have a patrol car meeting me to do some of these interviews. I’m starting a little bit north of Miami. It looks like we have a few people to stop in by over there. What did you get out at the dealership?”

“Well, I found out that the late Glen Scobee was sleeping around on his wife.”

“Really? He kills his first wife and sleeps around on the second. Great guy.”

“Yeah. The woman he had been having an affair with worked at the dealership. She didn’t come out and say they were involved at first but gave me enough hints that it was pretty much all but a foregone conclusion. I think her guilty conscience ended up getting the better of her, and she started singing.”

“Anything important?” Beth asked.

“She mentioned seeing a van similar to the one in my anonymous phone call. She’s going to come in this evening and take a look at some van photos.”

“So she’s where you got the additional info on the van you texted over?”

“Correct.”

“And she said it was a wheelchair van?”

“Yeah, it kind of goes with what my other caller said as well and would make sense for there to be numbers on the glass if it was a vehicle that was for hire.”

“Right,” Beth said.

“Anything from that pay phone that made the 9-1-1 call?”

“They didn’t find any video that covered the area where the pay phone was located. We got the 9-1-1 recording. The caller was a man. I guess they pulled some prints that belong to a local junkie in the system. The last I heard, they were out looking for the guy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Did they let you look at any video there?”

“I looked through a little bit in their security closet, but nothing was really there. I got a contact for the company that handles the dealership’s security. I figured I’d pass it down to the tech guys and see if they can go through the video and find our van on the recordings somewhere.”

“Not a bad idea. Did you want to meet me, or what is your plan?”

“Well, I was thinking about something while I was just driving. I need to put together some printouts of vans for this Alice Schipper, Scobee’s girlfriend, to go through when she comes in. I was kind of kicking around the idea of doing that right away and trying to get the ID of my anonymous caller. I only handed two cards out, and I know I’d remember the woman’s face that I handed one to if I saw her. I could make a trip back out there and see if the woman could pick out a van like she saw. Maybe she’ll be a little more apt to talk if I show up on her doorstep.”

“Sure,” Beth said. “What time is the girlfriend coming in?”

“Around six.”

“Okay. I should be back around then. I’ll meet you back there.”

“Sounds good. Hey, did Couch head out with everyone, or did he stay back at the office?”

“He said he was sticking around but to call him if I needed anything.”

“Okay. I’ll catch up with you when you get back. Let me know if you get something.”

“Will do. You do the same.”

“Yup.” I clicked off.

I pulled up to the Miramar office twenty minutes later, parked, and headed in. I found Agent Couch in his office and rapped my knuckles on the door, and he waved me inside. Couch pushed away whatever file he was looking at and motioned for me to sit.

“Any luck out there?” he asked.

“A little.”

I gave him a quick run-through about the girlfriend, the van, the video, and the fact the woman was stopping in later.

“What do you need from me?” Couch asked.

“Well, I have a contact for the security company that handles the dealership’s video. I’d like to get someone on making contact there and getting the recorded footage to look through for this mystery van. I’d also like to get the ID for the anonymous call that came to my cell phone so I can make a trip to the woman’s house and stick some photos of different vans in front of her face.”

“Sure. Let me get someone from our tech department in here to get on that. What else?” Couch asked.

“I’m going to need a printer to start printing out photos.”

I sat at an empty desk in the main office area of the serial crimes unit. In front of me sat a small stack of printed photos of late-model vans—some converted for wheelchair access, some not. I tried to limit my printouts to those of lighter colors—silver, beige, and white. I flipped open an empty folder and slipped all the papers inside. I’d printed a total of about fifty sheets, yet there were only ten different vans that it could be. Looking at them, and thinking back on what my anonymous caller had said about it not having looked like anything she’d seen, I was pretty set on the vehicle being one of three. Nissan, Chevy, and Ford each made a small van that didn’t look like your average minivan. Each van seemed to cater to the commercial market, being available in cargo trim or in other custom business specs.

“Rawlings,” I heard.

I spun my chair to find Agent Couch standing behind me.

“Your caller came from this address.” He held out a sheet of paper.

I took it from him and looked at the name and address.

“The home is three west and then across the street from our scene this morning. Phone and house belong to a Dorothea Rice. She’s eighty-four.”

“My caller wasn’t elderly. Do we know who else lives at the residence?”

Couch shook his head. “Are you set with your photos there?”

“Yeah.” I glanced over at the black-and-white analog clock on the wall. “Anything from the tech department on the security place?”

“They wanted a subpoena, which we supplied. I’ll call up to them and get an update, to see if they actually have gotten access yet. When are you going back out to Liberty City?”