Soft Case: (Book 1 in the John Keegan Mystery Series) Read online

  “Okay.” Rick jotted a few things down. Roseanna looked at me, as if wondering why I didn’t ask any questions. The only things I had to ask didn’t pertain to the investigation. Like, “Are you single?” or “What color underwear are you wearing?” Maybe a little creepy, I know. Just being honest. She smiled at me, and for a moment. I thought she knew what ran through my mind. I looked at her hands. No ring. Beautiful.

  “Where’s the answering machine?” Rick asked. I knew Rick didn’t even consider the woman sexually, though I wondered how that was possible. She reeked of sex. He only saw her as an information source for his case. Nothing else. Plus, he had the wife to worry about. And for some strange reason, he preferred to flirt in online chat rooms. Weird.

  “In the kitchen.” Rick took a plastic evidence bag out of his jacket pocket and got up. I did too, though I wanted to stay and stare at Roseanna longer. Creepy again.

  We made our way to the kitchen, a modern job. In the center stood a stainless steel refrigerator, a huge one, steel stove, steel dishwasher. The refrigerator struck me as odd, considering the lady, as far as we knew, lived alone, and wasn’t home often. The stove was in the middle of the room, with an exhaust hood over it. The walls were paneled dark, and there wasn’t much light in the room. A glance at the ceiling produced a normal fixture in this room. The kitchen was a sharp contrast to the living room. I guess Mrs. Minkoff kept the strange items in one room. Smart.

  Roseanna turned on the light, and pointed to a counter on the left side of the room. The answering machine was an old one, thankfully, which meant it used a tape instead of digital recording. That wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was easier to take a tape instead of the entire machine. Mrs. Minkoff probably wouldn’t be happy with the fact that she wouldn’t be receiving any messages for a while. Too bad.

  Rick went over to the machine, hovering over it like a kid over a big wrapped box at Christmas. He almost looked cute. He opened the machine, took the tape, and placed it in the plastic bag. He took it all so seriously. I kept my gaze on Roseanna’s nice behind. She stood next to Rick, watching what he did closely. Every few seconds, she curtly glanced over at me, and I smiled at her in my most sinister way.

  “Okay, we have the tape,” Rick said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card. “If you hear from Mrs. Minkoff, please contact me.” I wanted to let Rick know that we needed the number to contact Minkoff, but Roseanna was one step ahead of me.

  “Do you want that phone number?” she asked.

  “That would be nice,” I said, smiling again. I’m a bastard, I know. But I was born that way. Not my fault.

  “It’s over here.” Roseanna glided over to the kitchen cabinet, opened it, and read the number off a piece of paper taped inside it. Rick jotted it down in the notepad.

  “Is she expected to contact you soon?” I asked.

  “She sometimes calls on Thursday. Her schedule changes, so it’s tough to predict.” Roseanna looked directly at me when she spoke. I felt like she saw right through me. I liked it.

  “So, you might hear from her tomorrow,” Rick expertly deduced.

  “Yes,” Roseanna said, not taking her eyes off me.

  “Please let us know if she does,” Rick said.

  The voices came across as mere echoes in the unspoken dialog Roseanna had going on, at least in my head.

  “She’s going to be devastated,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked, getting lost in myself.

  “Mrs. Minkoff,” Roseanna said.

  “Oh, right.”

  Rick got us back on track, unfortunately. “Were you planning on contacting her about her son today?” he asked, shooting me a look of bewilderment. I could give a shit.

  “I thought about it, but I really don’t want to be the one to give her the bad news. I wouldn’t wish that job anyone.”

  “Does she have any contact at all to media?” Rick asked.

  “In the Andes? I don’t think so.”

  Real bright, Ricky-boy.

  “Oh,” he said, “Gonna be hard on her.” I wanted to be hard on Roseanna.

  “Yes, it will.”

  I could tell Roseanna wanted us to leave. Well, at least she wanted Rick to leave. I thought about asking for a tour of the house, especially the bedroom, but this wasn’t the time or place. Maybe I could come some other time, for extra information.

  “Thank you for your time, Ma’am,” Rick said. “Please do not hesitate to call us if you have any information.”

  “I will.”

  I scanned Roseanna’s face, this time with my detective eyes. I wanted to see if she had anything to hide. It didn’t appear that way, though I had the rose-colored glasses on. Rose-colored glasses for Roseanna. Can’t make that shit up. Reading someone’s intentions takes concentration and experience, I learned. You just need to be suspicious of everyone, and, even then, you might overlook something. Especially if you look at someone’s ass instead of their face. Not many clues to an investigation in a woman’s ass. At least, none that I have found yet. But I’ll keep looking, just in case.

  We left Ms. Minkoff’s house, and got back into the squad car. I couldn’t get Roseanna out of my head. I needed to focus on the investigation, not my libido. I looked at the tape in the plastic bag between us. It was a standard tape, not one of those miniature ones most answer machines used. And, to my delight, there was a cassette player in the car. I picked up the plastic bag as Rick pulled away from the house, and he turned to look at me.

  “What are you doing?” Rick asked, raising his voice to a high-pitched sissy yelp. And I am not being sexist or anything else with that comment.

  I held the tape in my hands. “Cassette tape,” I said, then gestured to the player, “Cassette player. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “What if the tape gets jammed in the player?” Rick asked.

  “We take it out then.”

  “And what if it gets damaged in the process?” Rick asked. He always worried so damn much. “We’ll lose everything.”

  “Won’t happen. Plus, we’ll still have each other.”

  Rick didn’t comment on that last part. He got squeamish about such joking. “I’m not so sure we should take that chance.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” I said. I remembered how to handle him. “Listen, we both want to hear what’s on this tape, and I can’t think of a better time to do it than right now.”

  Rick sighed. “Go ahead.” Too easy.

  I popped the tape in the player, and hit the rewind button. I hoped that the woman didn’t get like twenty messages that we had to go through to get to the good one. That would only figure.

  The tape didn’t take long to rewind, and started playing. There was a lot of feedback, but we could hear the tape clear enough. The first message came on.

  “Dr. Minkoff, this is Harold Neidemeyer, from last semester’s Anthropology class. I wanted to know if you had that copy of my paper. Please call me back at…” I won’t give out Harold’s number. Consider it an attempt to make it into heaven.

  So Mrs. Minkoff was also a professor. How appropriate. Perhaps a little Indiana Jones in her. It actually sounded kind of hot. I didn’t go for older women, but hey, nothing wrong with a little adventure. Life surely needs it these days.

  “Ms. Minkoff, please call the Long Island Power Authority regarding last month’s statement.” I reminded myself to call her Ms. Minkoff, not Mrs.

  “Jackie, this is Tom. I just wanted to wish you luck on your dig. Sorry I didn’t call you sooner. Take care.”

  Then, the message came. The one we hoped for. “Mom, it’s me. I guess you left for the Andes already.” Mullins sounded distraught. “I just wanted to apologize. This is all going to be hard on you. Understand that it’s the only way. I just hope this won’t make things too difficult. I’m doing it to help undo the damage to what Dad started. And don’t listen to what is said afterward. You’ll know the truth.” Then, the message got cut off.

  Ric
k stopped the car. “Rewind that,” he said.

  We listened to the message again. I thought it sounded like an apology for the suicide. Or perhaps an apology for something else. It could go either way.

  “That doesn’t sound like a suicide note,” Rick said.

  “Well, it could be. He is apologizing. Could be the suicide he is apologizing for,” I said. But I really agreed with Rick.

  “He gets cut off. If he was going to kill himself, and he planned it, don’t you think he would have timed his final message a little better?”

  ’’We’ll have to let Geiger hear it.”

  “He’s gonna think what I think. Regardless, we are going to have to investigate it. I think we should get a hold of Ms. Minkoff as soon as possible.”

  “And Mullins’ wife and partner. If he was distraught, they should have seen some indication of that.”

  “Absolutely.” Rick checked his watch. “It’s almost twelve. Mrs. Mullins should be touching down at JFK at any moment.”

  We were right near the airport. I had to control my urge to make us go to the airport and head her off. It wasn’t correct procedure, and the woman really didn’t deserve to be bombarded right away. Yet, something told me to get to this woman immediately. Call it my suspicious mind. Call it my insanity. Call it my good cop instincts. Call it whatever you want, because I didn’t follow it.

  And I should have.

  Five

  Geiger didn’t look happy. Though a tough man at times, he generally walked around with a smile on his face, his disposition usually pleasant. It wasn’t right then. Not at all. Something had his Fruit of the Looms in a bunch. It took me until I was in my 30’s to understand why they called them that, mainly because I never knew what the hell a loom was.

  “Who did you two talk to,” he said, meeting us in the back parking lot. He didn’t ask it.

  “Just the housekeeper,” I said.

  “No one else?”

  “No, why?”

  “I just received a call from Sondra Mullins’ lawyer. He said that if we want to speak to her, we have to contact him first. Someone tipped him off,” Geiger said.

  “Oh man,” Rick said. He whined when he said it. I mean that.

  “It could just be that he saw the news, and came to his own conclusions,” I said, trying to ignore Rick.

  “No. Someone spoke to him,” Geiger insisted.

  Rick looked at me. “The housekeeper,” he said. “She’s the only one we spoke to.”

  “And the neighbor, last night,” I added.

  “What neighbor?” Geiger said, his voice raising in pitch and volume. “You never said anything about a neighbor, and I sure didn’t see a report indicating that.”

  “The one who lives next door to the mother. Actually, he spoke to us first,” I said defensively. Sometimes talking to Geiger reminded me of talking to my father. I hoped he didn’t fully catch my sarcasm in identifying what a neighbor is.

  “What did you say to him?” Geiger looked directly at me when he asked that.

  “Nothing. He told us that the mother was away, and that we could talk to the housekeeper today.”

  “Nothing else?” Geiger asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Nothing. He kept asking us questions, but we didn’t answer them. He just came across as nosy.”

  “I expect that information will be in your first report.”

  “Of course,” Rick said.

  “Don’t mess around. Don’t talk to anyone that you don’t have to,” Geiger said. He sounded less than pleased and I felt guilty about that. The guy would grow old before his time if he stayed my boss. It’s the Keegan charm.

  “We won’t,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Geiger repeated.

  “Okay,” Rick said. He got ruffled. I found all of this amusing, because I knew something of this sort would happen. We should have gone to the airport. That would have solved all of this.

  “Where’s the tape?” Geiger asked.

  “Right here,” Rick said, removing the plastic bag from his jacket pocket. He acted like a proud kid.

  “You listen to it yet?”

  Rick gave me a stem look, the kind that made me want to knock his front teeth onto the pavement like Chiclets.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Anything on it?”

  I nodded.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Best if you hear it for yourself. Rick and I have conflicting opinions on it.” That made Geiger smile a little. He wanted conflicting opinions. He wanted all angles covered. He wanted us to argue our prospective ideas so that we might find something new in the argument. Geiger was a smart man. Rick and I would argue a lot.

  He grabbed the tape. “Let’s go.”

  Geiger led us to the department audio lab, which basically consisted of a decent rack system, a few monitoring tools, a souped-up computer, and a technician, who went by the name of Jacob. Jacob didn’t look like he belonged working in a police department. He looked more like someone who would be a guest in such a place. Jacob stood at about 6’1, weighed about 225lbs, had long red hair, which came down to his shoulders, a neatly trimmed beard (on Geiger’s orders), and green eyes that spoke of some sort of rage or insanity. Of course, one should never judge a book by its cover. Jacob was one of the warmest people I knew, and didn’t seem to have a violent molecule in his body. Still, he was on my list of people never to piss off. He ran with an elite crowd on that list, but I figured he would probably laugh if I ever told him about it.

  When we walked into the room, Jacob was busy listening to interrogation tapes from another case. Jacob did this for two reasons. One, if he heard anything really out of line, he notified Geiger. And two, he had an uncanny ability to notice slight changes in the tone of someone’s voice, and could tell they were lying. He’d give this information to the detectives, and they’d go and press the witness or suspect further on that subject. It worked pretty well, and a lot of us wondered how the hell Jacob did it.

  He turned around when we walked in the room, acknowledged our presence, and turned back to his equipment. Speaking of his equipment, my earlier descriptions were only physical. His stuff looked like common consumer electronics, but he had overhauled just about all of it, to the point that I wouldn’t even dare to try and listen to a CD on his system, for fear that I might cause the Russians to launch a nuclear attack on Antarctica, or something like that.

  Bach played softly on the small portable unit he had in the corner. I knew it was Bach because I had made the mistake of saying the same song was by Mozart the week before, and Jacob went into a long lecture about the differences between the two men, ranging from height, food preference, to their music. He was quite a knowledgeable guy, Jacob, but most of his expertise fell into what I considered useless knowledge.

  Geiger flipped Jacob the tape when he turned back around. “Pop this in, and let me know what you think of its quality.”

  “It’s an answer machine tape,” Jacob said.

  “Yes it is. The one with what we think are Ron Mullins’ last words.”

  That fact made Jacob hurry a little. As a computer buff, he knew of Ron Mullins. Anyone who had a computer on his or her desk knew the man’s work. Someone with an affinity for computers either saw him as a hero or villain, depending on their operating system preference.

  “You want computer analysis, or just a quick judgment on whether or not it’s been tampered with,” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t think it’s been tampered with,” Geiger said. He paused for a moment, then said, “Better check it,” he added.

  Jacob played the tape, both through two little speakers on his desk, and the headphones he perpetually wore on his head. The band was nearly invisible in his thick hair, but the earpieces were huge, covering his ears and almost all of his sideburns.

  While we listened to the tape, I tried to concentrate on the sound of Mullins’ voice. From what I know about suicides, when the person has come to the conclusion that
they are going to kill himself, they become calm, comforted. There is no distress in their demeanor. But, then again, I hadn’t spoken to, or heard the recorded voice of, a suicidal person who has made the final decision. My gut, however, told me that Ron Mullins’ distressed voice did not belong to a suicidal man but instead a scared one, perhaps a little angry, too. Definitely angry, I thought. And I wanted to know why.

  “I’m doing it to help undo the damage to what Dad started,” Geiger said, when the tape finished. “That’s the most important part of the whole tape. You guys get anything on that yet?”

  “No,” Rick said. “We haven’t gotten the chance.”

  “That part bugged me too. If we find out what that is, we have almost everything we need, in a sense,” I said.

  Geiger nodded in agreement. “We have to find out what his father was in to.”

  “Mullins’ father founded the business,” Jacob said, taking the headphones off. “They started in the late sixties making computer components out of a warehouse on the east end of Long Island. From there, they decided to custom build mainframes and desktops, but the market really wasn’t ready yet. Sam Mullins then decided to take on a partner, for financial reasons. Holden Chapman, a Wall Street broker, became interested in Sam’s company, and the two became partners sometime around Watergate. They fought often, but they ran one hell of a company. Mullins saw the declining profits in hardware by the early eighties, and decided to go into the software end. He groomed Ron as a computer programmer, and the kid produced at the age of seventeen, coming up with an office suite that, with only simple code changes, could run on both an Apple and a PC. Apple was still a force to be reckoned with during the mid-eighties, mainly because so many people had bought them, and the cycle of buying a new computer every two years hadn’t developed yet. People thought they would keep their computers forever. Sam Mullins brought innovations to almost every aspect of computer software, from fighting piracy to Internet encryption, all with the help of his son’s expertise. Both Sam Mullins and Holden Chapman died within two years of each other, both by heart attack, leaving Ron, and Holden’s son, Harold, in charge of the business.”