~~~
Riker’s Island, the New York City jail given brand-name recognition via countless television crime dramas, consisted of ten separate penal facilities. It contained its own power plant, a laundry that saw a lot of orange coveralls, a bakery that made seven kinds of bread, and convenience shops for the benefit of residents who needed soap, razors or condoms. Prisoners awaiting trial, sentencing or transfer to upstate institutions cooled their heels here, along with inmates serving sentences of less than a year. No one called it home but roughly 16,000 men and women who’d made their own beds were now forced to sleep in them there every night, reflecting upon the folly of their ways.
It was a ten-minute drive from LaGuardia to Riker’s, but it took half an hour for Blaikie and Crowe to get through the security to the interview rooms where Detectives Levinson and Rossimoff were doing double duty in a tag-team interrogation that had lasted almost 36 hours.
Levinson, looking like he hadn’t shaved, washed nor eaten a proper meal in days, took them to an observation room with a one-way window looking into an interrogation room. Detective Rossimoff, looking more surly than usual, sat at the observation window, silently watching the occupants next door. A toothpick shifted from one side of his mouth to the other.
On the other side of the window, a haggard Jeb Stockwell in orange coveralls sat at a metal table with a man in his mid-fifties.
“His lawyer?” Blaikie asked.
Rossimoff nodded.
“Did you tell Jeb that Carrie was dead?” Crowe asked Levinson.
“I said the FBI had caught her. I told him she had her story but we’d like to hear his before we finalized charges against them. Leave it to his imagination to fill in the rest. I said we knew everything except for a few details.” Levinson looked at the clock above the observation window. “He’s been with his lawyer an hour now. Maybe by midnight, he’ll be ready to plead out.”
Crowe watched Stockwell, whose head was scrunched between his shoulders, arms crossed over his chest, hugging himself. When he briefly tugged a hand loose to scratch his nose, Crowe saw his thumb was locked tightly inside his fist.
“Judging by his body language, he’s ready now.”
“Let’s see.” Levinson rapped on the window to get their attention. Stockwell and his lawyer looked up. Levinson pressed an intercom button. “Ready to resume talking?”
The lawyer made a beckoning motion with his hand.
Levinson flipped a switch on a control panel. “Sound’s on now, you can listen in,” he told Blaikie and Crowe.
The two detectives entered the interrogation room and sat at the table opposite Stockwell and his lawyer.
“So, what have you got to say?” Levinson asked Stockwell.
“What are you offering?” the lawyer said.
“We can talk to the DA but you know the drill. Twenty-five to life if we go to trial. Maybe fifteen if he confesses. Depends on his story.”
Stockwell grimaced. His lawyer shrugged, it doesn’t get any better. He whispered in Stockwell’s ear. Stockwell clasped his hands together as if in prayer.
“From the first time I got in bed with her, I knew I was out of my league,” Stockwell began. “She was a first-class manipulator, even way back then as a Berkeley sophomore. She had guys twisted around her little finger. Munson and I just became her favorites.”
“It was all her idea?”
“First time I heard it was ten years ago. One of those crazy what-if scenarios she came up with one night over a few joints and a bottle of tequila. Every now and again she brought it up, each time with more details sketched in, like she’d actually been thinking about it in between.”
“What about Munson?”
“Dave didn’t know whether to take her seriously or not. She had lots of crazy ideas and sometimes she did crazy things. Once while she was still in Berkeley she’d screwed this rich guy and then blackmailed him under threat of ruining his marriage. She said it was all fair game, that rich people should pay for their stupid mistakes.”
“Kind of a coincidence you all ended up with wealthy partners.”
“More like good luck. We should have left it at that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Stockwell rubbed his face and examined his hands, as if he expected to find something there. “I fell in love with an illusion.” He laughed. “I thought I could have it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get both the money and the younger woman.”
“What about Munson?”
“He knew Lang was seeing someone else and suspected it was getting serious. It was just a matter of time before Lang told him to move out.”
“And Carrie?”
“She’d been fed up with her husband for a long time. Their sex life was dead and she was tired of sneaking around. She’d given him a chance to save their marriage but he still spent all his time on the job.”
“Under those circumstances most people just get a no-fault divorce.”
“She always said, if she had to sell her freedom for marriage, she should be well paid for it. It was her way of making sure she got what she deserved.”
“So things just happened to converge…?”
Stockwell shrugged. “Carrie had kept in touch with us over the years. She liked to travel. New York and San Francisco, she was back and forth all the time. She kept stoking the fires… She had a sense we’d all reached the end of our ropes and it was time to, you know...”
“…to do what?
“Kill each other’s partners.”
“How was that going to work?”
“She had it all figured out. We’d each have the perfect out-of-town alibi. Like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, but a three-way.”
“How’d she determine the timing?”
“The banking conference came up first. That was my excuse to go to San Francisco. Then Munson found the bowling tournament in Albuquerque, close enough to Santa Fe for our purposes. Once those were in place, Carrie arranged meetings with literary agents in New York.”
“After that I suppose it was simple. Your victims were all creatures of habit.”
Stockwell nodded. “Janis had a ticket for a show that Tuesday night. She always walked home from Broadway. I told Carrie where to intercept her. It was even easier in San Francisco. Lang took the same run every day. And in Santa Fe Carrie knew her husband would be home alone late at night.”
“What happened there? If this was supposed to be a triple play, why didn’t Munson kill Dr. Cassidy?”
“Dave choked in the ninth inning. The week before it was set to go down, he told me he couldn’t do it. This was after Carrie had already arranged for an acquaintance of hers to provide Dave a gun in Albuquerque. Plan was, he’d drive up to Santa Fe Tuesday night, kill Cassidy and make it look like a burglary gone bad.”
“And…?”
“He freaked. The more he thought about it, he knew he couldn’t shoot anyone. He wanted to call the whole thing off but he was so afraid of Carrie, he talked to me first.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him it wasn’t any easier for me but if we wanted to get something out of this, we each had to do our parts. But if he just couldn’t do it he’d better find some help. If he bailed now there was no telling how Carrie would react. She might have killed him.”
“Did you really believe that?”
“We both did. We’d been in the same karate class with her. She lost her temper a few times and it was scary. When the instructor intervened she even turned on him. There was something in her, she could go ballistic in a heartbeat.”
“So you came up with Plan B for Dave?”
“No, I give Dave credit for that, he worked it out on his own. A couple of months earlier he’d borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Lang to buy into a music store in San Rafael. Lang gave him the money but the deal fell through at the last minute. Since Dave had decided not to tell Lang about it, it left him holding a conside
rable wad of cash.”
“Which became his working capital…”
“The toughest part was convincing Carrie. She didn’t like Plan B. The way she saw it, each of us had to be directly involved so that we’d all be equally guilty. But when she realized Dave just didn’t have it in him, she agreed to let Zabriskie do his dirty work. Since Dave was hiring Zabriskie, that put him neck-deep in it with the rest of us.”
Levinson placed a legal pad in front of Stockwell. “Write it all down. The players, the plans and what you personally did.”
Stockwell’s lawyer whispered something in his ear. Stockwell picked up the pen and began writing. Levinson and Rossimoff stood and left Stockwell to his allocution.
The two detectives rejoined Blaikie and Crowe in the observation room.
“Thank you.” Blaikie shook each of their hands in turn. “You did a good job.”
“Speaking of good jobs,” Levinson said to Crowe, “That Zabriskie was a real professional. He had the FBI chasing their tails all week.”
“Except he got too clever for his own good,” Crowe said. “If he’d stuck with the planned burglary it might have been all right. I think there was history between Zabriskie and Carrie, and he tried to protect her. Rather than follow Munson’s plan he decided to kill Dr. Cassidy outside his home and ahead of schedule, giving it a terrorist twist. But all those things just made it stand out a little more and drew the wrong kind of attention. It was supposed to be a simple three-way. Zabriskie’s involvement compromised that simplicity and screwed up the symmetry of their plan.”
“Up until then, they must have thought they’d planned the perfect crime,” Levinson said.
Crowe shook his head. “Perfection is God’s work. He guards it jealously.”
Chapter 75
New York
Blaikie and Crowe drove back into Queens, late-night jazz coming in clear and sweet on the car’s sound system. Crowe looked up as an airliner completed its approach over the East River, dropping down toward LaGuardia. Must be hard, he thought, for inmates to watch those planes come and go while they remained cell-bound. That was fate. Most birds were free but some spent a lifetime in cages.
Blaikie took the ramp onto Grand Central Parkway and accelerated up to speed with the traffic into Manhattan. “I got a call from Lisa Carmichael today. Remember the client I sent you last week…?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No sooner had the ink dried on the deed transfer, she got an offer on Friday from a Chinese multi-media company that wanted a SoHo address. She flipped the condo for a half-million profit. She asked what kind of wine you liked so she could send you a case.”
“Did you tell her I wasn’t much of a drinker?”
“I explained what a health freak you were,” Blaikie chuckled. “So she’s giving me the wine as a finder’s fee, and sending you a case of mango juice instead.”
“My guru would certainly approve.”
“It gets better.”
“How so?”
“I told her to throw in ten pounds of cashews.”
Crowe had to laugh. Some people got paid peanuts, but he was different…
They pulled up in front of the Washington Square Hotel. Before Crowe got out, Blaikie thanked him again for what he’d done.
“It won’t bring Janis back, but knowing Jeb will pay for what he’s done to our family will help us sleep at night. Thank you again. Please send me your bill and I’ll arrange for a funds transfer this week.”
They shook hands. Crowe took his bag and got out. The Mercedes slid away into the night, its midnight blue embraced by the darkness.
Crowe checked in and went up to his room. He shaved and took a shower. Just as he was toweling off, his phone rang. Somehow he knew it would be Tracey.
~ The End ~
ALAN ANNAND
Alan Annand is a writer of crime fiction, offering an intriguing blend of mystery, suspense, thriller and New Age noir. When he’s not dreaming up ingenious ways to kill people and thrill readers, he occasionally finds therapy in writing humor, short stories and faux book reviews.
Before becoming a full-time novelist, he worked as a technical writer for the railway industry, a corporate writer for private and public sectors, a human resources manager and an underground surveyor.
Currently, he divides his time between writing in the AM, astrology in the PM, and meditation on the OM. For those who care, he’s an Aries with a dash of Scorpio.
You can find him on Facebook, Goodreads and LinkedIn,
or follow him on Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.
For more information, see his website
www.sextile.com
~~~
Have you read all of Alan Annand’s novels?
Reviews are welcome on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
~~~
SCORPIO RISING (New Age Noir #1)
A criminal profiler investigates the killing of a New York heiress and discovers her death is linked to two other murders on the same day: a dot-com millionaire in San Francisco and the team leader of a CIA counter-terrorist project in Los Alamos.
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FELONIOUS MONK (New Age Noir #2)
Profiler Axel Crowe investigates the murder of a reporter at an ashram. His esoteric detective work reveals a series of Manhattan rape-murders dating back 12 years, with connections to sex trafficking, drug smuggling and the theft of an ancient golden Buddha.
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SOMA COUNTY (New Age Noir #3)
Axel Crowe searches for a missing person in wine country and discovers a black market in body parts. When his client’s best friend is murdered, and more people disappear, Crowe’s investigation leads to a little man with large appetites, big dogs and grand ambitions.
~~~
AL-QUEBECA
Montreal detective Sophie Gillette, still mourning the death of her brother during covert ops in Afghanistan, investigates a fatal hit-and-run, uncovering a terrorist plot to assassinate an American governor, disable New England’s electrical grid, and kill 10,000 hockey fans.
~~~
HARM’S WAY
A private investigator searches for the runaway daughter of an aspiring politician, only to become embroiled in a plot of corruption, decadence and murder. Although violence endangers everyone dear to him, his selfless sense of duty drives him onward to a twisted resolution.
~~~
HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT
A man assumes his twin brother’s identity in order to alibi his own wife who’s accidentally killed his brother in an argument. But when he finds himself sharing a bed with his beautiful sister-in-law, he faces bigger challenges and harder choices.
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ANTENNA SYNDROME
New York, 2026. In the aftermath of a dirty A-bomb, private investigator Keith Savage searches for a kidnapped artist, the paraplegic daughter of a crime-busting politician, but the trail leads to a place where her fascination with insects collides with his fears.
~~~
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