Taunting (The Flint Files Book 1) Read online

  “Doing the whole thing right, of course, would take three weeks just to define the requirements and then another month to get bids from companies to do the work. In six or eight months you can have what you really need” Juanita was excellent at what she did and knew it. And, she was tired of amateurs telling her how IT systems were supposed to work. They always wanted something that sounded simple, then changed their minds a thousand times later. Get it done right the first time.

  “Miss Lautrec, you’re absolutely right.” Allison, too, was pretty good at what he did. “In fact, once you have this up and running give me an hour and then let’s talk about requirements definition. The whole purpose of this quick and dirty thing is to speed getting the requirements right. Just keep that to yourself, please.” Juanita Lautrec had finally found someone who understood.

  Allison spent the next fifty minutes asking a bunch of questions of the accountants and detectives. He was most focused on the parameters for assembling the data set. Was it only members of this one church? Why not other Episcopal churches in New Orleans? Or why not other churches regardless of denomination?

  He finally got the selection parameters and started to ask a question. He thought better of it, and decided to wait until he’d gone over the stuff that Juanita Lautrec was putting together for him.

  There were about 150,000 monthly bank statements involved. He cut that down by looking only at already-computerized records from the bank with the most accounts. Then he created a duplicate set of the selected records so one was chronologically oldest to newest and a second set was the reverse. Then he created a working copy of the second set.

  The break came when he sorted the working copy data by size of deposit. There were clusters of identical deposits across accounts. With some color coding the pattern was obvious.

  Every three months seventeen of the church members got identical deposits. The deposits were all made on the same day. A few key strokes and the same deposits on the same days showed up in fourteen other members’ accounts in different banks.

  Over time the deposits grew in size. A dozen years ago the deposits were for about $6,000 every three months. That grew at an average rate of about 1.5% per year with several anomalies.

  The first anomaly was that all of the changes were upward. And there were spurts of upward changes.

  The biggest anomaly was that there was no correction in 2008 and 2009. No matter where the money arose, the Great Recession should have affected it. The data seemed to say that the recession never happened.

  Mike huddled with the forensic accountant for a couple of minutes going over his results. The accountant agreed. “Danny, we’ve got a big fucking clue here.”

  Juanita Lautrec decided not to be upset that Mr. Allison didn’t keep his word and talk to her about the requirements definition. She could forgive him; he wasn’t an IT professional.

  Chapter Eleven

  Joel locked up the offices at Fitch and Clemons when he left for the night. He thought about hitting a 24/7 bar downtown, but decided against it. There was plenty of time for drinking, he had a plan to make.

  Joel Vanderveer had wiped his computer clean of all traces of access to the fund’s details. Sure, somebody could reconstruct it. But that somebody would have to suspect something. Joel had figured out the skimming, just not the extent of it. And, frankly, he didn’t really want that money. Some of it would be recovered eventually in lawsuits anyway. And a lot of that would eventually go to Joel.

  Before leaving the office Joel put a copy of his memo into Clemons’s files. It had been written when Joel figured out that Clemons had been embezzling. The distributions just weren’t right, and Joel had a decisive analysis proving that money was owed to the fund’s members. A lot of money.

  Joel Vandeerveer’s hands were clean, it was Clemons who was going down. And Joel had documentation to prove he was on the side of the angels. Too bad about the promised job as an associate. Joel would cooperate fully with the investigation and get some good press. At worst, he could get a job with the prosecutor’s office. That might be fun. It’s not like he needed the money.

  Back at the guest house at Aunt Carol’s, Joel took a quick shower. He looked in the mirror and liked what he saw. Almost six feet tall, straw blond hair worn just longer than fashionable, one blue and one green eye (the girls loved that), no facial hair, strong jaw, slender smooth-shaven body. He thought of himself as “one handsome dude.” The girls agreed. Especially Veronica Meritt.

  He had seen her picture in the paper last year when the story about that kidnapping shit appeared. The student nurse had done some brilliant or heroic or lucky thing and diagnosed some Egyptian disease. She was really pretty, and would make a memorable notch on his bedpost. He managed to run into her “accidentally” outside St. Swithin’s where she was doing clinical training.

  The first date was pleasant right up until she said “I don’t put out on the first date.” Joel was ready to drop her on the spot, until she added “But I’ll consider it on the second. And, by the way, my knowledge of anatomy is awesome.”

  Joel went all out for the second date – flowers, a nice dinner, then drinks at Dana’s DaLounge off-Bourton. One of the busboys had stuck to their table like well-chewed gum. Veronica knew him. It was obvious he was smitten with Veronica. And, he was a kid, maybe just out of high school.

  Joel took the kid aside and asked if twenty bucks would make him leave them alone for the rest of the night. The kid said no. A kid turning down twenty bucks.

  “Then let me talk to the owner.” The kid said sure, walked into the small kitchen, and returned without the apron.

  “You wanted to talk to the owner? I’m Alex DeLauder. I own the place. What seems to be the problem, sir?”

  Joel said something about how nice the live band was and went back to the table. Veronica was drinking club soda, so Joel did the same. She had to work tomorrow. Joel was well-versed in the social niceties, and he did not leave a tip. He figured the owner would understand the message.

  They went back to Joel’s place for a nightcap. Veronica was all business, and Joel liked that about the woman. She wanted to draw blood for a sexually-transmitted disease test. “Until it gets back you’re going to use a condom.” Talk about direct, the girl had it all. And the sex was mind-blowing.

  She certainly did know a lot about anatomy. For example, she knew about this place right below his ear, on his neck, where she licked and he shuddered. He’d never had his toes sucked before, and vowed that this wasn’t going to be the last time. She did this thing with his foreskin he’d never even heard about before.

  She talked him through cunnilingus as an expert. He’d never had any complaints about oral sex from a girl before. After this, he didn’t expect he ever would. A minute after he entered her, Veronica’s finger invaded his hole. His orgasm was, well, orgasmic. She had already cum twice while his tongue was at work.

  After that they went out at least one night a week, usually more. And the sex remained just as mind-blowing. Joel wouldn’t mind having her over tonight, but it was late.

  Before getting in bed Joel made a quick note on his cellphone, a reminder to call Veronica tomorrow after he got to work. He couldn’t tell her before then, of course, that he would be tied up for several days in a fraud and murder investigation. In fact, it might be several days before he could tell her the bad news. He kind of wondered when it would be safe to let her know.

  Chapter Twelve

  Statements from a statistics professor at Tulane and from the forensic accountant got the necessary warrant for the dead members’ accounts. That had been Allison’s clue – if the dead members showed the same pattern of activity, the investigation had a potential new direction, one that didn’t lead to the altar at Martyrs’ Episcopal Church.

  Even without computerized versions of the earlier bank accounts, the pattern was easy to spot. A total of twenty-nine of the forty-five dead had the same deposits. That included all ten of the recent
murder victims as well as nineteen others. Among those were all five who had met their demise on cruises plus most of the accidental deaths.

  Danny got this feeling on the back of his neck that never failed him. The accidents were nothing of the sort. They were murder. And he was going to prove it.

  The banks traced the transactions to an account held in trust by Fitch and Clemons. Nobody could find Steve Clemons beyond check-in for a U.S. Airways flight from Miami to Caracas. Venezuelan authorities were saying nothing and accused the U.S. of trying to overthrow the people’s government.

  A material witness warrant was issued for Steve Clemons’s detention. Venezuela refused visas to the New Orleans police detectives who tried to fly there and serve the warrant.

  A trace of the lawyer’s phone records turned up the call to a bank in Vanuatu. The bank claimed they had never heard of Clemons. A request for assistance to the Vanuatu Consulate in New York met with puzzled looks.

  A warrant for all records of the trust account was issued without question. Ninety-six people had received identical distributions from the account since its inception in 1957. The twenty-nine dead were part of the list, so were thirty-two living church members.

  And so were thirty five people who were not members of the church. Except their distributions ended with their deaths, which totaled thirty-one. Death certificates were ordered. A few from natural causes, lots more from accidents, and twelve murders. Most of the murders were stabbings. Only one, a gun death, had been solved.

  The stabbings of non-church members had started about eight or nine years ago. The first had occurred the day after a social event attended by Steve Clemons and some of his clients. The victim had left the gathering, gone home, and climbed in bed. She was found there the following morning by her cleaning woman. Jezebel Washington’s abdomen was ripped open, and someone had sliced up her internal organs. The wounds just didn’t match the other stabbings. Maybe it was a coincidence.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Cornelius Harrington’s murder, two years later, matched Jezebel Washington’s stab for stab and slice for slice. Harrington had been locking up the mortuary he operated with his sons. The boys ran the business now and Cornelius came in just a few days a week. Some of the older customers preferred dealing with him; he had buried many of their friends and relatives.

  A visitor had been seen by a neighbor behind the funeral home. The appearance of a white man at the door was unusual but not rare. Almost half of the mortuary’s employees were white, and white funerals at the black-owned funeral home had become more common. Reverend Arnold Percy at the A.M.E. Church had started switching pulpits once a month with that Episcopal priest, and members of the two congregations had a good deal of contact. Cornelius, of course, already knew a lot of the older members of the Episcopal parish. They had been his friends since his middle son had enrolled at Martyrs Academy so many years ago.

  The mortician’s mutilated remains had been found the next morning by his youngest son, Cornelius Jr. The witness’s description of average height, average build, and average weight was not real helpful. The witness thought he might be white, but that was more a guess than an observation. The old woman had guessed “younger person,” but from her perspective of ninety-three, that included a lot of people on social security.

  Goldberg found the pattern. Washington and Harrington were black and had been attacked more viciously. One of the dead Episcopalians had been black. She had been stabbed only once, just like the rest of the victims. But, someone had broken her nose and a cheekbone with a boot stomp after death.

  She made a notation about possible rage at blacks. It still made no sense. But it would.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The most prolific serial killer in the history of the U.S. was Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. He was suspected of ninety murders and confessed to seventy-one. He had been convicted of forty-nine. The Martyrs murders just might give him a run for the title.

  Joel Vanderveer proved very helpful in the investigation. He showed police (and eventually U.S. Treasury Department investigators) all of the documentation on the trust and its members. This is where things got really interesting.

  The trust was a tontine. Oxley hadn’t been saying taunTING, he’d been saying tontine. Mike Allison gave Danny and the rest of the High Profile Crimes squad a quick overview, then referred them to a professor of finance at Stanford to flesh out the details.

  Movies, TV and books get it all wrong. A tontine isn’t a mutually-owned pile of money that goes to the last surviving member. It’s a form of an investment trust. Members are called subscribers. Every subscriber contributes the same amount of money. Nowadays most tontines are run by private enterprise, although they were used by European governments to raise capital in the 17th century.

  Somebody manages investment of the money and distribution of dividends. In the case of the MAPTA Tontine, the manager was the law firm of Fitch and Clemons. Like many tontines, every subscriber got an equal dividend payment, sometimes called a distribution, every year. MAPTA sent quarterly distributions. That explained the quarterly deposits.

  Unlike many other tontines, a membership could be inherited once. That is, if Mr. Jones is a member and dies, the tontine membership was allocated according to his will. So, Mrs. Jones usually got the membership and its benefits. Mrs. Jones, on the other hand, could not will her membership to anyone on her death. Her share was reallocated to all other members and thus the principal and the quarterly dividends regularly increased.

  When the next-to-last member died, title to principal and rights to all dividends went to the last surviving member. At that point the tontine was dissolved.

  The tontine was named for the Martyrs Academy PTA. So it sort of related to the church, if the tontine was at the center of this. In 1956 its members formed the tontine and invited friends and relatives to contribute. Most of the members of the PTA were members of Martyrs Episcopal Church, but not all. Most of the tontine’s members were also members of Martyrs’ congregation. Some belonged to other churches and a few to synagogues.

  There had been one hundred original members of the MAPTA tontine. George Talbot was a member. Late in life he married Carol as his second wife. He died shortly after Joel came to live with them, and Carol inherited his subscription. Joel could not inherit it from her because it had already been inherited once. Unless, of course, she was the last surviving member. Then, he got it all.

  Daryl Grzgorczyk first voiced the obvious. “People sure seem to die a lot when this guy’s around.”

  Suspicion quickly turned from Vanderveer. When police searched Clemons’s office they found shoes that matched the cemetery footprints. With mud that matched the cemetery grounds. And with William Henderson’s blood. A bloody knife wrapped in a confession would have been nice, but the shoes would probably do it.

  Steve Clemons had been murdering his own clients for at least a decade, and probably longer. Proving it was probably going to be easy. Bringing the killer to court was another matter.

  He was in Venezuela and planned to stay there for a very long time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Goldberg and Silverstein were put on the business of building the case. It was a monumental undertaking. There were at least twenty-one unsolved murders, and probably a whole shitload of accidents that weren’t accidents at all. Not to mention heart attacks that might have had some help.

  A search of Clemons’s home (not quite a mansion, but close) turned up poor Jezebel Washington’s necklace and a pin that once belonged to Millie Boatwright. Both were in the back of an end-table drawer. It’s common, of course, for serial killers to take trophies from their kills. This case was unusual in that only trophies from two victims had been found, and despite probably having time to garner a souvenir, nothing of William Henderson’s had been taken.

  A profiler from the FBI said that a police psychologist was probably the best bet to sort out the “why” of Clemons’s murderous activities.
So, they called in the contract shrink, who said this one was over his head. He suggested psychologists in three or four other departments.

  By this time Carly Thibedeaux had been assigned full time to Goldberg and Silverstein. The detectives were good, but neither had Melvin Brown’s touch when dealing with patrol officers. And with six months to go until Melvin’s retirement, Lieutenant Grzgorczyk wasn’t putting his star behind a desk. He was going to milk the guy for everything he had.

  Carly was the obvious choice. She had worked several of the murders, was well-respected in the Patrol Division, and was a Corporal. That kind of put her in the middle ground between the maggotry and management. She could talk to both sides. That’s why Carly was in the office when the police shrink stopped in to say this was too much for him and suggested a few other departments to look into.