The Three Way Murder

They did find a half-full wine bottle and a wineglass that was on the table beside the bed. Because Phil had said he suspected drugs were the cause of death, the techs had brought both back to the lab and checked them for fingerprints. They lifted several good prints from both the bottle and the glass, but they were all a match for Mr. Mitchell's prints. That contradicted my theory that Mr. Mitchell had been murdered. I was in no better shape than Phil, and no further along in figuring out what really happened.

That afternoon, Suzie Lee called me.

"Mark, I have some information on that company you asked me about. If you're not too busy, I'll come down and tell you what I found out."

Five minutes later, Suzie walked up to my desk and sat down in my visitor chair. That chair would have held two of Suzie. She's a tiny little Asian woman who's maybe forty and still cute as a button. She's had three kids but you'd never suspect that. Her ass is a little wider than when we first met and her tits are a little bigger, but she probably tips the scales at all of about ninety pounds.

Suzie swept her mane of long, coal black hair over her shoulder and then looked at the tablet computer she'd brought with her.

"JaMon Pharmacies is a privately owned company incorporated in Tennessee. The owners are listed as Jack and Monica Mitchell. The corporation has six locations in Tennessee and all are in cities with major hospitals.

"Their business strategy is a good one, I think. All their pharmacies are located within walking distance of an inner-city hospital. The reason that's a good strategy is that if you're in the hospital and taking a prescription med, the hospital makes it easy to fill that prescription in their own pharmacy when you leave. The only problem is the hospital marks up the meds quite a bit.

"JaMon's strategy is to locate close enough you don't have to drive to their pharmacy and they mark up their meds less than the hospital. That's what they say on their website anyway.

"They're probably doing pretty well. I checked on the average profit margin for a pharmacy, and it's about twenty-eight percent net on an average of two million in sales per location. Since they don't mark up as much, let's say each location does a million and a half and their margin is twenty-five. That's a net profit of three-seventy-five a year for each location and about two and a quarter million in total."

That was a ton of money, and a ton of reasons for Monica to put Jack in the ground.

"They rake in over two million a year? Their house was a big house and it was in a nice section of town, but it didn't look like a mansion."

Suzie smiled.

"I doubt the company keeps all that money and I doubt the owners put it in the bank. They'd lose almost half to taxes if they did. Their website says they're continuing to expand and remodel, so a lot probably goes to construction and renovation. They're building assets that they can sell down the road. When they sell, they'll have to pay taxes on the capital gains, but any decent CPA will be able to minimize what they have to pay then."

"I can't get much more unless I can get their bank statement and the company financial statements for the last ten years or so. If you can get me those, I'll tell you exactly where the money goes."

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When Suzie went back to her desk I went back to thinking. Maybe I was just shocked at how much money JaMon Pharmacies was raking in, but if Mr. Mitchell really wanted to divorce Monica, he could give her half the business and still have more money than he could spend. Well, he could have done like some movie stars and pro athletes and bought a mansion and several luxury cars, but I didn't think a man who was apparently pretty good at business would make that mistake.

On the other hand, two million a year is better than a million a year, so Monica would have been better off if Mr. Mitchell was out of the picture. I was still thinking she'd figured out a way to kill her husband. It wasn't just the money either. She'd seemed pretty meek until she thought I was accusing her of having something to do with her husband's death. She'd gone into fight mode then, so I figured she could be a pretty strong woman if she wanted to. She'd also called Janice, Mr. Michell's mistress and told her in very plain terms that he was dead.

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I had more questions I wanted to ask Monica, so I drove to the house that afternoon. When she answered the door, she was wearing jeans and a white blouse open enough at the neck she was showing some really nice cleavage.

She said, "Detective Robbins, I assumed you'd probably be back to talk to me. Are you going to take me downtown like they do in the cop shows on TV?"

I shook my head.

"No, I just have some questions, standard questions I'd ask anyone in a case involving the death of a spouse."

'Well, come in then. I'm having a glass of wine. Can I get anything for you?"

Monica didn't seem very sad. I mean, she was having problems with her husband and all that, but she'd been married to him for twenty years. You'd think she'd be at least a little sad.

Monica picked up her wineglass from the coffee table and then sat down.

"OK, what do you want to know?"

I got out my note pad and a pen.

"Well, Mrs. Mitchell, it looks a lot like your husband might have caused his own death. I'm trying to figure out if he had a reason to do that. How was your business doing? Were you two making money?"

Monica sipped her wine, then smiled.

"Yes. Jack and I paid ourselves a salary of two hundred thousand a year. The business was generating more income than that, but the financial end was Jack's. I don't really know how much."

She scowled then.

"I suppose one of these days after the funeral I'll have to sit down with Brian and find out. I don't like Brian. He's a little weasel of man who always stares at my boobs. I think after he tells me, I'll fire him and find a woman accountant."

I asked about life insurance. I figured they each had a policy, and life insurance would be another reason for murder.

Monica nodded.

"Yes. Jack was insistent that we both have policies. We each have one for three million and each is the beneficiary of the other."

I smiled.

"So, I guess you don't have to worry much about your future now, do you?"

Monica frowned.

"Detective Robbins, you're starting to talk like I was involved in this again. If you think I did it, just say so. Don't try to trick me into telling you I did because I didn't."

I shrugged.

"Well, you have to admit you had some pretty good reasons. The Coroner says he died from an overdose of a muscle relaxer. Since you're a pharmacist, you had access to that drug."

She laughed then.

"You're just like the cops on TV. It's always the three 'M's" isn't it -- means, method, and motive. Yes, I could have gotten any drug I wanted and I could have given it to him somehow. Yes, I'll have the company now and I'll have Jack's life insurance, but that assumes I'd get away with it. I admit the thought has crossed my mind, but I'm smart enough to know I'd get caught.

"There is one thing we agree on though. I don't think Jack would have killed himself. He was too strong a man to do something like that. That's why I married him in the first place. I still liked that part of him even after he said he was going to divorce me."

"Any ideas about who else might have wanted him dead?"

Monica thought for a moment.

"No, not really. Everybody liked Jack. There was one thing that was odd though. Jack got a call on his cell phone one night about a week ago and I heard what Jack said. The call didn't last long, maybe a minute, but Jack said "I asked you not to call me after six." Then he said "No, I mean what I said. If you do your part, everything will be fine".

"He hung up then and I asked him who was calling. Jack said it was Mike with another of his ideas about how to improve profits. Mike's an odd sort of guy. He's smart about business and calls Jack all the time about things he wants to do. Jack had to ask Mike not to call him at home because he was calling at all hours. He also had to keep assuring Mike that our business model was working and he wasn't ready to change it."

"What would this Mike have to gain if your husband was dead?"

Monica said he wouldn't get anything more or less if Jack was dead.

"Mike just manages day to day operations of the Lebanon pharmacy. He supervises the clerks and makes sure the pharmacy is neat and clean. His job will be the same as if Jack was still alive."

Monica picked up the wine bottle on the coffee table and filled her wineglass again, then looked at me.

"You think I'm probably drinking too much this early in the day, don't you? Well, this whole thing has me pretty jittery so I'm calming myself down a little. The Coroner has released Jack's body and tomorrow I have to go arrange for his cremation. I don't even want to think about that now."

"You're having him cremated?"

"When we used to talk, that's what Jack said he wanted. He didn't see any sense in paying for a cemetery plot when he wouldn't even know he was there."

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I left Monica's house with one more possibility. When I got back to my desk, I submitted a request for a subpoena to get Mr. Mitchell's cell phone records. As I was typing my justification, I went back and added subpoenas for Monica's cell phone records too. I didn't need probable cause to get just the incoming and outgoing phone numbers from their cell phones. All I had to do was to convince a judge those were needed as part of an ongoing investigation into whether Mr. Mitchell's death was the result of a suicide or a homicide.

It was relatively easy to do that since I had a statement from Phil that he believed it was a homicide but couldn't prove it. An hour later, I walked out of Judge Barnett's office with the subpoenas. Two days later, I had the printouts on my desk and was going through them line by line.

What I was looking for was repeated calls to or from the same phone number. I found one number in Monica's phone records that repeated frequently over the past three months. That number was the number of Mr. Mitchell's cell phone.

When I looked at Mr. Mitchell's phone records, I found several repeating numbers. One was Monica's number, though the number of calls dropped down to about one a week during the month before his death. Before that, he'd called Monica two to three times a week.

There were a lot of calls to six other numbers over the three-month period. They all checked out as calls to and from the six pharmacies JaMon owned, though there were a lot more from the pharmacy in Lebanon. One thing about the Lebanon calls did strike me though. All the calls from the Lebanon pharmacy had been made before five in the afternoon. I didn't find any over the past three months made after normal working hours.

Two phone numbers did stick out because there were multiple calls both to and from Mr. Mitchell's cell phone. A month before his death, Janice's phone number started appearing in the phone records with a call at least once a day, sometimes two or three. That jived with what Janice had told me about their relationship.

The second number had started about two weeks before Mr. Mitchell's death and I traced it to a Hillary Birch. They'd talked every day the week before his death. I wanted to talk to her, but before I did, I needed to find out as much about her as I could. The best interrogation happens when the person asking the questions already knows the answers. Hillary's name showed up when I ran her through the Tennessee Criminal Record database.

Hillary Birch had been arrested for prostitution while working as a stripper at a gentleman's club in 1999. According to the court records, an undercover cop had asked her for a private dance. During the private dance she rubbed his crotch and said, "for fifty, I'll let you do me with a rubber. For a hundred, you can do me bareback". She was nineteen at the time and it was her first offense, so she was sentenced to two years probation and fined five hundred dollars.

She stayed out of trouble after that. According to her parole officer, Hillary went back to stripping and moved around the clubs in the area for the next two years. There was nothing else in her record.

Most people have settled into a job by the time they're twenty-two or so, and I didn't figure Hillary was any different. She'd be forty or forty-one by now, so she wouldn't be working the best clubs, but there were at least two where I figured she might have a chance at landing a dancing job. I typed "mature exotic dancers in Nashville, TN" into my browser.

There were pictures of several so-called "mature" dancers at the first club, a club called "Experience", but none of them matched Hillary even accounting for the change in age. Most of the dancers were thirty at most anyway.

The second was a club called "Mom's Place". I'd never heard of it, probably because it had opened after I moved from a uniformed officer to a detective. It was in one of the sections in Nashville where the police got a lot of calls, and if it had been there when I was driving a squad car, I probably would have been there at least a couple of times.

I looked through the pictures of the dancers at "Mom's Place" and it was pretty sad. Like the first club, all the dancers were in lingerie that was supposed to make them look sexy. That effort didn't succeed very well. Most of the women looked like they'd led a pretty hard life.

I found Hillary half way down the page. She was dancing under the name of Hilly Passion, but it was Hillary. The little rose tattoo on her shoulder was in the same place and the same size as the one in her booking picture. That night, I drove down to "Mom's Place", paid the ten-dollar cover, and went inside.

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The women were worse in real life than in their pictures. The way they were dressed and posed for the pictures tended to tighten things up in some places. On the dance floor, all those loose places jiggled a lot. There weren't many guys down in front of the stage, and they weren't tossing a lot of bills at the dancers either.

When Hillary walked on the stage, things picked up a little. That was because Hillary didn't look all that bad. She had on a red bikini that almost wasn't there, and her big tits sort of rolled around when she walked. The bikini bottom was just a triangle and some strings. Hillary's ass wasn't all that firm, but at least it wasn't sagging like the dancer's before her.

There was one waitress in the place, and when she walked over to ask what I wanted to drink, I ordered a Coke. She brought my Coke and said, "That'll be four dollars". After fishing a five out of my wallet and telling her to keep the change I asked her to tell Hilly Passion that I was in the market for a private dance.

Hillary finished her dance by dropping her bikini bottoms and then turning around with her ass to the guys. She was shaved, something I'd never liked a woman to do, but the guys seemed to like it. She stayed that way until the rolled up bills stopped, then picked up the bills and put them in the cups of her bikini top. After picking up the bikini bottom, she tossed it to the guys in front of the stage and then walked behind the curtain.

I was watching a blonde with tits like bananas and an ass that looked like bubble-wrap when Hillary walked up beside me. She'd changed clothes. The bikini was now black and the bottom was a tiny bit bigger.

"You still want that private dance?"

I said I did, so Hillary crooked her finger at me.

"This way."

The room was really small, maybe eight feet square and there was only one door. When I stopped in front of the door, Hillary looked at me and smiled a very tired looking smile when I asked her how much this was going to cost me.

"Well, it depends on what you want. It's fifty for fifteen minutes and you can't touch me and I can't touch you. If you'd like more than that..."

She grinned then, ushered me inside, and closed the door.

"We're all alone in here so you tell me what you'd like and I'll tell you the price."

I pulled out my badge then.

"I'm detective Mark Robbins. What I want, Hillary, is just to talk. Have a seat."

Her face looked like she'd have killed me if she could.

"First fucking private dance I've had this week and I have to get a fucking cop. Well, I haven't said anything that gives you a fucking reason to fucking arrest me."

I chuckled.

"Well, I'm pretty sure, considering how you're almost dressed, I could convince a judge that you just propositioned me. That's not why I'm here though. Do you know a Mr. Jack Mitchell?"

"I know a Jack. He never said what his last name was. He came in here a few times and I did a private dance for him. That's all it was too, just a private dance. Why?"

"You're sure you didn't know his last name?"

"Don't you think if I knew his fucking last name I'd have fucking told you?"

I smiled.

"I don't know. Would you?"

"Well, what if I do know his last name. What's he got to do with me?"

I shrugged.

"Well, he's dead and I found your cell phone number in his list of calls. You called him and he called you several times."

Hillary had been standing. Now she sat down.

"No, you're wrong. He can't be dead. That's impossible."

"Oh...why would you say that?"

"Because if he's dead, that fucks up everything."

I said she needed to tell me what all the phone calls were about. Hillary flicked a piece of lint off her thigh and then looked at her knees.

"You're not going to believe me, but what we talked about is me coming to live with him. He said he was divorcing his wife and after that happened, I could move in with him, not married or anything like that, just because he liked me. The last time we talked, he said it would be over in about a week, so I should do what we'd talked about and everything would work out fine."

"What had you talked about that you were supposed to do?"

Hillary picked another piece of something off her thigh.

"All I was supposed to do was get my stuff packed and get ready to quit dancing."

I shook my head.

"Hillary, you talked fourteen times last week. I'm pretty sure you talked about something else. What was it?"

She looked up at me then.

"What we talked about was how I was going to fuck him in the same bed where he used to fuck his wife. He liked for me to tell him shit like that while he jacked off. You gonna arrest me now?"

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As I drove back home, I was sure Hillary hadn't told me everything she knew, but I didn't have a reason to suspect her of anything. She hadn't known Mr. Mitchell long enough to have formed the relationship she claimed unless she was going to be his live-in hooker, and I thought that was a stretch. Hillary might have been a good fuck, but Mr. Mitchell had already proposed to Janice. What I was thinking is Mr. Mitchell had probably arranged some sack time with Hillary. If she'd told me the truth, she would have been guilty of prostitution, so she lied. The fact that he'd think about that while married to one woman and fucking another on the side just confirmed Mr. Mitchell was indeed an asshole.

The next morning, I walked down to the Crime Lab to see if they'd found anything in all the stuff they'd taken from the house. Walt, the lab supervisor pointed to Karen, one of the lab techs.

"Karen has been doing the lab work and she found something late yesterday afternoon. Go talk to her."

Karen smiled at me when I walked up.

"Hi Mark. How's it goin'?"

I smiled back.

"That depends on you. Got anything more for me?"

Karen grinned.

"I think so. We found the cork and foil wrapper from the wine bottle on the kitchen counter. When I swabbed the end of the cork and tested the swab, it came back as having traces of cyclobenzaprine on it. That means the cyclobenzaprine was in the bottle before he opened it. When I looked at the wrapper under a microscope, there was what looked like a puncture in the foil where it covers the cork. It was about half a circle because when the foil was torn away, it tore through the puncture.