Sassafras, Part 3


Rick

I had been working with them for about a month when they found Richie Santos's decomposing body in the trunk of his car down in the next county. Boyd told me about it and asked if I wanted out. I didn't sign up for a suicide mission, but I told him I would stay in. I didn't feel like I was in any danger. If things got hairy I would bolt out of that little hick town so fast I might end up with whiplash, but for now I was staying.

It was about three days after the news started talking about the murdered drug dealer when Jenny died. Like I said, at first I didn't think anything about it. I was actually kind of glad, because that would keep the cops occupied and they wouldn't notice a little extra snooping on my part. I was in the cop shop with Sneider the day after Jenny died, doing some creative accounting, when he got a call on his cell phone from her sister. When I heard him say he wasn't in the office my ears perked up. Any time a cop lies, there's a reason. He had to be covering something up.

After he hung up he called someone else, but I couldn’t tell who he dialed. I tried to listen as much as I could without catching Sneider's attention. He didn't seem to like the idea of a sister coming to town. I heard him say he didn't want anybody around asking questions. When he hung up the second time I asked him what was up, but he told me to fuck off, so I let it drop.

Later that night when I got home I pulled my laptop out from under the couch and turned it on. Boyd had fought to get me that laptop. His superiors hadn’t liked the idea of handing a known computer thief a state of the art laptop loaded with programs that would let me hack into just about anything but the Pentagon, complete with passwords that let me access police files nation wide. I had to explain to them that they could install a monitoring program that would record every keystroke I made, and a remote access program that would let them check the keystroke monitoring program any time they wanted to. I hadn’t explained to them how easy it would be for me to bypass those programs. Not that I did. Seven years in prison was long enough to convince me I never wanted to go back.

I snuck a peek into the phone company computer and saw that Sneider had called a number at the county sheriff’s office, but I couldn't find out who he talked to. I compared it with Jenny’s phone record. She dialed the same number the day she died. That didn’t necessarily mean they talked to the same person, but whoever they talked to worked in the same department.

I looked up my file on Jenny Bota again. I just couldn't find anything to make her a target. Blonde hair, blue eyes, the perfect girl next door. Married at 18, widowed by 19. Marine husband dies a hero in Desert Storm. Lived the small town life, joins the PTA, probably baked apple pies while her kid played baseball. She had no connection to Santos, no connection to the cops, nothing in her background that would make somebody want to kill her. I was still curious about why Sneider told her sister he wasn't in the office when I was there sitting right next to him in the cop shop, but there wasn't anything there.

I looked for any information on her son, Billy, but he didn't have a police record, not even juvenile, and the school was so far back in the Stone Age it didn't have any records on-line. All I knew about him was that he was 15, a freshman, and that he broke his ankle when he was 12 when a car hit him while he was riding his bike.

I also looked up Joan Weaver. She worked for a Manhattan real estate firm, but lived in Brooklyn. Single, no police file at all. Her bank account and credit card history showed that she had a cat or cats, loved clothes, loved books, loved eBay. Not much of a social life. Eats out a lot. The only picture of her I could find was her driver’s license. I almost didn’t find it because I was checking New York’s license bureau, but then I checked to see if there was any information on her in Missouri, an old ticket or something from her past. Even though she had lived in New York for 8 years she still had a Missouri driver’s license, using Jenny’s address. Technically, that made her a criminal, too. She looked a little like her sister, but shorter, and had darker hair and green eyes.

Then I looked up the previous snitch from the DEA, Richie Santos. He was definitely a more likely target for murder. He'd spent more birthdays in jail than out of jail, starting with a two year stint in Juvy for setting his neighbor's car on fire when he was ten. He had made his last report on September 10. Not the kid of guy I would invite over for drinks, but he didn't deserve to get shot in the back of the head while he was tied up in his own trunk.

I checked my email after that, but didn't have anything but spam. I sent an email to Boyd, telling him about Sneider's call to the county police. Maybe we needed to expand our investigation. I also told him I was suspicious of Jenny's death, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I told him her sister was coming to town, and that it seemed to make Sneider nervous, so I was going to keep an eye on her to see if anything came up.