Chapter Twenty-Nine

BACK AT THE Twelfth, Hannah and I met with Detective Roberts. Once the three of us agreed on an operational strategy, Hannah called her captain to seek his approval. To my surprise, I was allowed into that meeting. It was my first-time face-to-face with Captain Slovitz.

Captain Jeffrey Slovitz was tall, nearly six feet, six inches, though he weighed no more than180 pounds. My mother once said a woman she knew was so skinny you could touch her and get a paper cut. I wondered what my mother would say about the rail-thin Captain Slovitz.

Since the captain was always eating, his weight was the subject of much speculation for those under his command. According to Hannah, half his officers assumed he purged while the other half credited his temper. Based on his scowl when we walked into the room, I was betting on the latter.

The attendees at the meeting were Hannah, Captain Slovitz, Detective Roberts, and myself. Hannah began by summarizing our visits to the taxi company and the rental agency. She then laid out our plan going forward. The captain was, to put it mildly, skeptical.

“You’re basing this plan on an offhand comment made by one suspect in a taxi and the hope the other suspect will respond to a taunt. Do you realize how half-assed that sounds?”

“We do, sir,” Hannah replied. “As you noted, the key is whether the second suspect replies to our message. If he is monitoring his e-mail, we believe that he will.”

“And I understand you’re working with a computer expert outside of the department?”

“We are, sir,” Hannah said. “This man is an expert used by Mr. Luvello in the past, and he has proven to be reliable.”

“Not good enough,” the captain replied. “You realize we’re going to have to get a warrant to enter the house, correct? No judge will take the word of some anonymous computer expert.” He then looked directly at me. “We can use your expert, but he needs to work with the computer geek from our department. Unless our department guy signs off, we won’t even think about moving forward.”

Wanting to sound agreeable, I said, “That’s fair. He’ll have no problem working with your guy.”

The captain’s disdain was obvious. “I am so grateful I strike you as fair, Mr. Luvello.” He turned back to Hannah. “Let’s assume this guy does respond, and let’s also assume the two computer geeks can pin down his location. What’s the plan from that point?”

Hannah gestured to Detective Roberts. “Andy and I worked out the details. You want to show him the map?”

Detective Roberts—I couldn’t think of him as Andy—opened a large street map. Elfin Street was part of the Countryside Estates, a small housing development in the center of North Olmsted. The development consisted of three blocks with five separate streets. All five had storybook names. Besides Elfin, those included Faerie, Merlin, Arthur, and Troll.

Elfin, Faerie, and Merlin ran east-west between the three blocks in the development, while Arthur and Troll ran north-south at the east and west ends of those three streets. Anyone entering or leaving the neighborhood via car had to do so using Elfin. The street names were a little too cutesy for my taste, but the residents clearly didn’t mind. The development looked to be full, based on the satellite photos we saw, and no homes were listed for sale.

“We initially considered staking out Elfin Street,” Hannah explained. “That changed when we studied the map. While Elfin is the street Mary Dhillon mentioned in the cab, it’s also the entryway to the entire development. That means Grieve and Mary could be hiding on any of these five streets. We could try to watch all five of them, but we’d have the entire neighborhood talking within hours. Our two suspects would likely run, and I can’t guarantee we could catch them.”

As Hannah described it, the arrest team would be small. Hannah, Detective Roberts, and I would be in the lead car along with a third, yet unassigned, detective. Three other unmarked vehicles would join us, stationed by the entrance to the development and behind the suspects’ home, to cut off any avenues to escape.

As the lead vehicle in the arrest, we would park a few houses down from whatever address Tomas identified. I would be in the lead car as an observer responsible for communicating with the other three vehicles while the operation was in progress.

The three detectives involved in the arrest would have their own personal radios, so my job was essentially meaningless. I also knew if I complained, Captain Slovitz would be more than happy to leave me behind at the station. I wanted to be involved, so I chose to keep quiet.

During a phone call from the captain, we were told Detective Franklin Aimes would be joining our meeting. Aimes was the department’s computer expert, the person who would be working directly with Tomas to identify Grieve’s location. Regarding Aimes and Tomas, Captain Slovitz reiterated, “Our decision to get a warrant will be based entirely on their input. If they don’t agree, we don’t go in. If we break into the wrong house, we will have a fucking disaster on our hands.”

“What happens if they identify a house in a different development?” I asked.

“Then we arrange for surveillance on that street until we can put together a new plan. We need to move quickly, but we’re not going to move stupidly.”

Then Captain Slovitz asked the question I was hoping he wouldn’t. “What message are we going to send?”

I looked at Hannah. I hadn’t shown her the text, and I wasn’t sure she’d agree to it. She shrugged, so I handed the message to Captain Slovitz.

He looked it over slowly, his eyes growing wider as he read. “Remind me never to get on your bad side, Mr. Luvello.” He handed the paper to Hannah. She read it quickly and also looked surprised. Detective Roberts read over her shoulder and turned back to me when he finished. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile.

The message read:

 

Michael: I heard about your slut girlfriend. It’s your fault Susan died. You sent her to her death, and then you ran away. You killed others, but you never had the balls to murder the one who killed your woman.

He was in jail. It would have been so easy—any real man would have done it already. Now you’re with another blonde slut. Should we slit her throat and let her bleed all over you? Apparently, it’s the only thing that turns you on. God is vengeance. You are weak and a failure. How do you live with yourself?

 

I felt like I needed to explain. “We’re dealing with an intelligent psychopath. He’s not going to respond if we ask him to be Facebook friends. This message hits all his weak points. As shitty as it made me feel to write it, I think this is the way to go.”

You don’t get to be a captain without avoiding political minefields. Captain Slovitz agreed with the message and my rationale. But given the content, he decreed, “your geek, not mine” would be the one sending it. The captain asked Hannah her opinion, and she said the message was “dark, but effective.” The reluctance was clear in her voice.

Detective Aimes picked that moment to enter the meeting room. Tall and slender like his captain, if he heard the “geek” comment, he showed no reaction. With Aimes now present, Hannah filled him in on his role in the case. Once our message was sent, he and “an outside computer consultant” would be observing Grieve’s Private Matters mailbox for a response. Assuming there was a reply, they’d use their separate resources to narrow down a location, and the planned operation would not take place unless the two experts agreed. For Tomas’s sake, I made clear that my consultant would be working from a separate location and communicating via telephone. Detective Aimes gave me his direct number, and we agreed Tomas would call thirty minutes before the message was delivered.

We then discussed the timing of the operation. None of us could see a point in waiting. There was also the issue of Tomas. He’d agreed to help me entirely out of friendship. I knew from our previous conversation he would be free tonight, but that wouldn’t last forever.

After some further discussion, we decided to send the message at nine o’clock. That seemed like the latest we could go and ensure that Grieve would read it the same evening. Captain Slovitz spoke about the warrant via conference call to a prosecutor from the Cleveland district attorney’s office. The prosecutor, a colleague of Hannah’s mother, promised to have a judge on call for an immediate response.

The timing set, those of us directly involved in the operation planned to meet at the North Olmsted police station at 8:00 p.m. Captain Slovitz would brief his North Olmsted counterpart, and North Olmsted detectives would provide backup support during the operation.

“Is the North Olmsted chief going to be upset with us taking the lead on his turf?” Hannah asked.

“Are you joking?” Captain Slovitz responded. “They’ll be only too happy to hang back in case this is all turns to shit. Now, if your plan works, you can also bet their chief will be on the podium with me to take his share of the credit. That’s just how these things play out. Remember that if you ever again get involved in a joint task force.”

Hannah brought up the possibility of hostages. All the homes on Elfin Street were occupied. If Grieve and Mary were hiding there, the likelihood was they’d taken over a house by force. While they could have broken in while the occupants were away, the two-month timeframe made that possibility unlikely. Alive or dead, we had to anticipate there were other occupants in the house. We finished discussing the hostage issue without any definite resolution.

I didn’t have my car, so Hannah drove me back to my apartment. Once home, I planned to deliver the hard drive to Tomas and make sure he’d found nothing affecting our ability to send the message. After that, I would tell him about the need for a joint arrangement with Detective Aimes. Despite what I’d told the captain, convincing Tomas to work with a partner would be tricky, to say the least.

It turned out tricky was an understatement. Before looking at the hard drive, Tomas wanted to know the details of my arrangement with the Cleveland PD. I preferred working alone, but Tomas guarded his private life with a fanaticism that made me look like a social butterfly. I understood his desire for secrecy better than most. Now I needed to talk him out of it.

“Let me get this straight,” Tomas said. “You want me to share information with a guy whose computer experience probably amounts to a community college course. Then, to top it all off, you’re going to let him sign off on my work?”

“Tomas, I’m not going to lie. While I have no clue about the detective’s experience, that’s what this thing comes down to. The truth is, I need you on this. The cops would have been just as happy to let their computer guy try to find the source of the message and let it go at that. I want you involved because I trust you. This may be our best chance to solve this case before these two decide to kill someone else. I don’t want some hack to screw up the location and send us off to God knows where.”

“You forget something—the hack will be signing off on my work. Unless he agrees I’m right, you’re going to be screwed.”

“Then I need you to convince him you’re right. You’re good at this, Tomas. That’s not bullshit. My knowledge of computers begins and ends at Microsoft Office, and yet I know you’re good at this. Convince him like you convinced me.”

He reluctantly agreed based on my absolute assurance of his anonymity. When he asked me for the hard drive, however, I knew he was in for sure. Tomas and I were alike in our desire for privacy, but like me, he also loved puzzles. There was no way he was putting down the drive until he figured out what was on it and how it could be used.

Detective Ross in New Orleans had already cracked Mary’s password to the Private Matters website. That task accomplished, our first break came a half hour after Tomas opened the drive. He called me over to look, excitement in his voice. He then spent the next two minutes silently working on his keyboard.

“I’m still waiting, Tomas.” I couldn’t help it. I got impatient when I was on a case.

“Sorry. While I can’t pull it back up, I found activity on the message board the two of them were using. I jumped into the site directly from the hard drive, so the website thought it recognized my computer. From what I could see, it looks like there were some messages deleted. The thing is, they were removed much later than I expected.”

“How much later are we talking about?”

“The last deletion took place toward the end of May, the 29th to be exact. Weren’t they already in Cleveland by that time?”

“They were indeed. Could Grieve have been cleaning up other messages on the board? I imagine there’s spam on this site, maybe a lot given it’s designed for hookups.”

“I have no doubt there was spam, some of it from the site itself. What this tells you is that Grieve or Mary Dhillon is still keeping tabs on it. I’m assuming it was Grieve. That means there’s a real chance he might read your message once it’s sent.”

“I wonder how consistently he checks it.”

“I can’t say, though I will keep looking to see if I can find the deleted messages. Here’s another question—If Grieve was in the habit of scrubbing e-mails, why did he leave the original correspondence, the messages between him and Mary Dhillon, up on the site?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Grieve deleted the spam messages and left anything he thought might be important. They still have no idea we found Drew’s computer. Drew could have communicated with Mary, but New Orleans has a tap on his landline and his cell, and they’re watching his computer. They would have noticed any communication between Drew and Mary after we left his home.”

We talked about timing. The plan was to send the message at nine o’clock, and we agreed Tomas would call Detective Aimes thirty minutes before that to discuss the technical details behind the trace. I gave Tomas the detective’s contact information and assured him his own contact info would be private. Not believing me in the slightest, he planned to call from a burner phone.

Tomas then asked about the message. I handed it to him, and he read it slowly. His reaction was similar to Captain Slovitz.

“You are one dark detective. I feel like I should go to confession just for reading this. Remind me to never turn my back on you.”

“Don’t worry, Tomas. You’re a friend.”