The Cold Case of the 69 Murder

Harry London, a detective retiring from the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department, frowned when he handed me the file.

"This one's from 1995, though the actual murders happened about ten years before that. I doubt you're going to get anywhere on this case, but it'll give you and Rochelle something to think about. Damnedest case I ever got. Couldn't get any information about the victims so I couldn't tie them together or to anybody else."

Harry grinned then.

"Well, they were tied together, sort of. The way they were buried, the guy was lying on his back and the woman was on top of him with her face on his crotch and her crotch on his face. They'd been buried that way for about ten years or so according to the Coroner at the time. All the techs found were bones. There was no clothing, no jewelry, and nothing wrapping either body.

"I couldn't figure out how they got that way unless they were posed in that position when they were buried. Whoever killed them had to have had a real beef against them because he had to dig a grave a lot longer and deeper than he'd have had to if he'd just stacked them in it like you'd think would be normal.

"Anyway, you can read the file and look at the evidence and you'll see why I hit a brick wall when I did my investigation. Maybe you and Rochelle will see something I didn't."

}|{

If you haven't read my other cold case stories, I'm Richard Owens, a detective for the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department and mostly I work on solving the backlog of cold cases in the department files. Rochelle is a writer who makes her living writing murder mysteries based on real crimes. We met when my former employer, the Nashville, Tennessee Police Department, agreed to let her tag along on one of my cases.

After I got a job as a detective for the Knoxville Police Department, we started living together, but we've both been divorced so while we love each other, we're not ready to make things permanent, at least not for a while. One divorce hurts pretty bad and we want to be sure this time.

}|{

I took the file home with me and gave it to Rochelle to read while I took a shower and changed clothes. When I came back into the living room, Rochelle was grinning.

"For the killer to pose the bodies like this, he must have had a real bone to pick with the couple, so to speak."

I chuckled.

"That's what Harry thought too. He just couldn't figure out why. Since he never was able to identify either body, he couldn't find any motive for them to have been killed, much less a reason why they ended up being buried like that."

Rochelle grinned again.

"Maybe the killer was jealous. I mean, if a man caught his wife in that position with a different man, it might tend to make him at least a little upset. I wonder if that was the motive? The killer comes home and finds his wife with the guy's dick in her mouth and the guy with his face buried in the wife's crotch. He shoots them both and then buries them in that position out of spite.

"Or... maybe it was the wife who finds her husband like that and decides once was one time too many. She shoots them both and then buries them like that out of spite."

I shook my head.

"Well, there was no evidence that they'd been shot. It's possible, but you'd think a bullet would have at least nicked a bone or two on one of them. The coroner didn't find that on either skeleton.

"I'm thinking the killer was probably a man. According to the coroner's report, the guy would have stood about five-eleven and would have weighed between one-eighty and two hundred. The woman was a little smaller, but not by much because she was pretty tall for a woman. She was about five-nine. I can't see you carrying a man or a woman that big a hundred yards off a dirt road up in the mountains. That's where the grave was found.

"This college kid decided it would be a great idea to start growing marijuana out in the woods. The location was a state park so he couldn't be connected to it if anybody found his garden. If he was found there by somebody else, he could say he was just out walking through the woods and stumbled across the plants.

"He'd found a little clearing that he figured was big enough. When he scraped off the surface trash, he found what he thought was just a dirty white rock. He dug around it a little so he could pull it out of the ground. He figured out after a couple more scoops that his rock was a human skull.

"The kid decided maybe planting marijuana there wasn't such a good idea after all, but not telling anybody what he'd found was probably a worse idea. He drove back home and called the Knoxville PD. He admitted why he'd been digging there, but the officers couldn't find any marijuana plants so they said he wouldn't be charged. After the officers confirmed they had a buried body, then radioed for the coroner and his crime scene team and a detective.

"The crime scene techs began digging up the body, but after they lifted up the skull, they found a pelvis under it. When they finished, they had two skeletons, a female on top and a male under her. There were no clothing remnants or anything else found in the grave so apparently both victims were naked when they were buried. Based upon the state of the bones, the coroner at the time estimated they'd been buried for about ten years and he estimated their ages at early twenties.

"That was in 1995. By then, it was routine to take samples for DNA, so the coroner took samples from both sets of bones and had them sequenced in hopes of someday identifying the victims. Harry sent the DNA sequences to CODIS in 1999, but didn't get a match for either skeleton."

Rochelle flipped through the coroner's reports for a while, and then looked up at me.

"There's no cause of death for either body? All it says is undetermined."

"There's no cause of death because the coroner couldn't find one. Both their hyoid bones were intact, so neither had been strangled and he couldn't find any evidence either one had been shot, stabbed, or beaten. That pretty much left death by poisoning, a drug overdose, or maybe smothering, but since he had only the bones to work with, he couldn't find any evidence of those either. In his notes, the Coroner wrote that it could very well have been death by natural causes except he couldn't imagine that two people would have died of natural causes at the same time. He only ruled it a homicide because of that and because there was no way both people could have buried themselves. Somebody else had to do it."

Rochelle closed up the file then.

"I'll see what I can do tomorrow. Right now, we need to eat dinner. You go light the grill and cook the brats while I get everything else ready."

}|{

We'd finished dinner and Rochelle had finished cleaning up when she said she wanted to try an experiment. When she came out of the bedroom, she was naked.

Now, Rochelle is a woman with a very active imagination. That's what makes her a successful author and also makes her so helpful in solving our cold cases. She can think up fifteen ways a murder might have happened and then spends her time trying to prove which one is correct. I spend my time trying to disprove every one. Between the two of us, we usually arrive at the answer.

Her experiment this time was to re-enact the scene of the murder.

"Rich, you lay down on your back. I'm going to get on top of you, just like the pictures in the case file."

I chuckled.

"I don't see how that's much of an experiment. We've done that before."

Rochelle grinned.

"I've done you and you've done me, but we've never done it at the same time and we've never done either on the floor. That's what I want to try out."

Like I said, Rochelle has a vivid imagination.

}|{

The next morning, Rochelle sipped her coffee and then frowned.

"You know, it's hard to believe that nobody could identify the two victims. Somebody had to have reported them as missing."

I shrugged.

"Probably, but with nothing to go on except bones, Harry didn't have much of a chance."

Rochelle frowned again.

"Well, I'm going to try to find out today. Harry didn't have NameUS when he started on the case and probably didn't have time to go looking when it became available. That's where I'm going to start."

I kissed Rochelle goodbye and went to the station. I wasn't sure what I was going to do when I got there. I was in the same boat as Harry. Without at least one name, there wasn't any place to start.

As I've written before, solving any case requires three things, things I call "MOM". That stands for method, opportunity, and motive. With just bones with no obvious indications of cause of death to work with, I had no method to work with. Without at least one name, I couldn't start looking into motive or opportunity.

I was looking at the pictures when I thought maybe I could look into one motive because of the unusual way in which the victims were buried. That possible motive came to mind because there are more than a few homicide cases every year involving prostitutes.

Prostitutes make easy victims. About any other woman, unless she knows the killer really well, won't voluntarily go anywhere with him. She'll either run or fight and either might have left traces on her skeleton like a blow to the head or some cracked ribs. The killer doesn't have to do anything to get a prostitute in his car except open the door.

It was very possible the female was a prostitute. Maybe one of her johns had talked her into giving up the business and moving in with him. Her pimp had killed them both and then buried them like that.

Prostitutes sell their bodies, but they're still women and like all women they talk about everything under the sun. If a prostitute was going to run away from her pimp, at least one other prostitute would know that. To curry favor with her pimp, she'd tell him and her pimp would tell the other prostitute's pimp. That pimp might have buried them like that so when they were found it was sure to hit the newspapers. The other prostitutes would see what happened to a girl who tried to leave a pimp's stable.

One thing I could do was to check the police files for the names of Knoxville prostitutes back in the early 1980's. Most prostitutes are arrested at least a few times and some are arrested often enough that it's almost like a family reunion when they show up in handcuffs at the station. Everybody knows everybody else.

They wouldn't stay there long because their pimp would come and bail them out. Very few of those prostitutes ever served any jail time either. When they went to trial, they'd plead guilty and they'd be sentenced to time served and a fine. The pimp was happy to pay the fine because with a popular girl he'd make that up in less than a week.

Those arrest files would have actual names, addresses at the time, and the age of the prostitute. Since that time period was at least forty years ago, I didn't hold a lot of hope for finding one to talk to. Most prostitutes start out in their early twenties and after forty years they'd be in their sixties if they were even still alive. Prostitutes don't have a long life expectancy. As they age, they stop earning much money for the pimp. While he might keep them in his stable, he doesn't' support them and they start to get depressed. That depression causes drug ODs to get a lot of them before they're forty. They also don't have good medical care so things like AIDS kill some of them. Still, it was something I could do and maybe check off one of my "MOM" boxes.

After six hours of checking arrest records for that time and then cross referencing those records with the Tennessee DMV, I had three names. All three had renewed their driver's license in the last two years so they were probably still alive. Two had also changed their last names and I figured that was because they'd figured out a way to get out and then had found a guy and married him.

I decided it would be the easiest to talk with Betty Adams first. She was still single or at least she'd never changed her last name, so there wouldn't be any of the, "My husband doesn't know and I don't want him to find out" excuses for not talking to me.

Betty Adams lived in a duplex in one of the nicer suburbs of Knoxville. It looked to me like she'd gotten out of prostitution soon enough that she could still have a career. It took a couple minutes after I rang the doorbell before the door opened, and the woman I was looking at wasn't sixty-eight. She looked more like mid thirties.

"Yes. Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for a Miss Betty Adams, but I think I must have the wrong side of the duplex. Sorry to have bothered you."

She smiled.

"You have the right duplex. I'm Veronica Adams, Betty's daughter. Who can I say wants to speak with her?"

"I'm Detective Rich Owens. I'm a detective for the Knoxville Police Department, but I'm not here for anything having to do with your mother, so please hear out what I have to say. I just thought she might have some information about a murder case I'm working on. The murder happened sometime between 1980 and 1985."

Veronica frowned.

"You mean when Mom was a prostitute, don't you?"

Well, that was a surprise. I nodded.

"Yes, but I'm not here about what she was doing then. All I want to do is ask her a couple questions."

Veronica frowned again.

"I'll go ask her. You stay here."

She shut the door in my face and I heard the click of the deadbolt. A couple minutes later, the door opened again.

"Mom says you can come in as long as I'm there with her."

I don't like questioning people with someone other than another detective in the room. Since Veronica was Betty's daughter, Betty might not tell me something important to my case out of embarrassment or in order to protect her daughter. On the other hand, I figured I didn't have anything to lose and maybe something to gain. If I suspected Betty wasn't telling me the truth, I could always have her brought to the station for another interview.

I smiled at Veronica.

"Fair enough."

}|{

I had expected Betty would try to downplay her past and tell me she'd never been a prostitute or heard of any prostitute just disappearing. That wasn't what she did at all.

Betty began by telling me that her daughter, Veronica, knew everything about her past so I didn't need to be cautious about my questions.

"Detective Owens, I left that life behind me before Veronica was born. When she was old enough to understand, I explained what I'd done and why she should never fall into the same trap. The only fear I have is that she's not married yet and I'm afraid I might have scared her out of having a relationship with a man. Now, what do you want to know?"

I explained my case and ended with my theory about the female victim possibly being a prostitute.

"Were there any prostitutes that just seemed to disappear around that time frame?"

Betty smiled.

"You mean besides me? No, none that I know of, but then I never worked the street. I was what today you'd call an escort. Back then, I was a call girl. I had a pimp who told me what I had to charge and would be there to take care of a date if things got out of hand, but basically I made my own arrangements by telephone. I was very careful about the men I went with and they were very careful about me. Many were pretty high up in business and the society of the day and they didn't want their name in the papers.

"That's why I was able to get out. This one guy... well, he's dead now so I guess I can tell you his name. Did you ever hear of Archie Nicholson?"

I had. Archie Nicholson had been a real estate developer back in the 1970's and 1980's and had made a ton of money by turning undeveloped land into subdivisions. His son, Ted Nicholson, now ran the business and in addition to new development, was in the business of managing rental properties owned by Nicholson Properties. According to the last article I'd read about the real estate business in Knoxville, Nicholson Properties had a net worth of about thirty million.

"Yes, I know of him."

Betty smiled.

"Well, Archie's wife only stayed with him for his money, or so he told me, so he came to me about once a month. He was in his sixties then, so it wasn't really sex except for one time. I did what I usually did with him, but that time, he wanted to try. That one time was enough, I guess, because two months later, I thought I was pregnant. It had to be Archie because that was the only time I hadn't made a john use a condom. I thought Archie was too old to get me pregnant. When I told Archie, he said it was his responsibility and he'd take care of it.

"The way he took care of it was to pay my pimp twenty thousand dollars to never speak to me or look for me again, and Archie told him if he ever did, Archie knew some people who would make sure he regretted it. Then he gave me this duplex. On paper, I bought the duplex from him for ten dollars, but it was basically free because Archie gave me the ten dollars. He also put me on his payroll as a property manager but I never did any real work. He just did that to give me health insurance as well as a paycheck so that with the rental income from the other half of the duplex I'd have enough money to live and raise Veronica. I still get the rental money from the other half of the duplex and Veronica has a job, so we're doing all right.

"When Veronica was born, Archie set up a trust fund for her that paid her way through college. He also transferred ten percent of the stock in his business to her with the provision that she wouldn't sell it until she graduated from college. As far as I know, none of that was ever made public. Only his lawyer knew about it. His lawyer was the one who told me about the trust fund and stock anyway.

"Veronica knows all this. When Archie died I thought she deserved to know who her father was and what he'd done for her, so I told her. I also told her not to ever tell anyone because the papers would just make a really nice older man into a man who cheated on his wife with a prostitute.

"He wasn't that kind of man at all. He was just a man whose wife didn't love him and he came to me to get what he was missing. I think in his own way he loved me. I know he loved Veronica. He called me about her all the time and he went to her eighth grade graduation. Veronica is an accountant for Archie's son now, and I think that's because Ted knows about her. He called her the day after she graduated and offered her a job. That's another reason I told her about Archie. Veronica is a pretty girl and she attracts men. I didn't want her to get involved with Archie's son since he's her half brother."

I asked Betty if she'd even heard of a former prostitute leaving the business and she said she hadn't.

"No, but they used to disappear all the time. I don't have to tell you how most of those girls end up, even the call girls. After they turn thirty or so, they don't get much business. A lot of them are messed up in the head and start taking drugs and their pimps throw them out on the street. The lucky ones find a man who doesn't care about what they've been and they go on to live the life they should have chosen in the first place. The others... well, I'd imagine many of them are in the county cemetery."

Betty thought for a moment and then said, "You might see if you can find Jesse Simson and Marjorie Dix. They were street girls I knew who got out about the same time I did. I have no idea what happened to them though."

}|{

I didn't have time to go back to my desk and look for the two women, so I went from Betty's duplex to home. When I got there, Rochelle was cooking something on our stove. I walked up behind her, cupped her right breast, and kissed her on the back of the neck.

Rochelle shivered a little at the kiss.

"You know that makes me get all wooky. If you want your dinner on time, you better leave me to my cooking."

I chuckled and slipped my other hand down her jeans and panties and between her thighs.

"I like it when you get all wooky. I wonder if this is all wooky too."

Rochelle reached down and pulled my hand out of her jeans.

"You wait until after dinner. After we clean up, you can get me as wooky as you want."

I backed up then.

"Were you able to find any matches to our victims?"

Rochelle sighed.

"Twelve men and forty-six women, but nothing that ties any of them together. The only things they have in common is that they were reported missing between 1980 and 1985 by somebody and they haven't been found yet."

"Weren't any of them married? I'd think at least a couple were reported missing by a wife or husband."

Rochelle shook her head.

"No, all of them were listed as single. I found several more that were married, but they were reported as being found or were reported as dead.

"Apparently the ones I found just walked out of Knoxville one day and never came back. They were all over twenty-one, so they wouldn't have had to come back. At that age, there wasn't much the police could do either. There's no law that says you can't just walk away from your life and go somewhere else without telling anyone what you're doing.

"The parents are probably all dead by now because they'd have been in their forties or older when they reported a son or daughter missing. They'd be at least eighty now. I'm going to try to confirm that tomorrow by checking the Knoxville obituaries for the names of the parents. Maybe I'll find a couple who are still alive.

"Now, shoo so I don't burn the spaghetti sauce."

}|{

Well, among other things that Rochelle does well, she's a great cook. The spaghetti was fantastic like it always is. Our conversation was pretty good too.

Rochelle sipped her iced tea and then frowned.

"Why would people just up and leave their parents and never come back? I never even considered the idea. Did you?"

I smiled.

"Just one time that I remember. Well, I don't really remember it. It's just what my mother always used to tell me. I was four and had decided I was a cowboy. I watched every western TV show and had decided that a real cowboy needed a horse. When I asked for a horse, my father said we couldn't have a horse in the city. Apparently I put on my six guns and cowboy hat and started down the block to find a horse on my own.

"The cop on the street corner saw me and asked me what I was doing. When I told him, he said he didn't think I was going to find a horse anywhere in Nashville, but he knew where there were some horses. He said he'd take me back home and ask my dad if he could take me to this place.

"He took me home and explained to my father what I'd been doing. Then he asked my father if he knew about this riding stable out north of Nashville. My dad said he did, and he'd take me there that Saturday. That Saturday we drove to the stable and I got to see a horse up close. Apparently the horses scared the living daylights out of me because they were so big. My mother said I started crying and wanted to go home, so they took me back home."

Rochelle smiled.

"You're lucky. If that cop had found you today, he'd have had to report it to Children and Family Services. They'd probably have taken you and put you in a foster home."

I nodded.

"Yeah, things were a lot different back then, but I don't think a patrol officer today would act much different. He'd take the kid home and have a talk with the parents before he did anything else. If he was satisfied that there was nothing going on in the family, he'd probably just let the family work it out.

"I did that on a couple occasions when I was a patrol officer in Nashville. One of them was a five-year-old boy who was really into Batman and had decided the AT&T building in Nashville was where Batman lived. I caught him about three blocks from home and said I didn't think Batman was at home that day. When I took him back to his parents, they were embarrassed but I didn't seen any signs of abuse or anything else that might indicate that they were bad parents. I just said maybe they should take him downtown some day and let him see for himself. His mother called me a couple weeks later and said her son had decided that he'd be a cop now. I felt pretty good about that."

Rochelle ate a forkful of spaghetti and then frowned.

"I can see why a little kid might do that, and teenagers being teenagers might think running away was a good idea, but why somebody in their twenties?" All the ones I found were at least twenty."

I shrugged.

"There are probably as many reasons as there are people. I've heard a lot of reasons. Some feel like their parents still treat them like children. Some have different views about things than their parents and that can cause some arguments. You'd have to talk with each one to find out the real reason."

Rochelle put down her fork and grinned.

"I'll deal with that tomorrow. If I remember right, you said something about making me all wooky all over. Let me clean up and we'll see if you can do that."

Well, if I can brag just a bit, I did make Rochelle feel all wooky all over, or at least that's what she said after she'd curled up against me and kissed me goodnight.

}|{

The next day was a complete bust for me. I drove out to see Marion Chambers first.

Marion was now divorced and she hadn't aged well at all. She was at least fifty pounds overweight and her face looked like she was about eighty instead of sixty-four. I figured she'd spent a lot of years not taking care of herself because she was hooked on drugs. She listened to what I had to say, and then told me she didn't remember any girls leaving back then except for Donna Roche.

"The only one I remember was Donna Roche. She went by the name of Kitty la Roche then because she thought guys thought women with French names were better at sex. She stopped hooking because one of her johns beat the hell out of her. She spent a month in the hospital and when she got out, her pimp wouldn't take her back because her face was all messed up. I have no idea what happened to her after that. I think she had family in Atlanta. Maybe she went back there."

Madeline Anderson was a different story. She was married to a doctor and looked more like forty-seven than sixty-seven. I figured she'd had a few things nipped and tucked over the years.

Madeline didn't know of any girl who'd turned up missing either.

"If one of the girls had just disappeared, all us girls would have known about it. Our pimps would have made sure of that so we wouldn't try it. I don't remember that ever happening. If a girl decided to just quit, she'd have told at least one of us. I don't remember that ever happening either.

"You have to understand that once you're in that life, it's really, really hard to get out. You don't have much money, and your pimp keeps you that way and also keeps track of you. I only managed because I thought I had an STD. My pimp took me the emergency room because he didn't want some john telling the cops I'd given something to him. That would have been bad for business.

"It turned out to just be a UTI, but while I was in the examining room, the doctor told me I was risking my life by hooking. Matt said he'd help me if I wanted some help."

Madeline grinned then.

"I never dreamed his help would turn out like it did. When we went out to the waiting room where my pimp was waiting for me, Matt told him that I had contracted a very rare and very contagious STD called infectio vesicae contagiosa. Matt then told my pimp that there was no permanent cure and that he was referring me to a special facility where they were experimenting with different drugs to cure it.

"My pimp got really wide-eyed then and asked how long that would take. Matt frowned and said probably at least a year and maybe two. My pimp just told me to get my stuff out of the apartment where I lived and to never come back. Well, I didn't have anything in that apartment that I couldn't replace, so I never went back.

"After my pimp left he there in the emergency room, I asked Matt where this special facility was, how was I supposed to get there, and was it going to cost a lot of money. He just grinned and said he had a spare bedroom I could use until my pimp forgot about me.

"I moved into Matt's spare bedroom and he gave me some antibiotics to cure my UTI. To pay him back, I started cooking for him and doing his laundry and cleaning the house. It felt pretty good to just be a normal woman, you know? Evidently it felt pretty good to Matt too, because he took me out to dinner after two weeks.

"My pimp forgot about me about two months after that because he got into a problem with another pimp. I read about it in the newspaper. The other pimp shot him dead for trying to take one of his girls. He couldn't ever bother me again.

"Matt and I had gotten pretty close by then, and when that newspaper article came out, Matt asked me if I'd like to stay with him. I said I wasn't going to be a prostitute anymore and Matt said he wasn't talking about me giving him sex to live there. He was talking about us getting married. That's what we ended up doing and we have two kids now. They're out on their own, so it's just us, and I miss our kids, but it's kind of nice to have time alone again."

Well, I hadn't learned anything from either of those interviews. I drove back to my desk and looked for the two names Betty had given me. I found them both in the Florida DMV records like Betty had said, but neither had renewed their driver's license after 2000. Based on the fact that I hadn't been able to get any information out of Betty, Marion, or Madeline, and also because I figured both the Florida women were either dead or had moved, I stopped looking.

That left me with the theory of an affair gone bad. I hoped Rochelle had been able to come up with something. If she hadn't, we were stuck.

}|{

As it turned out, Rochelle hadn't come up with a name, but she'd eliminated all the names she had except for four men and four women.

"I tried something different this time. I know that most of the people who are reported missing are found, but that never gets entered into NameUS for some of them. Since anybody in their twenties in 1985 would be at least sixty now, I wondered if any of them are dead. If they are, they'd be buried someplace.

"I signed onto the Find a Grave website that lists graves all over the world and looked for the names I'd found. So far, I've been able to find all but four of the men and four of the women. That's not proof that any of the last four are our victims, but it's more than we knew before."

I agreed.

"That will help. Eliminating suspects is useful in identifying the guilty party or in this case, the victim. At least we know who not to look for now. Give me the names you have and I'll check them out tomorrow.

}|{

By noon the next day, I'd run all four names through NCIC and the Tennessee DMV database. NCIC had nothing on any of them, and the Tennessee DMV only confirmed that none of them had renewed a driver's license after they were reported missing. That meant either they were dead or they'd moved out of state. I'd spent the morning doing a hell of a lot of typing and had nothing to show for it. I was starting to believe this was one case we'd never solve.

I was on my way to lunch when Rochelle called my cell phone.

"Rich, I found something that looks fishy to me. Can you come home and look at what I found?"

Half an hour later I walked through our front door and saw Rochelle staring at her laptop on the dining room table. She looked up and frowned.

"I think I've found a pattern, but I'm not sure. I wasn't finding anything so I decided I'd start a timeline of when people went missing and when their headstones said they died."

Rochelle pointed to the white board that's basically become another piece of furniture in our dining room.

"The blue circles are the dates when the men were reported as missing. The red circles are the dates for the women. The blue crosses are the dates from the men's tombstones and the red crosses are for the women. Most of the missing person reports are scattered out between June and August. That made sense to me because if I was going to disappear myself, I wouldn't do it in winter. I'd do it during the summer when it's warm. But look at February and March. There is only one blue circle every year in the second week of February and one red circle in the first week of every March. Now look at the crosses. There aren't as many because of the people I couldn't find graves for, but the ones that are there are the same people who went missing in February and March and they all died in the third week of September.

"I went back to NameUS and looked at the years between 1985 and 1995. The same pattern repeats up until 1991. Those are the extra circles and crosses. It stops then. That can't be just a coincidence can it?"

I shook my head.

"I don't believe in coincidences. This looks like a pattern to me. I don't know what caused the pattern or what it means, but it's too regular to be just chance."

Rochelle frowned.

"I think the cause of the deaths might be a serial killer. I haven't come up with an explanation for why the same people went missing in the same months of every year though."

"Well, I don't have much experience with serial killers, but from what I've read, they usually kill more often than just once a year. I suppose it could be a serial killer though. You didn't find out anything about how they died?"

"No. The ones in NameUS identified as dead didn't have a cause of death, just that they were reported as having died. Tomorrow, I'll start looking up obituaries for the people who died in September. Sometimes the obituary will have the cause of death. Since they all died in Knoxville, would your coroner still have their records?"

I nodded.

"Maybe. It depends upon if they were autopsied or not. If they died under a doctor's care, they probably weren't. I'll have to ask Ron tomorrow. Give me the names and the dates."

Rochelle typed something on her laptop and a couple seconds later our printer started. Rochelle pulled a single sheet from the printer and handed it to me.

"I had a lot of data and I needed a quick way to sort it, so I put all the names and other information into a spreadsheet. I sorted it by the date of death for each person."

}|{

The next morning, I made a copy of Rochelle's spreadsheet and took it down to Ron's lab. When I asked him if we still had autopsy records back to 1980, he frowned.

"Yeah, we do, but they're still on paper and in file boxes stored in the basement. It'll take us a week to find them. Don't you have them in your case files?"

I shook my head.

"I can look, but the only way I'd have a case file is if the coroner did an autopsy and said it was murder. I don't have any reason to think these people were murdered. I just want to know how they died."

Ron smiled.

"Well, if that's all you want to know, check the state records for death certificates. When a person dies, the funeral home has to complete a standard death certificate form and send it to Tennessee Office of Vital Records. Those death certificates are filed with the Tennessee Office of Vital Records just like birth certificates are filed by the hospital."

Ron said he'd have Janice, his secretary, look for them when she had time, but he couldn't promise anything. I'd seen Janice at her desk and figured Ron just wanted to keep her there so he could watch her. Janice isn't a model by any means, but her breasts are something else and Ron seems to have a thing for big breasts. Now, I'm not saying her breasts had anything to do with Ron hiring her. I knew Janice and she was one very intelligent woman and she's also married with two kids. I just think Ron appreciates the fact that Janice apparently knows how big her breasts are and usually dresses to show them off.

I went back at my desk and started searching our police files for the names on the list. I'd gotten about halfway through the list without finding anything when a realization hit me.

Rochelle had also listed the name of the person who had made the missing person's report. When I'd looked up missing people before, it was usually a parent or spouse who made the missing persons report and they shared the same last name. Sometimes a woman's last name was different because she'd married, but usually they'd give the officer filling out the report a maiden name that was the same.

That's how it was except for the people who went missing in February and March. Those people were reported as missing by another person with a different last name. To me that could only mean one thing. Either their parent or parents weren't alive, or their parent or parents didn't know or didn't care that they were missing. It was a friend or roommate who filed the report.

That was turning into another pattern, so I started looking for other patterns. I found them in a place I'd never have looked -- the address of the person who filed the missing persons report.

The addresses weren't all the same, but they were in the same location, that being what apparently was an apartment building on Hogskin Road outside of Knoxville proper. I looked up Hogskin Road on Google Earth and what I found didn't make any sense. Hogskin Road ran through mostly woods. Since the addresses were all Apt. such and such and then 9314 Hogskin Road, I should have seen at least one building and a parking lot out in all those woods. The only thing I found from one end of Hogskin Road to the other were a few houses that looked relatively new, and one small clearing in the trees with a barn.

What did make sense was that Hogskin Road runs right beside House Mountain State Natural Area. House Mountain State Natural Area is where the kid discovered the grave of our two victims.

Information can be tantalizing sometimes and can lead a detective into the wrong conclusion. I didn't make any conclusions, but it was more than tempting since the addresses of the people filing the missing persons reports were within a few miles of where our victims had been found. I thought that was worth a trip out to Hogskin Road the next day.

After going through all the other names on Rochelle's list and finding no records on any of them, I went home. I hoped Rochelle had found out something from the obituaries.

}|{

Rochelle had tracked down obituaries for all but two men and two women, but they didn't tell us anything except for the date of death. That date of death was in the third week of September of the same year they'd been reported missing.

One thing she had found was a mystery.

"None of the obituaries for the people who died in September listed a cause of death, but two asked for donations to something called UMT. Have you ever heard of anything called UMT?'

I said I hadn't.

"The U might stand for university. Maybe it's some little college somewhere. I know it's not around Knoxville."

Rochelle then showed me two pictures of headstones.

"There's this really weird writing on two of the headstones too. It looks like Chinese or Japanese except it's not as curvy. It's characters look kind of like Chinese or Japanese but the characters are more squared off and they're all in a horizontal row, kind of like Korean. I sent a copy to the dean of Asian Studies at UT Knoxville and asked if he could identify it. He said he'd give it to his professors and see what they said, but it would take at least a couple days."

"Other than those two things, I haven't found out anything we didn't already know."

Rochelle paused then.

"Well, there is something else that's odd. None of the obituaries for the people who died in September said anything about parents or siblings. Obituaries always say something like, "So and so preceded him in death" or "he is survived by so and so", but there was nothing like that in any of them. It's like those people just appeared out of nowhere, went missing, and then died leaving no trace behind them."

I sighed.

"That's what I'm finding too. None of the ones on your list were ever arrested for anything, not even a traffic violation. I gave the list to Ron. Hopefully he can come up with at least a couple autopsy reports that will give us a direction to follow. Because of what you just told me and because of what Ron suggested, maybe there's another way. I'm going to the Tennessee Office of Vital Records for death certificates on each of our people who went missing in February or March."

}|{

The next morning, I figured Ron wouldn't have anything for me yet so I made my call to the Tennessee Office of Vital Records. After I explained who I was and why I needed the information, I asked the woman if she could get me death certificates for four people. She didn't sound encouraging when she answered.

"Yes, we can, but it's going to take a while. Everything since 2000 was digitized and is in the server. We have summer temps who are working their way backwards from 2000, but most of our death records before 2000 are still on paper. I'll call you when we find something."

I emailed her the names and when she said she'd gotten them, I thanked her and ended the call.

Thinking that the "UMT" Rochelle had found on a couple obituaries might lead us somewhere, I typed "UMT" into my browser.

What I got was several sites about the University of Michigan, the University of Montana, the University of Minnesota, one for a university in Malaysia, several for colleges and companies with either "university", "management" or "technology" in the name, and a bunch more for software called "UMT." I gave up on that method after sixteen browser pages that all had the same Internet addresses.

}|{

A lot of what any detective does when solving a case is wait on somebody else to give him the information he thinks will help. In a current case, that means waiting on things like DNA sequencing, fingerprint identification, bullet matches, and a cause of death from the Coroner. In cold cases, it can involve all those same things, but depending upon the age of the case, that information is usually in a file box on a rack someplace.

Those boxes are in the archive area of the police department, the County Clerk, the coroner, and sometimes other organizations like the court system, and probably along with tens if not hundreds of similar boxes.

It isn't like the people who run those archives don't do their job. It's just that all that paper means any search is pretty inefficient. It's also usual that those same people have regular jobs to do as well. I mean, I couldn't go down to the Corner's office and demand that Ron drop everything and look for autopsy records that may or not exist. He had current cases to work on.

I love my job. If I didn't, I'd be doing something else, but waiting is something I absolutely hate. In a psychology class I took, I learned that people who work as cops, EMT's, and firemen are driven to do something all the time or they feel useless. I suppose I'm that way too.

Anyway, I didn't want to wait on some clerk to sort through boxes of forms so I called Rochelle and asked her if she'd like to have lunch and then take a drive. She said she wasn't getting anywhere either and needed a break.

}|{

After lunch of a chicken sandwich and a soda, I drove us out to where Hogskin Road tees in to Fulton Road. After a mile, we were driving through dense trees on both sides of the road.

I drove slowly while Rochelle watched for a sign or a mailbox with the number 9314 on it. Several miles later, Rochelle said she saw a mailbox with 9305 on it so we must be getting close. Half a mile later she pointed to another mailbox.

"There's 9321 so we must have passed it. It must be about half way from 9305 and here. Turn around and go back the other way and drive slower."

I turned around and drove about ten miles an hour while Rochelle watched both sides of the road and I watched my odometer. I'd driven about seven miles when Rochelle pointed.

"There, that open spot where there's been a turnoff. That has to be it."

Well, the asphalt turnoff like the County Highway Department puts at any driveway was there, but it didn't look like it went anywhere. I stopped the car so we could get a better look.

It looked to me like there might have been a drive that went up into the trees, but if that's what it was, it had been grown over almost completely by weeds and brush. Neither I nor Rochelle was dressed for any hike through all that brush, though Rochelle did get out and follow what looked like a lane for a few feet.

When she came back, she smiled.

"I think this must be it because when I rubbed my shoe a little I saw gravel. It's just not been used in a long time. I'm thinking like maybe since 1991."

Well, finding out what was back there would involve going back to the County Clerk and asking Rachel at the County Clerk's office to find that out. Asking her for the owner of the property would just stretch out the time.

Like I said before, I hate waiting, and I figured there might be a faster way.

I drove back down Hogskin Road to the house at 9305 and pulled into the drive. There was an older man mowing the yard in front of the house, so I waved at him to come to me. He shut off his mower blades and then drove the mower to my car.

He smiled when he shut off the mower and asked what I wanted. I introduced myself and said I wondered if he knew much about the area.

He shook my hand and chuckled.

"I'm Jim Monroe and I grew up in this house. Moved out to join the Army in September of '68 and decided I liked it. Stayed in for thirty years and then me and my wife came back to take care of my parents. When my parents died, they willed it to me. I'd guess you could say I know the area."

I smiled.

"Well, I'm working on an old case where a couple people went missing. The people who reported them as missing gave 9314 Hogskin Road as an address. Was there ever a 9314 Hogskin Road?"

He nodded.

"Yep, just up the road a few miles. It was there when I left to join the Army anyway. The way I heard the story, some rich kid from Chicago bought about fifty acres up there in the woods in March of '68 and started a commune. They built a house up there and a barn. They had some chickens and goats running around and they'd cleared a space for a big garden.

"The summer I graduated from high school I knew I was headed for the Army so I didn't try to find a job. I stayed at home and spent my time fishing and helping Mom with her garden. I still had some free time, so one day I sneaked through the woods to where they'd built that house.

"It was still pretty hot even in the shade of all them trees and them young girls who lived there wasn't wearing much for clothes. Well, me being eighteen, them young girls was pretty fun to watch. Ain't none of them wore any underwear that I could tell 'cause I could see their nipples poking out their shirts.

"I found out they didn't wear panties either. I was up there one day and saw this guy and girl working in the garden. He reached up under her T-shirt and squeezed her tit. She stood up, pulled that shirt right off over her head, and then took off her little shorts. Man, I tell you what. She had big tits and it looked like she was wearing fur panties except that fur was all her.

"Well, she walked up to the guy and pulled off his shirt and then stuck her hand down his jeans. Didn't take him much more than a minute before he had his jeans off. She got down and spread her legs for the guy, and after he sucked her nipples a little, he got himself plugged in. Took them all of fifteen minutes to get done. She stuck her T-shirt between her legs, put her shorts back on, and walked back to the house with her big tits swinging.

"Well, that was the last time I went up there. When I came home from 'Nam, I reinlisted and kept reinlisting until I could retire. Me and my wife would come back for Christmas, but I never went back to see if they were still there. When I came back in '94 the mailbox out by the road was gone and it didn't look like anybody'd been up the drive in at least a year."

I asked him if he knew of anybody else who might know more about the place.

He shook his head.

"Not really. Other than this house and the one up the road there aren't any others around. The people who own that house are in their sixties. I've met them, but we don't have much in common and they don't seem to want to socialize much, so I don't really know them. They might know something though."

}|{

I drove us back to the other house and pulled into the drive. I saw a woman looking out of a window when Rochelle and I got out. We walked up to the front door and I knocked.

The woman who opened the door smiled.

"Can I help you?"

I smiled back.

"I hope so. I'm Detective Rich Owens of the Knoxville Police Department and this is Rochelle Roberts, a woman who helps me sometimes."

I paused before saying anything else because as soon as I'd said the word "detective", her smile changed to a look of fear almost bordering on terror and she'd stopped looking at my face. Rochelle tried to calm her down.

"Like Rich said, I'm Rochelle and I'm a writer. I write mysteries based on real cases from the past. Right now, we're looking at a case of two people who were reported missing back in 1985. I found some information that the people who reported them missing used to live at 9314 Hogskin Road. We thought since you live here, you might know where it is and if anybody lived there or if it was just a phony address."

The woman didn't calm down much, but she did give Rochelle an answer.

"We've only lived here since 1991 so I don't know if anybody ever lived over there. My husband doesn't either."

Rochelle looked at me and frowned.

"Well, I guess we might as well leave then."

That surprised me because Rochelle doesn't usually give up that easily. Once we were back in the car, Rochelle explained.

"Did you see the look on her face when you told her you were a detective? She looked like she was scared to death."

"That's what I saw too. I'm also sure she lied to us. You didn't tell her where 9314 was or that we'd even found the place, yet she told us she didn't know anything about anybody who lived there. I think she knows where it is and what went on there."

Rochelle smiled.

"Well, she did tell us her name, sort of. I wrote down the name on the mailbox before we got out. When we get back home, you should be able to match the name with the address and if it does, we can find out who she and her husband are.

"Right now, I'm ready to go home, have dinner, and then soak in the tub for about half an hour. Once I'm all clean, we can decide what we're going to do next."

Dinner was simple but pretty good, just a casserole Rochelle had put in the oven before we left. Rochelle just out of the bathtub was even better. What we decided to do wasn't particularly different or athletic, but it was still great to hear her breathe, "Oh God, don't you dare stop."

}|{

The next morning, I ran Martin and Penny Pierce through NCIC and the Tennessee DMV. Like all the others I'd checked out. NCIC had nothing on them. The Tennessee DMV did.

Martin Pierce had gotten his first driver's license in 1977 at the age of sixteen and the address on that license was in Greenville, Tennessee. He'd changed addresses in 1984 to 9314 Hogskin Road. The address stayed the same until 1991 when his address changed to 9321 Hogskin Road. He'd renewed his license twice since at that last address.

Penny Adams Pierce followed the same timing, except her first license had the last name of Adams and listed an address in Moristown, Tennessee. She'd renewed her license in 1991 with the 9321 address and the last name of Pierce.

I assumed that Martin and Penny had been married in 1991 and bought the property the same year. That would make sense if both were living at the 9314 Hogskin Road address. They'd have met, fallen in love, and then married.

What didn't make sense to me was that I'd not found anything on NCIC about either one but Penny was still afraid of me. I decided I needed to look at the Knoxville Police files. What I found wasn't much, but it was interesting.

What I found was a patrol officer's report from 1986 of his response to an anonymous complaint that there were some strange things going on at 9314 Hogskin Road. Dispatch sent the nearest patrol officer, one Officer Brian Wigs, out to investigate.

Brian didn't find anything going on except for about twenty people having fun drinking beer and roasting hot dogs around a fire. He did talk to a few people to see if they knew why someone would call in a complaint. One of the people he talked to was Penny Adams. According to Brian, Penny had been hesitant to talk to him, but finally told him they might have been singing loud enough for a neighbor to hear."

That was the end of the report, but gave me an idea about how to shake Penny into telling me something. I planned on driving back to her house that afternoon and reminding her of her conversation with Officer Wigs.

That plan got postponed by a phone call from Rochelle. She sounded excited.

"Rich, I looked in the newspaper files for Martin and Penny Pierce. I found their wedding announcement and it was really strange. They weren't married in a church. They were married at 9314 Hogskin Road in something called the Uma Mheghwor Temple. That must be what the UMT on the headstone means, but I'd never heard of it. It took me forever to find it on my browser, but I finally did. Uma Mheghwor Temple is a Hindu temple in Nepal, not a building out on Hogskin Road."

Well that was odd, but I figured if there was a Hindu temple on Hogskin Road, the Knoxville PD had probably known about it.

"Give me a while to see if I can find out anything about this temple. Maybe that'll tell us something. By the way, did your language professor ever get back to you?"

Rochelle said he hadn't but she'd call him.

When I closed my cell phone, I was wondering why there would be a place in Tennessee named after a Hindu temple in Nepal. I knew there were a few small communities who practiced the Hindu religion in the larger cities like Nashville and Memphis, but out in the country like on Hogskin Road, most people were Christians if they were anything.

My inquiry into the Knoxville PD database didn't yield anything. Neither did my query into NCIC. I only had one more place to look and that was the TBI database. It was entirely possible that some detail of a case as old as this hadn't been reported to NCIC by the TBI.

I didn't find anything there either, but I thought I had another angle into information. I called Matt Wills, a older TBI agent I'd worked with in solving a case involving a minor drug cartel during my years as a Nashville PD detective. I hoped he'd remember me.

"When he answered my call, I said, "Matt, it's Rich Owens. We worked together several years ago in Nashville."

He chuckled.

"Yeah, I remember you. It was what, your second case? You did a pretty fair job for a beginner. What can I do for you."

"I need to know if you've ever heard of a church called Uma Mheghwor Temple just outside of Knoxville."

Matt didn't say anything for a few seconds and when he did it was to ask me a question and he didn't chuckle again. He sounded like a cop on duty when he spoke.

"Why do you want to know that?"

I gave Matt a summary of my cold case and then said I thought it might have something to do with that temple.

Matt was quiet for a few seconds again.

"Because that there's still an investigation ongoing. All I can tell you is you need read a book written by Narayan Mukhopadhyay. You can find it on the Internet. Once you read the book you might understand why I can't tell you more. NCIC has a little about him, but he's pretty much a ghost."

After Matt spelled the name and I wrote it down, I hung up my desk phone and decided I was into more than just a murder case involving two people. I didn't know what that was, but if Matt wouldn't tell me anything, it was way bigger than just two bodies buried in an unusual position in a Tennessee State Park.

When I signed on to NCIC and typed Narayan Mukhopadhyay into the search box, NCIC didn't have much more than Matt had told me. All I got was the guy's supposed real name. He was Hector Martinez and he was wanted for questioning about a fraud scheme in New York City.

}|{

I did get a little useful information late that afternoon. Ron called me and said his secretary had found four of the autopsy reports I'd asked for.

"Rich, we found four, but they're not going to tell you much. All four died of complications of ingestion of methamphetimine. Two of the guys and one woman suffered a cardiac arrest and the other woman developed a bad brain aneurysm. The coroner attributed the cause of death to severely high blood pressure as a result of ingestion of methamphetamine. Meth can do that if administered in high enough doses."

I asked Ron why anyone would take such a dose. He said it might not have been an actual OD, but was probably one of two things.

"Meth is known to raise blood pressure and put stress on the heart, arteries and veins. It might be that these four didn't truly OD as far as how much they ingested, but were just really susceptible to the effects of high blood pressure. Some people are. Usually they're diabetic or at least grossly overweight, but normal people can be too.

"Some people with high blood pressure can feel normal one hour and die of internal bleeding from an aneurysm an hour later. That's usually because their arterial and veinous walls aren't very strong. We still don't know for sure why that is.

"The other possibility is sex. Meth is known to increase sexual desire and in some cases, performance. Some of these deaths might be the result of thinking that if some meth means good sex, a lot will mean better sex. It probably works that way until the meth works it way to the brain or causes a failure of some portion of the cardiac system.

"How long that takes depends on if the meth was ingested, snorted, or injected into a vein and how pure it is. Street dealers cut the meth with caffeine. The caffeine gives the meth a little kick-start, but it also makes it weaker. That kept the customers alive and buying more meth. If they had gotten used to a certain does of the cut stuff and then ingested the same dose of pure meth, it might kill them.

"Today, they're doping meth with fentanyl. I'm not sure how that works for the meth addicts. Meth increases blood pressure and heart rate and fentanyl does the opposite. I suppose when your heart gives out you don't feel it because you're probably nodding off to sleep.

"The odd thing about the OD being because if sex is that the coroner who did the autopsy didn't find any semen in the two women or vaginal fluids on the men, so that pretty much rules out sex at or near the time of their death."

I asked Ron to copy me on the autopsy reports and then said I'd call him if I had any more questions.

}|{

When I got home that night, Rochelle was reading something on her laptop and she looked confused. I asked her what the problem was. She looked up and frowned.

"My language professor sent me an email about the funny writing on the headstones. He said it's Napali, a language spoken in Nepal and a few parts of India. When spoken, it sounds like "Jīvana kāma hō, kāma jīvana hō." It translates into English as, "Life is kama, kama is life."

"I've been trying to find that phrase somewhere on the internet but all I've come up with is it was sort of the motto of some Hindu guru named Narayan Mukhopadhyay. Apparently he led a group of people in New York City in the late 1990's and early 2000's. I haven't been able to find out anything more about him except that he disappeared from New York in 2006 and hasn't been seen or heard of since."

"What did you say his name was?"

"Narayan Mukhopadhyay. Why? Have you heard that name before?"

I nodded.

"Yes. I called a guy I know who's an investigator for the TBI and asked him if he'd ever heard of a Hindu temple in Knoxville called Uma Mheghwor Temple. He asked me why I wanted to know. I explained our case and he said he couldn't give me much because there's an investigation still ongoing. All he'd tell me was that I should look on the Internet for a book written by Narayan Mukhopadhyay.

"He did say NCIC has some more information about the guy, so I looked him up. His real name is Hector Martinez and there's a New York City active warrant for him for questioning about some fraud scheme in New York City in 2005."

Rochelle frowned.

"He's Hispanic? Narayan Mukhopadhyay sounds like Indian or Pakistani to me."

"Yes, he's Hispanic, but I saw a picture of him in the NCIC file. The way he wears his hair and his skin tone could probably let him pass as Indian."

"So he's just a con man?"

I shook my head.

"I think he is, but I also think there's more to the story. Matt would have told me if he was just chasing a con man. I really doubt the TBI would spend much time looking for a con man unless they had evidence of more criminal activities. What we need to do is to find that book."

}|{

It took another hour of searching the Internet to find the book. It wasn't really a book though. It was just about twenty pages of some dogma about people and how they should follow the teachings of this Narayan Mukhopadhyay.

The cover was an ancient painting of three females, a painting Rochelle said she'd seen before.

"This is the Tridevi. That's the three Hindu goddesses that depending upon the Hindu sect, represent motherhood, fertility, and culture. The one on the left is Parvati, in the center is Laksmi, and on the right is Saraswati. Parvati is motherhood, Laksmi is fertility, and Parvati is culture."

I asked Rochelle how she knew so much and she said she'd taken a class in the Eastern religions in college.

"I took the class because Eastern Religions go back for eons there are a lot of parallels to those beliefs in major religions practiced today. One of the books assigned as required reading was the Kama Sutra. You've heard of the Kama Sutra haven't you?"

I smiled.

"That's the old Indian book of instructions for sex. Is that where you get your ideas?"

Rochelle grinned.

"If you'd read it instead of just look at the pictures, you'd know The Kama Sutra is a lot more than how to have sex. It's a guidebook for how to achieve the four goals of Hinduism. Let's keep reading and see if this guy followed those goals."

As it turned out, the guy did, sort of. The first four pages were about morality and how to live a good life, but he seemed to be telling the reader to do what he said. Each page had a Hindu painting and then a line of text.

"Heed the teachings of Narayan Mukhopadhyay for he is chosen by Vishnu to lead you toward fulfillment."

"Seek your true calling in life and embrace it."

"Follow the rules as taught by Narayan Mukhopadhyay that you may be just and have honor in life."

"Accept dharma as taught by Narayan Mukhopadhyay as your way of life."

I asked Rochelle if she remembered those things being in the Kama Sutra, and she shook her head.

"Well, the same words are there, sort of, but there's nothing about Narayan Mukhopadhyay in the Kama Sutra. I think this guy was trying to convince people he was hand picked by Vishnu to lead them. That sounds like he's running a religious cult to me."

She turned to the next page, read it and then next three, and then looked up at me.

"This guy is just a con man. He's writing about artha, the section of Hindu principles about having a career and making money so you can have a good life, but he's turned it into telling people they should give all their money and everything else they have to the group. By group, what he's saying is to give your money to him and Vishnu will make you happy. That's probably why there was no jewelry or anything else on our victims. They gave everything they owned to him.

"He's also added a section telling women to go out and seduce men and bring them back to the group and for men to do the same to women. He says that's to grow the community. I think that's so he could get more work and more money out of the new members."

The next four pages were about sexuality, but even I could see that what the guy wrote wasn't about sex. It was about two things.

"Seek pleasure in the joining with other members of the group, but abstain from the pleasures which are reserved for Narayan Mukhopadhyay. It is Narayan Mukhopadhyay alone who has been chosen to enter the gates of pleasure and give the gift of Durga to those deemed deserving."

Rochelle looked up at me then.

"Durga is a Hindu goddess associated with motherhood. The gift he's writing about is the gift of making one of his followers pregnant."

Rochelle kept reading.

"Joining is the worship of Laksmi. Men rejoice in the pleasures of partaking of the flower of womanhood. Women rejoice in the pleasures of giving manhood the gifts you have been taught and seek to accept the result of those gifts.

"Seek out things to enhance the pleasures of joining and join often. Only on a woman's days should she abstain from her pleasure, but should take pleasure in giving to a man what only she can give."

"Strive for the ultimate in pleasures of the body that you may achieve Moksha, the liberation."

I said, "Is this guy telling people what I think he's telling them?"

Rochelle frowned.

"What he's telling them is to have sex as much as they can but that he's the only man who can actually have intercourse with a woman. That's a feature of several religious cults over the ages. The leader sets himself up as the only man who can have actual sex, and his position allows him to pick and choose from the women in the group.

"What he's left the group to do is basically either manual or oral sex. Does that ring any bells with you?"

I nodded.

"Our two victims were posed like that's what they'd been doing. It sounds like this guy was setting himself up to be the resident stud for his group. What's he mean by Moksha?'

Rochelle turned the page.

"What Moksha is in the Kama Sutra is the achievement of liberation from the cycle of life and death. Let's see what he has to say about Moksha."

Rochelle read for about six seconds and then looked up at me.

"He's added a dash of Buddhism into his teachings. What he's saying about Moksha is that if you achieve it, when you die you don't really die. You'll be transported to a higher plane of existence and start the cycle of life over again."

Rochelle turned that page, read a little and then looked up at me.

"He's saying you'll know if you've achieved Moksha in the ninth month of the year because you'll be reborn and it takes nine months between conception and birth. Maybe that's why it looks like there was one couple who died in September of each year. He killed them so he could say they'd achieved Moksha. If he was conning people out of their money with the promise that they'd move to another plane, he'd have had to prove it. Maybe he led them out into the woods without anybody knowing, killed them, and then buried them like our victims were."

I started to shake my head, but then stopped because I thought I'd found a connection.

"Ron found autopsy reports for four of the people on your list. Those four died somewhere they could be easily found, not buried in the woods. The cause of death was listed as a heart attack or brain aneurysm caused by ingestion of methamphetamine. Maybe he didn't kill them. Maybe he just gave them enough meth to do it themselves. That would explain why the coroner couldn't find a cause of death for our two victims."

"OK, but if there were others who died that way and ended up in a cemetery, why didn't the Pierce's?"

"I don't know. I think we need to take a hike out there and see if anything's left of that commune, and then we need to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Pierce again. We know they lived in that commune at one time and she was too scared to talk with us. I think we need to scare her and her husband enough that they will talk.

}|{

I made a stop at my desk the next morning to see if the Tennessee Office of Vital Records had come up with the information I'd asked for. They had.

I had copies of death certificates for all the names on Rochelle's list who had died in September. The cause of death varied, but all of them noted a high concentration of methamphetamine in their blood.

I walked down to the County Clerk's office to ask Rachel how long it would take to find out who owned the property at 9314 Hogskin Road. She smiled.

"About ten seconds. We started converting the paper files to digital with property deeds because that's where we were getting the most requests. The properties around Knoxville were initially surveyed by using markers like trees or the course of a stream or river or some big rock that stuck out of the ground. Those change over time and that results in people wanting to know what they own or what they're thinking about buying. Give me a sec."

I heard a printer start up a few minutes later. Rachael walked over to the printer and brought me two sheets of paper.

"The property was owned by Johnathan Mann since the county began filing deeds. His estate sold it to Randall Spires in 1968 and Mr. Spires sold it to Hector Martinez in January of 1980. There hasn't been a change of deed filed since then, so Mr. Martinez still owns the property."

"OK, so who pays the property taxes?"

Rachael typed a little more on her keyboard and then the printer started again.

The single sheet she brought me said the taxes were direct billed to a real estate management company in New York.

I thanked Rachael and said I owed her a cup of coffee sometime. She just laughed.

"That's what you tell me every time you come down here. I'm still waiting."

I promised Rachael I buy her that coffee as soon as I finished this case, and then drove back home to pick up Rochelle.

I didn't have enough to get a warrant for the account at the real estate management company in New York, but maybe I would after talking to the Pierce's again.

}|{

Rochelle was waiting for me beside her Jeep Grand Cherokee.

"I thought we'd take my car. It's four-wheel drive so it shouldn't have any trouble on the drive to the place and I've never taken it off-road before. I want to see if I got what I paid for."

When she turned off onto what we hoped was a gravel drive, Rochelle shifted the Cherokee into low gear and four-wheel drive, took a deep breath, and pressed the accelerator. The Cherokee started through the overgrowth and didn't seem to be having any problems.

I was having a big problem though. I couldn't see where the drive went. Rochelle told me a Cherokee was supposed to be able to handle anything, and started steering the Cherokee down the center of the gap between the trees.

Rochelle stayed in low gear so it took a while before the Cherokee broke into a clearing. All I could see was a barn with the roof caved in. Rochelle kept driving and stopped beside what had once been a house. The exterior walls were still there but the roof had mostly fallen in. The trees had grown up so close to the house that the branches hid it from a satellite.

We didn't try to do more than look through the windows, but that was still pretty interesting. Since the windows were mostly broken, I expected to see the usual gang graffiti done with spray cans. That wasn't what was there. On the interior of the walls that were still standing were kind of poorly painted pictures much like I'd seen years ago when I looked at a copy of the Kama Sutra.

Most of the pictures were of couples having oral sex but a few were of the girl jacking off the guy or the guy with his fingers between the girl's thighs. We kept seeing the same type of paintings through every window until we came to a much larger room. In that room on one wall was a large mural of a naked woman riding a man's cock while six other naked women stood by while touching each other's breasts and mounds.

Rochelle grinned at me. "This must be the place where what's his name screwed the girls he thought were worthy of him."

There wasn't much more to see in the house so we walked to the barn and discovered it wasn't a barn anymore. It had been a barn at one time, but the inside of half of it had been reconfigured into a living and eating area and a bunch of small rooms. Each room had a door and each door had a number from one to forty. There was also what passed for a kitchen with an old wood cookstove and three long picnic tables. This was where the people who lived here called home.

On the other side of the barn we found a large area with a wood floor. The same type of pictures that we'd seen in the house were painted on the interior walls. The only furniture in the place was a raised platform with a chair.

Rochelle pointed to that platform.

"I'll bet that's where he sat while he taught and watched everybody having oral sex."

I nodded.

"That's what it looks like to me too. Do you need to see anything else?"

Rochelle shook her head.

"No. I've seen enough to know what this guy really was."

We were walking back to her car when I saw a small building about a hundred feet from the barn and almost completely hidden in the trees. I pointed to it.

"Let's go see what this was."

That building was about the size of a one-car garage and was made of concrete blocks with a metal roof. It appeared to still be sound. There was a padlock on the door, but when I tried it, the hasp screws fell out of the door with my first push. When the door swung open, I didn't need more than one look to tell me what I was seeing.

The house and barn furniture had been sort of antique shop bargain deco. Inside that little building, it was chemistry lab modern. There were no galvanized steel buckets and mason jars like I'd seen in meth labs before. There were commercial glass flasks and huge glass beakers and stainless steel tanks with holding racks and a drying oven to dry the meth into a powder. A yellow haz-mat suit hung on a peg beside the door.

Rochelle started to go inside, but I stopped her.

"You don't want to go in there, Rochelle. This is a meth lab and it's no amateur setup. There will be a whole bunch of chemicals in there that you don't want to be around without a haz-mat suit. That's why that yellow suit is there."

I pointed to a lab table with a black marble top and a sink.

"It looks to me like whoever worked here left in a hurry because they didn't take much with them. See the bottles on that table? They'll be the chemicals they used to convert pseudoephedrine into meth. I can't tell which process they used but all of them involve chemicals that are either very flammable, very corrosive, or become that way at some point during the process. We've found more than one meth lab because it exploded and then caught on fire.

"My guess is this is where the meth came from that killed the people whose graves you found. Although it's dangerous to make, it isn't particularly hard to make if you have the right ingredients, the major ingredient being pseudoephedrine. Back then you could buy all the pseudoephedrine you wanted at Walmart or any other store that sold over the counter decongestant drugs. With this setup, the guy could have made way more than even twenty people could ever use and still stay alive. My guess is he was also selling it, or maybe having the members or the group sell it for him.

"Let's back out of here and call the station and the Tennessee EPA. I'm sure the ground is contaminated as well as everything in this building. They'll need to check the other buildings as well. Once we've done that, we'll go talk to the Pierces.

}|{

When we drove into the drive of the Pierce house I saw the same woman's face peering from the curtain in one of the windows. That let me know somebody was in the house. If she and her husband wouldn't answer the door or talk to me, I'd just call for a couple patrol officers to take her and her husband to the station.

It took her a little longer to answer my knock on the door, and when she did, she tried to brush me off again.

"Detective... I forgot your name but I already told you that I don't know anything about anybody who lived over there. My husband doesn't either. You can leave now."

I shook my head.

"Not this time Mrs. Pierce. You can either invite me inside and you and your husband can talk to me here, or I can put you both in cuffs and take you to the station for questioning. It's your choice."

Mrs. Pierce shook her head.

"I haven't done anything. Neither has my husband."

Rochelle and I hadn't talked about what we'd do when we questioned the Pierce's. I figured Rochelle would just listen. Instead, she started playing "good cop".

"Mrs. Pierce, Rich isn't accusing you of anything. He just wants to ask you some questions about the place down the road."

Mrs. Pierce was still trying to deny any knowledge of the place.

"I've never been there and I don't even know where it is if I wanted to."

It was my turn to play "bad cop" then. I pulled out my notebook and flipped through a few pages.

"Mrs. Pierce, I know you're lying to us. You got your first driver's license at the age of sixteen when you lived in Moristown. That was in 1977. You renewed it in 1984 and the address you used was 9314 Hogskin Road Apartment 6. That's the address I asked you about before but you said you didn't know anything about.

"In 1991 you changed your license from Penny Adams to Penny Adams Pierce and listed your address as 9321 Hogskin Road. That's the same name and address on your mailbox. Your husband, Martin, is about the same except his apartment number was 7.

"I also know you talked to a patrol officer named Wigs back in 1986 when you lived a 9314 Hogskin Road. I have a copy of his report in my file in the car if you want to see it. You gave him your name when he talked to you.

"Like Rochelle just told you, I don't have any reason to arrest you, but it you don't answer my questions with the truth, I'll arrest you and your husband for obstruction of justice, take you to the station and let you sit in a holding cell overnight. Maybe that'll change your mind."

She was standing there wringing her hands when a balding man walked up beside her and put his arm around her waist.

"It's OK, Penny. He's been gone for over twenty years. Even if he's still alive he can't do anything to us anymore."

He looked up at me then.

"Detective, come in and bring your partner with you. We'll tell you everything we know."

}|{

It took two hours before Rochelle and I got it all down on paper. When the Pierce's said that was all they knew, I thanked them and told them I'd be in touch when we found him. Then, Rochelle and I started back home.

When we got to the turnoff into the woods, I saw a patrol car parked beside the drive with a patrol officer standing in front of it. They'd gotten there a lot faster than I thought they would. I rolled down my window and asked Rochelle to pull over.

The patrol officer recognized me.

"Hey, Rich. You the one who called us out here?"

"Yeah, there's a mess up there and it needs to be cleaned up."

"So I heard on the radio. The crime scene techs and half a dozen guys from the EPA are up there sorting everything out. They just called for a contractor with a backhoe too, so I think they're gonna be there for a while."

I said I figured as much and then wished him a good rest of the day.

}|{

Rochelle didn't talk much until we got home. As soon as we walked into the living room, she plopped down on the couch, took off her hiking shoes, and then frowned at me.

"If I wrote this into a novel, nobody would ever believe it. I mean, he was sending young girls out to recruit men with the promise of sex and sending young men out to do the same thing to young girls. How he convinced them join his cult is beyond me, let alone convince them do something like that for him. On top of all that, he was selling meth to the gangs in Knoxville."

I thought I had an answer.

"Well, those kids grew up in the late sixties and early seventies. They were on the tail end of the hippie culture of free love and marijuana and at the beginning of the hard drug culture with artists like Joplin and Hendrix. The Beatles had introduced people to eastern religions in the late sixties. To some people, Hinduism and Buddhism probably sounded pretty good.

"Add all that to how kids are before they've been out in the world on their own for a while. They're still rebelling against their parents and against a lot of laws they think are designed to keep them from having fun. It probably seemed great to a few to join an organization where none of that mattered and they could do what they wanted to do.

"I once read that a good con man can convince anybody to do anything given enough time and enough control over what the person sees and hears. He had them trapped in isolation from the rest of the world until he'd gotten them addicted to sex and meth and indoctrinated. You'd think people are smarter than that, but there are still well educated people falling for Ponzi schemes and there are more Internet scams than you can count.

"It looks to me like his method was very calculated. He started his cult by going to bars and introducing men and women to meth and telling them it made sex really great. Then he told them that his church wasn't like any other church they knew about. Sex was encouraged in his church and the sex was better with a little meth. Martin said the guy never told them it was meth. He told them it was an ancient Hindu aphrodisiac.

Once he had a few members and had indoctrinated them, he sent them out to find more. He probably needed new members so he could get what money they had. I don't understand what was special about February and March though

"Most of them were probably like the Pierces, young and looking for what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. His commune gave them a place to live, food to eat, and all the sex and meth they wanted in exchange for working in the commune and bringing in new recruits. They stayed with him for the same reason you like wearing sports bras. You say that you're big enough they don't give you much support, but you like how they feel.

"I think that's why most of them stayed until they died. They'd gotten comfortable with the sex and drugs and didn't see any reason to change that. The Pierces didn't manage to get out until Hector disappeared. The Pierces probably stayed alive because they were useful to the guy so he didn't get them addicted to meth. Martin worked in the meth lab and he and Peggy delivered it to the gangs in Knoxville. Hector wouldn't have killed them because he'd have had to find somebody else to help him.

"They were happy staying there. Hector gave them more food and he never tried to do anything to Peggy. The only reason Martin and Peggy left was Martin found out from one of his gang contacts that somebody from the TBI had been asking questions about their source of meth anytime one of them was arrested.

"When Hector heard that, he left the same day. Martin found fifty thousand dollars Hector had left behind in the meth lab, and that let him and Peggy buy the house they still live in.

Rochelle frowned.

"Comfortable or not, I wouldn't have stayed after I'd seen Hector kill people.

"Well, remember that neither Martin or Peggy said they'd never actually watched anybody die. What he told them when a couple didn't come back to their rooms was that they'd reached the top of their goals so they didn't really die. They'd just moved on to another plane of existence. Since he didn't allow newspapers or television or radios in the commune, they had no way to find out otherwise. Martin and Peggy might have seen a newspaper when they delivered meth if Hector hadn't always driven them when they made the delivery.

"It sounds like they were pretty stupid, but it's pretty common in cults for the members to believe anything they're told.

"What he was telling his cult was that you just disappeared as soon as you died, went to the next level, and you'd remember everything from your past life. He even told them it had happened to him seven times. What he taught them was that dying while having sex was a good thing because that would guarantee Vishnu would take them to the next level of life. He made sure some of them disappeared by giving them an overdose of meth. He just didn't kill most of them on the property. The autopsy records showed most died in cheap hotel rooms."

Rochelle pursed her lips then.

"I still don't understand why he killed our two victims and why he posed them in the grave like he did. If he led them out in the woods and killed them, he'd have been better off just leaving them there. Taking the time to bury them the way he did it would have put him in a lot of risk."

I shrugged.

"I don't understand it either unless they crossed him in some way and he had to kill them so they wouldn't talk and wouldn't be found. I think that's probably why Mrs. Piece was so scared. She thought if she told us anything, he'd come back and kill her.

"Even if we can find him, we'll probably never know for sure. I don't think any psychologist has figured out any real reason why Manson sent his followers to kill those people. They haven't really figured out what causes a person to become a serial killer. Psychiatrists have found some indicators but nothing that matches up one for one as a definite cause. Some people just seem to be evil at the core.

"Personally, I think the man was a good con man who also knew how to make and sell meth. He told young kids he was chosen by the main Hindu god and he was just really good at convincing a few naive kids that that was true. I mean, how could anyone believe that he was chosen to be the only man to father children in the cult so nobody could have actual sex except with him? We were both that age. Would you have settled for oral sex and nothing else?"

Rochelle grinned.

"Until I was married, I did. I had to teach my fiancée what to do, but it wasn't bad and I didn't risk getting pregnant. I imagine most of the girls felt the same way, and meth apparently does increase libido in some women. The guys probably thought the oral sex was fantastic."

I smiled.

"Well, I have to admit that it's pretty great, not as great as the real thing, but it's pretty good in a pinch."

Rochelle chuckled.

"So, are you going to pinch me and find out if it's still good?"

}|{

No, I didn't pinch Rochelle. We went out for dinner first. It was when we got back that I pinched her except my pinches were just little gentle pinches. She liked my little pinches to her nipples and she gasped with I pinched her lips over her clit.

She pinched back a little too, right before she straddled me and backed up until she was holding my cock in her mouth and I was spreading her hair-fringed lips apart with my thumbs.

We didn't need any meth to make it great.

}|{

It was a week later that I got a call from Matt at the TBI. He asked if I'd found the book and I said I had. I also said I was now looking for Hector Martinez.

Matt chuckled.

"Well, you can have him after the FBI and the TBI get done with him. The FBI caught up with him in Washington State a couple days ago. He'd started another cult there once he left New York City. He's seventy-three now, but he's still going strong. Had half a dozen young girls and another half dozen young guys there in a big cabin in the mountains. As far as they know, he didn't kill anybody there, but he'd only been in operation for about six months.

"New York City wasn't so lucky. He was there for ten years before an NYPD detective decided it was really unusual for so many people to die of meth overdoses in September. The NYPD missed him by a month, but they got the story from the cult members he left behind. He was making meth and selling it to the street gangs at the same time he was running his cult just like you found in Knoxville. September was just some Hindu celebration he'd made up as a reason to kill people with his meth.

"Rich, the reason I couldn't tell you all this before is because the FBI has been looking for him since he started his first cult in Alabama. They tracked him to Tennessee, so the TBI joined the team looking for him. We tracked him to New York City and then lost him.

"He's been really hard to catch. He has a degree in organic chemistry and another in psychology and he's one smart criminal. I know you and if I'd told you much you'd have started calling people in New York City. The FBI hasn't gotten all the names of his followers so they're not sure that some of his followers aren't still in the cult and know where he went. If there are and you'd gotten that close, they'd have called him and he'd have disappeared again.

"The only reason the FBI found him in Washington State is he'd been there long enough to get his meth business started and screwed up by selling some to a Washington State police officer working undercover.

"It's important that we get to interrogate him. We knew about your two victims from day they were found. We're just not sure he only left two in Knoxville. We know he killed at least three couples in Alabama. I'm sure you've found more than two who were reported missing but can't be accounted for. We know of ten, five men and five women, and we suspect they're buried in those same woods. There's a couple thousand acres out there. Without knowing at least a general area, it's like looking for a flea on a big hairy black dog. We need to interrogate him until he tells us where they're buried.

"He has no reason not to tell us. He's already charged with manufacturing meth and transporting it across state lines, and New York City is charging him with six counts of murder in addition to a bunch of drug charges. Tennessee is going to do the same. He'll probably never live long enough to get out of a federal prison, but even if he does, he'll still face more prison time in New York, Tennessee, and probably Washington State. He also won't have any money. Washington State and New York have already seized his bank accounts as profits from an illegal business and we're going to do the same in Tennessee. So far, it looks like he'd socked away about fifteen million in seven different banks."

I asked Matt if he knew the identity of my two victims and he said no.

"Sorry, Rich. We tried to match the DNA samples your coroner sent us, but we couldn't find a match. I tried the reverse genealogy thing a few years ago, but I ran into a common problem. Getting your DNA sequenced has become sort of a milestone for a lot of younger people, but it wasn't for their parents and grandparents. We might be able to identify them some day, but it'll be a process of elimination once we're sure we have all the bodies."

}|{

I went home that night and told Rochelle what Matt had said.

"There aren't that many older people who have had their DNA sequenced so Matt didn't have anything to match to. I suppose that'll continue to be a problem unless laws are passed that you have to submit DNA any time you're required submit your fingerprints."

Rochelle grinned that special grin she has.

"So, are you going to get your DNA sampled so it doesn't happen to you?"

"I doubt it. It never seemed important to me."

"Well it's important to me. I think I'll take a sample of your DNA tonight. I might even take two if you can see your way to give me two."

Now, I know Rochelle isn't going to send my DNA off to be sequenced... well... I don't think she'd do something like that... Like I said though, Rochelle has a very active imagination.

I did give her two samples and when she stopped shaking after each she put her hand between her thighs and went to the bathroom. She wouldn't tell me what she did in there, so I'm not sure what she has planned.

}|{

I couldn't officially close this case until Hector Martinez either died or stood trial in a Knoxville court for the murder of my two victims. I doubt he's going to last that long, but I still got an arrest warrant for him and sent it to both Washington State and New York. I put a copy of the warrant in the file with the rest of our evidence and took the file down to records. I wouldn't forget about the case though. If Hector ever got out of prison, I or some other detective would be there to arrest him and bring him back to Knoxville.

Once I did that, I drove out to the Pierce house and told them that Hector was in FBI custody and he probably wouldn't live long enough to serve out the sentence he was going to get. I also told them that even though they'd confessed to making and distributing meth, the statute of limitations had run out years before so they wouldn't be arrested or charged with anything. They seemed relieved.

}|{

It's tough to solve a case but not be able to see the guilty party be tried, convicted, and sentenced. I didn't lose in this case because Rochelle and I proved Hector was making meth at the commune. The DNA the crime scene techs lifted from the haz-mat suit and some of the equipment in the shed matched the DNA they took from Hector in Washington State. The testimony that the Pierces would give would be enough to prove he gave his commune members meth while telling them it was an ancient Hindu aphrodisiac. Since some of them died, that would be enough to convict him of at least negligent homicide.

I didn't win though, or at least I hadn't won yet. I'll consider it a win when I get to face Hector Martinez in court and give my testimony about the evidence that will convict him. Until that time, I guess it's more like the old saying about pissing your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.

}|{

I still have a lot of cold cases that need solving, so I'm not going to work myself out of a job anytime soon. I've been looking at one that looks interesting. Well, interesting isn't the right word for any cold case. All cold cases are catastrophes for someone. It just looks like it's going to be interesting to solve.

It's the 1986 case of a woman who was reported missing by her husband after they went RV camping out by Ijams Crag for a week. Apparently they camped out frequently, but their arrangement on this particular camping trip seemed a little unusual to Harry.

The husband was a very successful real estate agent. That success required him to be in his office most of the time either writing contracts for properties he was going to list, or out of his office showing those properties to people wanting to buy them or negotiating with lenders to qualify potential buyers.

The wife was about as different from her husband as she could get. She was an outdoorswoman who loved camping and hiking. According to her sister, the wife was as comfortable in the wilds of the mountains as she was at a country club cocktail party.

As a result, their camping trips usually meant that the husband left their campsite every morning for his office and the wife spent the day hiking and watching wildlife. On this particular camping trip, the husband had told his wife that he had a deal close to closing so he'd be away from the campsite for the first three days of their trip.

At some point during those three days, she'd left a note saying she'd decided to hike one of the trails, but when the husband returned at about 1:00 PM of the third day, she wasn't there. Knowing her love for the outdoors, he wasn't worried. She'd stayed out on hiking trails overnight before in order to experience what he said she called "the sounds of nature at night". He waited until the next morning before reporting her missing. A subsequent search found her body two days later at the foot of a steep cliff that wasn't on any marked trail, and there wasn't a lot left to find.

The coroner found some marks in what remained of her flesh and bones that looked like animal tooth marks, so before he started the autopsy he called the TWRA and asked if they could send someone to identify what animal had made the marks. The biologist from the TWRA said it looked like a couple of the tooth marks might have been made by a black bear. Then he shook his head and said that because coyotes and turkey vultures had been feeding on the body he couldn't positively state that a bear had killed the woman or that the tooth marks were actually from a black bear. He said that the marks could have been caused by a large coyote or a large feral dog.

The coroner then did an autopsy of the remains. After taking samples of several tissues, including the woman's brain, the coroner ruled the cause of death to be a heart attack. He found brain damage caused by her striking her head when she fell and also the damage to her heart cause by a lack of blood flow to the left ventricle. His ruling was that the wife had been hiking off a known trail for some reason, had had a heart attack, and had fallen from the cliff. With no immediate attempt at resuscitation to restore blood flow to her brain, she died within a few minutes.

The coroner's report also stated that it was unusual for a woman of only thirty-one to have a heart attack, but that her husband had indicated his wife was a believer in holistic medicine. She'd been taking foxglove extract because she'd experienced some incidents of irregular heartbeat, and that would account for the digoxin in her tissue samples. His report said it was possible that she'd experienced a period of irregular heartbeat and had taken more than what was normal for her. The extra dose caused her heart to stop pumping and resulted in her fall.

Harry's subsequent investigation revealed that the wife had a life insurance policy that was worth four hundred thousand if she died of natural causes and double that if she died from an accident or foul play. The beneficiary of the policy was her husband.

To any detective, the unwitnessed and unexplained death of a person with almost any amount of life insurance immediately raises the theory that the beneficiary of said life insurance killed the insured person. That was Harry's initial theory and he brought in the husband for questioning. Harry also asked the coroner to preserve and retain the tissue samples indefinitely in case they were needed in the future.

The interview with the husband hadn't produced anything of value. He'd answered all Harry's questions, volunteered for and passed a lie detector test, and even had a very embarrassing but ironclad alibi. His proof that he couldn't have murdered his wife was three six-hour VHS tapes, one for each day prior to him reporting that his wife was missing, complete with date and time stamps.

The embarrassing part was that his secretary had been helping him. What the VHS tapes revealed was that her "help" involved both of them in a hotel room and staying naked most of the time. A lot of the video was of the secretary lying on the bed naked. Some of that video was of the secretary lying on the bed and masturbating. Some was of the secretary riding the husband's cock after she managed to jack and suck him hard enough. When Harry questioned the secretary she admitted that she and the husband had spent the three days and two nights in a hotel room together.

I think I'll take that one home to Rochelle and see if she thinks it's worth pursuing. If I'm lucky, I might get another one of Rochelle's experiments out of it.