Page 61 of Done Dirty

Plank and Wachowski came in and took the far end of the table. I’d never actually seen Plank and Wachowski in street clothes like a normal couple. It was weird. I wasn’t even sure what Wachowski’s first name was. I knew she was eight years older than Plank, though honestly, she didn’t look it. She had a sleek tail of copper-red hair and freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she was wearing an Orioles T-shirt and a pair of frayed denim shorts. She’d done some undercover work at the high schools when she’d been on the drug task force, and she barely looked out of college. The waiter carded her and Plank, which made me chuckle.

Daniels and Derby settled across from us, and then Doug dropped into the middle chair. He’d brought Margot in with him, but the laptop was still closed and sitting in front of him. Doug had put Oscar in the little room behind Jack’s office with fresh water and a leftover sausage kolache he’d swiped from the breakroom. Oscar had seemed happy with the arrangement.

“So what’s the deal with your dead guy?” Cole asked. “I heard he’d been roofying his clients. Hard to get Rohypnol these days.”

“Good to see the gossip still flows like wine, even when you’re out on leave,” Jack said.

“I’ve got my informants on the inside,” he said, grinning.

Jack filled him in on the case and everything we’d discovered so far. “Plank and Wachowski have confirmed six women from the black book,” Jack said.

“That number is fourteen now,” Wachowski said. “We’ve got a few more interviews to conduct in the morning, but their stories are consistent. Three of the ones we’ve interviewed don’t have an alibi for the time of the murder.”

“But their stories are similar,” Plank said. “They all started with group classes and then were invited to the private sessions.”

I thought about Zoe Brown and the pre-workout smoothies. “And they were all given the smoothies?”

“Yeah,” Plank said. “But it varies. Some of the women weren’t given the pre-workout smoothie. Some weren’t given the post-workout smoothie. Some were given both. But all of them had at least one.”

“It would have depended on the woman,” I said. “Zoe Brown wasn’t interested in Wade sexually. So the pre-workout smoothie, from her description at least, would’ve had the sildenafil and the trial meds from Mexico to get her in the mood.”

“We sent the smoothies we found in his fridge to the lab,” Daniels said. “Prelim report says you’re right, though they have no way of knowing what the trial drug is. That will have to come from the lab in Mexico, though they were able to break down certain components. The lab said best guess is a powerful aphrodisiac, but it was combined with an unknown substance that has similar chemical structure to methamphetamines. He said it would’ve been highly addictive.”

“Which is why Zoe said she couldn’t stop thinking about it,” I said. “Why she went back for more even though she didn’t want to cheat on her husband.”

“Exactly,” Daniels said. “The other smoothie was positive for Rohypnol.”

Cole whistled. “That’s a dangerous combination.”

Jack nodded. “Then he took pictures of them in various sexual acts and blackmailed them. He’s collected a little over half a million dollars in the last two years. It’s a cycle of lust, shame, and addiction.”

“No one reported him?” Lily asked.

“No,” Plank said. “The consensus among all the women, even the ones who didn’t want to start an affair with him, was that it was somehow consensual because they were overcome with desire. None of them had a memory of them telling him no, even though there were a couple who said they had no desire to cheat on their spouse and still can’t believe they did it. So they kept going. And the ones who quit or pushed back received blackmail photographs. That started a whole new cycle. They were threatened with them being uploaded online, sent to their workplaces, to their spouses. He’d done their homework on them. He knew what buttons to push.”

“All good predators do,” Jack said.

“You didn’t find any of the drugs in his system?” Lily asked me.

“Not the ones he was giving his victims,” I said. “But he had his own concoction of steroids, testosterone, and Viagra. It was the only way he was able to fulfill a sexual addiction of that magnitude. His narcissism knew for his plan to work his victims would have to blame themselves or take full responsibility. He’s just the nice guy everyone wants.”

“What a creep,” Lily said, shuddering.

“Was the blackmail consistent?” Jack asked.

“Different amounts,” Wachowski said. “Again, you could tell he’d done research on the victims. First amounts were always the lowest. Anywhere from a thousand to five thousand usually. Then they went up incrementally. Whatever was in those photographs was graphic enough that they gladly paid. They were weird interviews. Some of the women were so broken up about his death we could barely understand them. A couple of them asked if they could get his smoothie recipe. And others were like zombies, just staring at us as if they couldn’t comprehend what they were saying. It was weird.”

“Some were still paying?” I asked.

“Yes,” Wachowski said.

“Send us those names,” Jack said. “They need to go at the top of our list. Did any of the ones still paying have no alibi?”

“Just one,” Plank said. “A Tasha Crider.”

“Did any of them know about each other?” I asked.

“Not one,” Plank said. “He kept them completely isolated. Different days, different times. Two of the women we talked to today have been members at the studio at the same time, have taken the same group classes, sat next to each other. No idea.” He looked at Jack. “He was meticulous about it.”