PART I COLD CASE #4
That day, after making me try on many different styles of clothing, she told me to buy several t-shirts with beer brands written on the chest (Coors, Coors Lite, Miller, Miller Lite: ‘This is Texas, baby,’ she said); a brown canvas jacket made by a brand called Carhartt; Levi’s blue denim jeans (501 style); and Converse All Star Chuck Taylor II sneakers (these are, according to Darla, a little more stylish than your standard Converse sneakers).
I now have seven beer-branded t-shirts—four black, three navy—three jackets, four pairs of jeans and three pairs of Converse All Star Chuck Taylor IIs.
Darla tried to get me to change the style of my glasses, but on that matter, I wouldn’t budge.
I wear prescription Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
‘But they make you look like Buddy Holly, darlin’!’ Darla complained.
This was objectively true but the Wayfarer style of glasses is a sturdy design that sits firmly on my face, which I like.
I also wouldn’t change my watch, again over Darla’s objections.
‘Darlin’, even a basic little Timex would be more fashionable than that clunky-lookin’ thing,’ were her exact words.
I wear an unremarkable black plastic Casio G-Shock digital watch. It has no fashion or collector’s value whatsoever.
But it has great value to me.
My black G-Shock was a gift from my parents—my foster -parents, that is.
They’re lovely people who live in Clear Lake, south of Houston, down near the NASA Space Center.
Over the years, they’ve raised numerous foster kids, me among them. They gave me the Casio for my tenth birthday and I’ve worn it every day ever since.
Anyway, on October 2nd—dressed in my Coors Lite t-shirt, my Carhartt jacket, my jeans and my Converse sneakers, and with my backpack by my side—I was eating my lunch at Hooters when my phone pinged with the DNA match.
I looked at the alert and frowned.
It was very odd.
Not the DNA match. They came up all the time.
This DNA match.
It was an old one.
A very old one.
It came from a case I’d worked on seven years previously.
The LaToya Martyn case.
That case had involved four sex workers who’d disappeared in March of 2018, one of whom was LaToya Martyn.
Houston is a great town, but every city has its less desirable neighbourhoods and Sunnyside is one of Houston’s.
That four prostitutes had gone missing from there wasn’t unusual. Street workers vanished all the time—sometimes under suspicious circumstances; sometimes they just left, packing up in the middle of the night and moving without telling anyone.
The missing women were:
LaToya.
Olympia Cole.
Renata Long.
And Nia Carter.
All were Black, aged either nineteen or twenty, and they all worked for a notoriously brutal pimp named Tyrone Brown.
Back in 2018, LaToya Martyn’s parents had hired me to find her.
They were sweet people, her parents.
He was a janitor; she was a beautician.
And while they were estranged from LaToya, they loved their daughter and tried to keep in touch with her, even when she’d run away from home and started working on the streets of Sunnyside.
I did the usual legwork.
Sadly, the story of LaToya Martyn wasn’t new.
Quit school in ninth grade; started doing fentanyl soon after; then began selling her body to pay for more drugs.
(It was a shame, her mother said. LaToya had struggled at school due to severe dyslexia. Since none of her teachers noticed or cared, she’d quit.)
Credit card checks; cell phone tracking; internet searches; boyfriend and ex-boyfriend searches (usually the prime suspect when a street worker disappears is the boyfriend or ex-boyfriend); all of that.
And I got nothing.
Zero.
Zip.
Her phone had gone completely offline. It never triangulated with any cell phone tower ever again.
She also never used her credit card again.
LaToya Martyn had not just ‘gone missing’.
LaToya Martyn had fallen off the face of the earth.
Of course, I took DNA samples from her parents.
Now, being a private detective is a pretty interesting job, especially for someone like me, but it does have some drawbacks.
One of them is you don’t have access to all the systems and technology that the cops and FBI have, notably DNA labs and records.
And so, a confession: I’d hacked the law enforcement DNA labs in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana a few years back.
I’m good with computers and after having experienced some reluctance on the part of law enforcement to cooperate with me on a few investigations—cases that had involved some of their own officers and a few prominent citizens—I took it upon myself to gain access to their DNA databases.
(It wasn’t hard. Seriously, some cops still use ‘password’ as their password.)
In any case, back in 2018, I’d set up a standing alert for any time LaToya Martyn’s DNA appeared on one of those states’ computer systems.
It came up that day.
LaToya Martyn’s DNA had been detected in the blood of a dead newborn baby girl found inside a plastic doll that had washed up, thanks to the recent storm, in the Acheron River near Victorville, Louisiana, over by the vast Sabine National Wildlife Refuge.
I read the DNA report: the short tandem repeats were clear. They had been amplified via polymerase chain reactions and then run through gel electrophoresis which confirmed the result.
That result: the dead baby found inside the doll near Victorville was definitely LaToya Martyn’s daughter.
I asked Millie-Mae for my check.
‘Sure. See ya next time, handsome.’
‘Thank you, Millie-Mae. Oh, have you heard from the organisers of the Hooters Annual Calendar yet?’
‘Not yet. Hopin’ to hear somethin’ soon. Fingers crossed!’
‘I hope you get in, Millie-Mae. See you tomorrow.’
I paid the check and walked to my office one block away.
The bell above the door jingled as I entered the reception area of my little suite of offices.
Stencilled on the door’s translucent glass was:
the detective
samuel j. speedman
proprietor
texas private detective license # tx71120-a
texas state bar license # t545567
louisiana private detective license # la46721
louisiana state bar license # 33881ar
My friend Lincoln Lewis was the one who suggested that I call myself ‘The Detective’.
Linc is also a private investigator. He works out of Tampa in Florida and we often help each other on cases that overlap into each other’s regions.
Linc said calling myself ‘The Detective’ was Marketing and that it made me sound like a bad-ass.
As the door indicated, I was a licensed private investigator in both Texas and Louisiana.
This is a good thing as my clients and targets often go back and forth across the state line, which in the case of Texas and Louisiana is the north–south running Sabine River.
‘Good afternoon, Heidi,’ I said.
‘Hey, little man,’ Heidi Spunkmeyer said from behind the reception counter. As usual, she was chewing a large wad of gum. ‘You’re back early. Normally, you don’t come back from lunch at Hooters till 12:47.’
‘A case came up. Old one. I gotta go to the morgue over in Lake Charles.’
Heidi shrugged. ‘Sure.’
Even though she sat behind the reception counter, Heidi wasn’t my receptionist.
She was my intern.
I’ve never actually had a receptionist.
My suite of offices is on the second floor of a strip mall one block away from Hooters, near the CVS. It sits beside a laser hair removal boutique and a Krav Maga gym.
The reception counter is in the front room and the counter came with the lease.
Until Heidi had entered my life, both the front room and the counter had sat empty.
Twenty-four years old, sturdy and gruff, with pink hair and facial rings in her nose, eyebrows and lower lip, Heidi was the daughter of Rabbi Spunkmeyer, whose synagogue could be found a few blocks from my office.
Heidi wore thick black make-up around her eyes, black jeans and sturdy black Doc Martens boots.
A devoted fan of professional wrestling, her t-shirts were often World Wrestling Entertainment branded ones, most of them featuring a wrestler named Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage.
I’d once handled a case for Rabbi Spunkmeyer—someone had been stealing from his synagogue’s online donation account; it turned out to be the treasurer (gambling addiction).
Anyway, shortly after that case, Rabbi Spunkmeyer had asked me if I might be able to assist him with Heidi.
It turned out Heidi was something of a problem for the rabbi.
With her hair, piercings, make-up and overall ‘Goth-lesbian-emo-Macho Man-biker-chick’ demeanour (her words not mine), she didn’t quite fit in among the synagogue’s somewhat more conservatively inclined congregation.
But the rabbi loved her and he mentioned to me that Heidi was in the process of completing her private detective’s course as required by the licensing board of the State of Texas. (I suggested she get a licence for Louisiana, too, and she was going to do this after.)
The course mandated forty hours of practical experience and the rabbi asked if I would be her supervisor.
I said sure. Unlike his congregation, I had no issue with Goth lesbian biker chicks with pink hair, facial piercings and a love of professional wrestling.
While Heidi wasn’t going to win any deportment contests—her phone manner needed work—she’d turned out to be an excellent investigator. She was nearing the end of her mandated forty hours and I’d offered her a full-time job as soon as she became officially certified.
I stepped into my office.
It’s much like any other office, I guess, except for one thing: it’s dominated by a 105-inch DynaTech Systems smart whiteboard.
I powered up the whiteboard, punched in my password.
The home screen appeared, showing my ongoing cases:
ONGOING CASES
CLIENT
SUBJECT
REGION
1
‘X’ OIL CORP
Topographical MAPS hacking
HOUSTON, TX
2
MRS MARYLIN CHANG
Infidelity of MR DONALD CHANG
BATON ROUGE, LA
3
LINC LEWIS
Skip trace: GLENN W. DUFFY, bail absconder
DALLAS, TX
PENSACOLA, FL
X
MR DARNELL MARTYN
MRS KECIA MARTYN
LATOYA MARTYN
MISSING
HOUSTON, TX