“Loser pays for dinner at the winner’s restaurant of choice,” I said.
“Deal. Give me a few minutes and I’ll text you the dates.”
I ended the call, and true to her word, the birthdates for Mele Akamu, her husband, her son, and Tavii appeared on my phone in short order.
I found a piece of paper on Mele Akamu’s desk and wrote out the dates. Most people pick numbers that mean something to them when they devise security codes. So, I took some of the numbers Alana had sent me and combined them with others until I had around thirty possible codes for the safe. For example, I took the month of Mele Akamu’s birth and combined it with the month of her husband’s birth.
I stood and walked over to the safe. I started typing in code combinations. The safe opened on my fifth attempt. It was Mele’s birth year combined with her husband’s birth year. As with everything else in this case, things came down to two possibilities. Either Mele Akamu had put the gun in the safe since she and Samson had been the ones to kill Eric Ellis, or the real killer had done it.
I’d just proved that it was possible to figure out the code and I’d done so in under ten minutes. Unfortunately, that also meant I’d lost the bet with Alana, which didn’t bother me since I would have insisted on paying for the dinner anyway.
I went back over to the desk and grabbed another piece of paper. In past cases, I’d made a list of things I knew or thought I knew about the case. Sometimes seeing the list in black and white helped my mind process things.
I wrote the headline, “Facts of the Eric Ellis Case,” on the top of the paper.
Fact. Eric Ellis worked for Mele Akamu until he decided he wanted more. He tried to blackmail her with information he stole about her business. He then tried to sell that information to a man named Stan Cross.
Fact. Mele Akamu stated that Samson couldn’t find Eric, yet Eric’s girlfriend, Gracie Ito, contradicted that with a photo of a battered and bruised Eric Ellis. Mele Akamu ultimately admitted that she lied to me about that.
Gracie Ito also claimed Samson threatened her if she went to the police. Was she lying about that?
Oleen Akamu, Tavii’s soon-to-be ex-wife, claimed to have been an eyewitness to Eric’s murder, only to later admit that she made it up so she could be paid by Stan Cross to help implicate Mele Akamu in the crime.
Tavii Akamu pointed to Lee Walters as a suspect, claiming Lee was mad that Eric blew up their business relationship with the Akamu family.
Tavii seemed happy that his grandmother was in jail since it freed him up to take over the family business, especially after his failed political career. Was this a strong enough motive to have framed his grandmother?
Lee Walters denied hurting Eric Ellis, but he admitted that he wanted to. He pointed to Tavii as a possible suspect and said that he might have gone behind his grandmother’s back to order the hit on Eric.
Gracie Ito mentioned that a man named Stan called Eric and that Eric argued with him the day he vanished.
Samson confirmed that Stan Cross was a rival of Mele Akamu and may have killed Eric.
Samson also stated that Lee Walters offered to murder his friend, Eric Ellis, in order to get back on Mele Akamu’s good side. What was that saying? There is no honor among thieves?
Daniel Davis found Eric’s remains with his dog, yet he’d clearly bought the dog for the purpose of finding the body. Who told him it was there? Or was he the one who buried Eric’s body five years ago?
Daniel owed a substantial amount of money to a loan shark, yet he somehow came up with the money to pay it back. Was he paid that money to pretend to find Eric’s body? Was he killed because of my interview with him?
Stan Cross said that he turned down Eric’s offer because he didn’t trust Eric. He was worried that Mele Akamu was setting him up.
Stan revealed that Eric was having an affair. The affair was confirmed by Gracie Ito.
Eric went to see his lover, Tiana Wise, the night he disappeared. He left in the middle of the night after receiving a call from Mele Akamu. Why would he have been so foolish to have done so? Or was the call from someone other than Mele Akamu? If so, why would Tiana lie about that?
Tiana Wise lived down the hall from Daniel Davis, yet she said she didn’t know who he was. This was directly contradicted by a co-worker of Daniel’s who saw Tiana in his apartment. What is their connection?
The police claimed to have found Mele Akamu’s safe on their own, yet they hadn’t trashed the study like the rest of the house. It’s possible that both Tavii and Oleen Akamu separately told the police in advance about the safe. If so, why had Detective Parrish lied to me about that? Probably because he was bragging about his ability to find the well-hidden safe.
According to the locksmith, the gun was in the safe when he opened it in the presence of Detective Parrish and the other police officers. Did someone figure out the combination to the safe like I had and planted the gun beforehand?
I put the pen down. I then folded the piece of paper and shoved it into my pocket. I had a long list of information, but none of it pointed to a guilty party beyond Mele Akamu and Stan Cross, who had been my main suspects from early in the case.
I was still at a dead end, so I decided to drive home and take a run or a swim, which was another tried and true method to free my mind and think about the case. I was almost home when I received a
