Martha Vasquez

Professor Martha Gina Vasquez (alias Zachary Jacques Tolono Venshlin) is the main antagonist of the novel Vasquez Private Eye: A Fable of Murder and the Unknown Truth. She is a forensic scientist and chemistry teacher who went insane after losing a kneecap and her youngest son in a plane crash before being driven into a murderous rage after the airline was acquitted of all responsibility for the crash.

History
Martha was a forensic scientist who taught her trade as a professor at the fictitious Deviltry University in Cincinnati. Her work led to her meeting and falling in love with one of the police's most respected detectives, Daniel Jack Vasquez. Before long, they started a family with two sons, Johnson and Terrence.

The professor took a dark turn around the age of 50. She and her family were on Firebird Airlines Flight 934 from Denver to Cincinnati, which crashed in Kansas City following an in-flight structural failure. 75 of the 200 passengers and crew were killed, including Terrence. Johnson rescued the pilots from the wrecked airplane, which would contribute to Firebird Airlines facing no legal consequences for their role in the accident, which was blamed entirely on the airline's chief mechanic, William York.

Having lost a kneecap in the accident in addition to her youngest son, Martha grew resentful toward the lawyers and judge involved in the lawsuit hearings for their handling of the case and secretly turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms that eventually led her to try to rob a store owned by Johnson's friend, Alex Andrews, called Dr. Chuckle's Prank Lab and Gag Shop.

Unknown to Martha, however, her former student, Shannon Thomson, had created a batch of drink mixes that would cause personality shifts in whoever consumed them, and that Alex had accidentally been given a dose. The hitman she recruited to steal the money was foiled in the robbery and arrested, and she set about figuring out what was going on.

After figuring out Alex's new secret identity as Brandon Chide and the drink mix recipe, Martha had Shannon make batches for her own use, becoming a student at the Wainwright Law Academy under the name Zachary Jacques Tolono Venshlin (an anagram of Johnson Charlie Clayton Vasquez) to become a lawyer and take revenge on the legal system.

Over the next several years, Venshlin began interfering with trials involving three key individuals: Harold Satchel, the defense attorney who represented Firebird Airlines in the lawsuit hearings, whom Venshlin believed won the case because of his skills as an attorney; Martin Hershel, the judge presiding over the lawsuit hearings, whom Venshlin accused of being biased against William York so that his brother-in-law could take his job; and Gary McCrery, William's attorney during his appeal hearing, (later becoming Cincinnati's DA) whom Venshlin believed lost the appeal because of his inadequate handling of the case. The trials were sabotaged to allow truly guilty defendants to be acquitted of the charges pressed against them.

After graduating from Wainwright, Venshlin enlisted himself into Landenberg Law Firm, where Harold Satchel worked, before putting the ultimate plan into action.

In the book
Her first victim was Harold Satchel, who was due to represent William York in an upcoming murder trial. Johnson Vasquez, who was investigating the suspicious murder trials with his girlfriend, Zelda Thomson, (Shannon's sister) was interrogating Satchel about his knowledge of the cases, since he was involved in several of them. The meeting was interrupted by William requesting Satchel's presence, and Martha followed after them. Passing a note to Johnson at a restaurant, she kidnapped Satchel in the subway and stabbed him in the throat under an escalator with an icicle.

That night, she kidnapped her husband Daniel and took him to Wainwright Law Academy, where she stuck him in a closet, stuffed his clothes with the pages of a flight training manual, and dropped a burning candle on him, burning him alive to prevent him from solving the mystery. By the time the fire was noticed, Martha was long gone.

With Satchel dead, William chose Venshlin as his new attorney, believing his inexperience as a lawyer would get him the death penalty for killing his father with a microwaved airbag that almost killed Patrick Ralston, an insurance agent whose brother, Richard, was a friend of Johnson. At Venshlin's insistence, William fought the case in court, in which DA McCrery and Judge Hershel were present, and was acquitted on mixed evidence.

After the trial, Hershel was abducted while Johnson tried to find out more about Venshlin. The judge was thrown on a subway track, where he was electrocuted by the third rail and subsequently run over by a train. Johnson's continued discoveries of the dead murder victims make him the prime suspect of the official investigation, led by his cousin Rachel Dinesen, who also believes William wanted a new attorney for his trial and was colluding with Johnson.

As Johnson and his friends sift through evidence found in Venshlin's Landenberg office, including makeup accessories and packets of Shannon's drink mix, they manage to establish a motive for the crimes and the fact that Zachary Venshlin is a pseudonym. They also find evidence that Gary McCrery will be Venshlin's next victim, but are unable to find out if this is in fact the case.

By the time the next note comes into Johnson's possession, McCrery is already dead, stabbed hundreds of times all across his body with needles in the barn behind his house. The needles are hidden in haystacks around the barn, and after several months of searching, they are all found.

Johnson and his friends confront Rachel with the evidence, but without knowing who Venshlin really is, she remains unconvinced. Unable to handle Rachel's stubborn attitude, William throws himself in front of a bus. In the hospital, William confesses to murdering his father in a last ditch effort to resolve his financial troubles that started when he was unjustly fired from Firebird Airlines. Johnson, realizing the role he played in the fallout of the accident, runs out of the room and falls down a flight of stairs. He finds the last note as he gets back up and realizes that he has to solve a puzzle to find out who the last intended victim is.

Martha invites Johnson and his friends to her apartment for dinner, intending to abduct Johnson. She does this by drugging Johnson's silverware with sleeping medication and taking him to a subway train, riding through the closed subway. There, Johnson provides his summation of the case before Martha sets the train on fire and fights Johnson in a station when the train stops.

The fight ends with Johnson throwing himself and Martha over a railing, whereupon Martha lands on her own knife, which slices off her head.

Trivia

 * She is similar to Ray Finkle from the Jim Carrey film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.


 * Both are detective story villains.


 * Both seek revenge for perceived injustices.


 * Both are driven by insanity.


 * Both go into a profession that deals with the law as part of their plan.


 * Both disguise themselves as the opposite gender while doing so.


 * Both have aliases that foreshadow their big secret.


 * Both fight their story's protagonist after they solve the mystery.