by Thomas Laird
“That would make a why for all of this.”
“Yes. He killed all of those people because the owners wouldn’t pay. I don’t think they’ll stop with one building unless the landlords have agreed to pay up.”
“Merton.”
“Pardon?”
“Gary Merton is the CEO and majority owner of all the properties including the Anderson site. I talked him into re-hiring a maintenance guy of his that we suspected briefly of blowing up the place. Gary Merton is the guy I have to talk to.”
Parisi scanned the room where the Manets graced the walls of the Art Institute.
“Donlan? Are you listening in?” Jimmy smiled.
“Do you think he is listening somehow?”
“If the satellite is in the right spot of its orbit? Anybody’s guess. I think he already knows about Grodnov and about krysha and about how ruthless these pricks are. You have classified information you want to share with me, call me on my cellphone from now on. I don’t like the lack of security here—or anywhere else for that matter.”
Parisi took out a notebook and scribbled a message for Van Dyke.
“Keep an eye on your back. The Russians won’t hesitate to try to shut you up. Or me. So don’t go anywhere alone if you can help it. Don’t go out to talk to somebody who calls and tells you he’s got some hot intel for you. All right?” Parisi wrote on the pad.
Marty nodded. Parisi waved goodbye and walked away.
*
His eyes snapped open with the crash. He threw off the bed covers and raced into the living room where he’d heard the noise. When he got there, there was no sound—except a slight sizzling noise. Marty saw the hole in his front window before he saw the bottle of liquid on the floor. Then he recognized the Molotov cocktail and the burning cloth that was stuffed in its neck.
He knew he was dead. He knew he wouldn’t have time to turn away and dive for the floor. He saw the flame extend into the bottle where the clear liquid lay. But instead of hearing the roar of an explosion, Marty heard no more sizzling.
The flame simply went out. When he was able to move his feet, he reached down and picked up the bottle. He tore out the charred cloth, and then he sniffed what was inside the bottle. It was water. Just water. He took the bottle back into the kitchen and emptied the liquid into the sink. He placed the bottle on the counter, saving it for the police. He’d touched it, but he wasn’t sure if anyone else’s prints might have been left on the glass. He was fairly sure the Russians wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave evidence on the bottle, but he had to be certain.
He went into the living room. Then he went back into the hallway to find a towel to stuff into the hole the bottle had made when it pierced his front window. Finally, Marty called the police.
Parisi and Spencer showed up. They’d heard about a call to Van Dyke’s place, and that got their immediate attention.
“So you got a message,” Parisi smiled. “Better than the real thing.”
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it were a real Molotov,” Tommy grinned.
“Why are they being tactful? Grodnov wasted a thousand people, and he holds back on me?” Marty wondered aloud.
“He kills for money,” Jimmy said. “Nobody’s invested in you. Yet,” Jimmy explained.
“I’m going to move,” Marty said. “This…And too many memories.”
“I’ll help you if you need a hand,” Parisi offered.
“Count on me too. If you spring for food,” Spencer smiled.
“I think we’d draw a bit too much attention to ourselves if we started piling my stuff into a U-Haul, but thanks. I’ll have pros do it for me. Very low key, no?”
Parisi picked up the bottle in the kitchen after he’d put on his latex gloves. Then he put the bottle inside a plastic bag.
“Fingerprints?” Marty asked hopefully.
“Not likely,” Tommy said. “Except for your own prints…I assume you picked it up naked-hand?”
Marty grinned.
“It’s okay. We can eliminate you from the guy who hurled this thing in here, I guess,” Tommy grinned back at Van Dyke.
“Get out as soon as you can,” Parisi suggested. There was no merry look on his face.
Van Dyke nodded, the two cops finished their search of the condo, and then the Homicides left.
*
Alexei Grodnov was still in love with his wife Heather. Heather had the kids and a house in Concord, California—about 2300 miles from Grodnov and Chicago, his current residence. Grodnov had a condo on the Gold Coast, not far from Oprah Winfrey, the Gold Coast’s most famous resident. Grodnov had gone by the building where the famous TV personality lived. It was out of his league, owning several floors as she did, but Alexei lived well. Even with the drain of two separate households, the one in Concord and his own place here. The expenses were heavy, but his income could support everyone comfortably.
He had his share of women. He also liked the company of young males. They had to be in their early teens, however. The boys became a bit tiresome when they reached, say, sixteen. He was more inclined to allow females to stay at his condo because he knew the young boys would not be a tolerated item by others in the organization. As with most criminals, paedophiles were reviled and homophobia ran rampant. So he had to keep his taste for adolescent boys secret. No one knew but Alexei himself. He found the boys on his own. And they were not allowed to talk behind his back. No, after a night or two together, he snapped their necks and disposed of the bodies himself, in places like the Chicago River, Lake Michigan, and so on. His choices of young males were always particular. They were street kids. Usually kids who’d run away. Runaways were his choice because no one would come looking for them, and when they were found in the River or the Lake, no one seemed to care much. The police understood why these boys wound up dead, so they were low profile homicides.
Grodnov thought he was really performing a service for the city and for the society around him. In a way he was cleaning the city of its trash. Trash was the way he looked at each of the boys, so it was never difficult to end his pleasure with them by snapping their frail, immature necks. It was a quick, almost painless death. They were freed from the sewers their lives had become, and Grodnov would never be found out as the paedophile/murderer he really was. To the men in his Outfit he would always appear to be a cocksman. He made no secret of the females who shared his bed. He took them to public places, and he certainly never snapped their necks. They had all survived to spread the legend of Alexei Grodnov’s libido. His sexual prowess was notorious among the whores who worked the Gold Coast, and not all of his girlfriends were whores. Some were socialites. Some were college girls, some were models, and some were middle aged, one-time babes who basked in his notoriety. Women loved Alexei because he was dangerous. They were aware he was an outlaw, but they didn’t know about his taste for adolescent male flesh or for his capacity for cruelty. No, he was a partier and a cocksman, and that was enough for the legions of women who left their thongs in his bed as mementos.
Alexei’s partner was Viktor Rustov. Rustov was a Chechen and an assassin. He liked neither boys nor women. He wasn’t a homosexual—he was more asexual than anything else. He loved the horses, trotters and thoroughbreds, and when he wasn’t at the track he was killing at the behest of Alexei and the Russian crew here in Chicago. Rustov was short, five feet six, but he was almost as broad as he was tall. His shoulders were immense, and he was muscled like a Roman gladiator. He worked out with weights when he wasn’t with the horses or stalking a victim, and the horses and the weights and the whacks took up all his time.
Alexei admired him because Viktor was the only man he knew in the world with absolutely no sense of humor. Rustov was always serious, so there was never a worry that he’d lose concentration while on the job. The sight of a rounded ass or full set of tits would not distract him either. Rustov was the word ‘focused,’ in the flesh. The two men headed the Chicago crew of the Russian Mafia for several years now
. They had made a lot of money, and their organization was slowly replacing the Italians in the muscle area. The Sicilians had been crippled by the Feds and the Courts, but the Russians had fared better. Now the main competition was coming from the Vietnamese and the Latin gangs, but the Russians were gaining more than the Asians or the Hispanics. There weren’t as many conflicts inside, with the Russians. The other gangs had too many internal conflicts constantly interfering with business. Alexei and Viktor dealt summarily with internal problems. They shot them and dumped them in the bodies of water God had provided them here in northern Illinois.
“This Parisi insulted you in public?” Viktor asked.
“He put his hands on me, yes,” Alexei explained.
“You want me to take care of him?”
“No. I don’t think we need to anger the police. They’re already angry with the Federals. Let them direct their emotions at each other.”
“Parisi thinks we blew up the Anderson Building.”
“Yes.”
“Another reason to liquidate him.”
“The Federals still want people to think that the terrorists have done that piece of work.”
“I confess, Alexei. I think you overreacted with the Anderson situation. You didn’t have to kill them all, did you?”
“And still have them thinking the sand niggers did it? Yes. It was the only way.”
“Now the FBI has turned their attention toward us, Alexei.”
“Yes. But they have nothing to prosecute us with. Their only witness isn’t likely to speak out.”
“Am I to kill the girl?”
“I don’t think it will be necessary. I already spent some time with her in St. Thomas…Before the police located her. Then I spent some time here with her mother. We brought the father here and he watched. I have it on video. Would you like to see?”
Viktor Rustov nodded. Alexei rose and went to his home entertainment center, and then he played the dvd.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Carlton Atkins had left work on a day in late November and he had never reported back to work since then. The owner of the construction supply in Mokena didn’t think much of it after trying to reach Carlton by phone. He tried three times. Maury Angeles was the owner’s name.
Tommy and I and Natalie took the trip out to the far southwest burb to see if Atkins could ID Grodnov in a lineup. We stopped at the construction place, and Maury gave us his phone and address. Carlton lived in the sticks near Mokena. Angeles didn’t think he had a wife or a family—all he knew was that Carlton was a recent grad of Joliet. Ten years for a stickup in Elgin. His parole officer had helped secure the job for Carlton, but Atkins was finished with his parole sentence and was clear of the law by now. That was why no one seemed to miss him, Maury told us when we stopped there.
It was difficult to find the trailer where Carlton Atkins resided, but Tommy was an excellent navigator. And he seemed to be a natural in the woods too, following Maury’s direction to this off road site. It was off road all right. Two miles of a drive on a sloppy gravel road. I thought the Taurus was going to come apart, with all the holes and craters on that gravel path. But we finally arrived at the trailer with Carlton’s number burned on the door: 677.
The door was locked. No one answered after the fifth knock. Tommy tried to look in his windows, but they were all covered by blinds, and the blinds were shut tight.
“Grounds for entry?” Tommy asked.
“This is a multiple homicide investigation. I guess,” I told him.
Spencer splintered the door with the first boot. The second kick shattered the cheap wooden door altogether, and then the odor hit us.
There was no one in the tiny living room and adjacent dining room. The stink seemed to be coming from a room in the back. That left only the bedroom.
What was left of Carlton lay on his naked mattress. The sheets had been stripped. He was propped up with a three foot lead pipe that had been shoved through his mouth, out the back of his skull and into the wall behind him. Black blood crusted his mouth and the wall behind his head. His hands had been stapled to the headboard of the bed to keep him upright—although the pipe certainly would have done that trick all by itself. And a long butcher knife had been stuck through his adam’s apple, and the tip was lodged in the headboard behind Carlton.
“Overkill,” Tommy said.
He got on his cell phone and rang up some help, including the Medical Examiner and the crime scene specialists. We’d have to wait a while for all of them to arrive. It was a long ride out to the sticks of Mokena.
“It’s cold in here,” Natalie remarked.
“They probably turned his heat off when he didn’t pay his bills,” I said.
We’d seen the pile of mail inside his door. There was a slot in that wooden entry. The pile looked like several weeks worth.
“Grodnov is several steps ahead of us,” I tell my partner and my wife.
“This is him. You betcha,” Tommy agreed.
“Overkill is the word,” I repeat.
“This is another little note from blondie,” Tommy says. “He’s trying to tell us to back the fuck off, in no uncertain terms.”
“They don’t fear the police. That’s for sure,” Natalie concurs.
“That’s his fatal flaw, my children,” I smile at the two.
Carlton’s eyes are bugged almost all the way out of his skull. I’ve been on gruesome homicide scenes, but this one ranks right up there.
Forty-nine minutes later, Dr. Gray arrives with his ME team. The crime scene specialists arrive just four minutes later. I write down the times in my notebook.
*
Nadine Grant returns to Chicago after an extended stay in St. Thomas. Josh Kelvin has indeed taken over the Chicago office of the FBI, and Jack Donlan has departed somewhere on ‘leave of absence.’ Our Captain gives us the good word about Donlan’s departure.
True to his word, it is Kelvin’s people who deliver the girl to us, Tommy and Natalie and me, at O’Hare, right off the plane.
Kelvin himself is there to make it official. He tells us he’ll help with the surveillance on Nadine if she’ll change her mind and pick the blond Russian out in a lineup.
Nadine looks as if she’s been drugged, and Kelvin explains that a doctor in St. Thomas had to give her a sedative before she’d board the jet. She’d been hysterical, so they took her off the jet the first time she boarded, and then the FBI agents had found a doctor on board who agreed to give her something to calm her so that they could take her home.
“Nadine?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. We take her back to the car and drive her to her parents’ home in Palatine.
Her father, Robin, looks shaken. It’s as if he’s afraid of us. Nadine weeps quietly in his arms, but the mother is not present.
“Where’s Mrs. Grant?” I ask.
Robin trembles with the mention of her name.
“Where’s your wife, Mr. Grant?” Tommy asks.
“She’s…She’s at Elgin.”
Nadine screams.
“She’s not responsive. She’s fairly well sedated,” Dr. Welkey, the resident shrink tells us at Elgin.
“What did this to her?” Tommy asks.
“I wish we knew. Her husband claims he found her trying to cut her wrists in the kitchen with a butcher knife. She made one slice before he could stop her. You’ll see the scar on her left wrist…We’ve tried hypnotherapy. Various medications. We can’t get anything out her, and the husband only keeps repeating his story about finding her with that knife.”
Welkey leaves the three of us in the room with Mrs. Grant.
When I approach the bed, I am shocked by her appearance. Her hair has gone white on the sides. Snow white. This woman is only in her early forties, and the last time I saw her…
Her face is tinged with a sickly gray.
“Grodnov,” Natalie says quietly.
Mrs. Grant blinks twice but doesn’t move her face. She’s staring out in
front of her. She seems to be just this side of catatonic, and we’re certainly not going to get anywhere with her.
I touch her left hand, and then I see the scarlet scar.
Her eyes are suddenly aimed at me, and then she blinks twice, slowly.
“Okay, Robin. We know your wife met up with Alexei Grodnov,” I tell Mr. Grant.
We’re sitting in the interview room on the first floor of Headquarters.
“I don’t mean to make you feel like you’re the bad guy here, but if we don’t get your daughter to ID Grodnov, he’s going to be free to keep on doing whatever he’s been doing to your family.”
Robin studies his outspread fingers. We read him his rights and asked if he wanted counsel, but he remained mute, so we continued.
“He threatened your daughter. Is that why she went on her ‘vacation’?” Natalie asks.
Robin Grant is a tall, athletic man. He doesn’t appear to be the 98 pound weakling on the beach who’d let the bully kick sand all over him.
He looks more like an ex Big Ten wide receiver. Six four, lean. He looks like a jock and nobody’s patsy, I’m saying.
“He made me watch,” Robin whispers.
“Made you watch?” I ask.
“He made me watch.”
Then he goes mute again, and no matter what any of us ask, he remains silent. After forty minutes of futility, we end the interview.
“Made him watch,” Tommy says.
“So you think he recorded what he did to Mrs. Grant, so he could blackmail him once the shock wears off?” Natalie asked.
“Sounds like Grodnov,” I say. “Sounds like his m.o.”
“We could search his house, see if Grodnov gave him a copy, just to keep him in line,” Tommy suggests.
We assign Natalie the job of trying to talk to Robin Grant while we illegally toss his house in Palatine. Nadine has gone back to her dorm at the Art Institute, so the house will be unoccupied.
