Jack Daniels Six Pack

by J. A. Konrath

  Harry shook his head. “And they say pornography is harmless.”

  I turned off the TV, cursing bad luck, fate, and timing in the same breath.

  “Oh, dear.” The manager made worried mother-hen noises. “We can’t let this get out.”

  “It’ll make a good headline.” Harry put his arm around the clerk’s shoulders. “Crooked Department of Corrections Employee Wanks Himself to Death at Four Seasons.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “At least he died happy.”

  I called it in, then flipped on the lights and spent ten minutes tearing the room apart. I found a few grand in cash, and nothing else.

  “Get anything?” I asked McGlade.

  “Just an almost new bottle of baby oil.”

  “No tape?”

  “No tape. It’s not here, unless he’s hiding it in a body cavity. I’ll roll him over if you wanna check.”

  I rubbed my eyes. Cops came, and paramedics.

  “Probably a heart attack or a stroke,” said a uniform.

  “More like a lot of strokes,” Harry said.

  My cell rang. I went into the hallway to answer.

  “Daniels.”

  “Lieutenant? This is Gary Pludenza, Derrick Rushlo’s lawyer. Derrick would like to talk.”

  “I won’t testify!” Rushlo screamed in the background.

  “We need him to testify, Mr. Pludenza.”

  “He won’t do it, but I think he might be able to help you anyway. Can you come here?”

  “Where are you?”

  He gave me his address, a house in the suburb of Naperville.

  “How soon can you get here?”

  “Gimme an hour.”

  I hung up, heading for the elevator. McGlade nipped at my heels.

  “You’re still going to sign the permission form, right? Jackie? I’ll be by in a couple of days, okay? Sorry this didn’t work out for you—”

  The elevator doors closed, saving me from further pestering.

  I took Delaware to Congress, and hopped on 290 heading west. Rush hour was in full effect, and the stop-and-go traffic was a perfect setting for inducing a panic attack. My heart rate doubled, my palms became slick, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek while my brain kept sending me still pictures, like a slide show, of every mistake I’d ever made over my whole life.

  By the time I made it to Naperville, I was a wreck.

  Pludenza’s house reeked of money. It sat in a cul-de-sac in a ritzy development, two stories high with four alabaster Doric columns supporting the roof overhang. The doorbell was hooked up to real bells.

  “Thanks for coming, Lieutenant.” Pludenza looked about as agitated as I felt. He led me through a grand foyer, my short heels clicking on the terrazzo floor.

  “Bankruptcies seem to be on the rise.”

  “Hmm? Oh. My wife comes from money. It’s like living in the Taj Mahal. Derrick is in the den.”

  The den was an expansive room with vaulted ceilings, black leather furniture, and a beautiful Prairie Wind pool table in colonial maple.

  Derrick sat in an armchair, hugging his knees to his chest.

  “Is he out yet?” he asked.

  “Soon. Closing arguments are today. If you want to keep him locked up, you have to testify.”

  His head shook violently.

  “No. No testifying.”

  “Then he’s going to get out, Derrick. And then he’ll come for you. He was a cop. He knows how to find people.”

  Derrick began to hum, off-tune.

  “Did you want something to drink, Lieutenant?”

  I asked Pludenza for some coffee, and sat across from Rushlo.

  “Derrick, we need to keep him in jail. Do you understand that?”

  He nodded.

  “I know that you’re scared. We can keep you safe. I promise. But you need to help us make sure he doesn’t get out.”

  He nodded again.

  “Tell me about Southern Illinois.”

  His good eye locked on me.

  “You know about Southern?”

  “I know about you getting kicked out. I know that’s where you met Fuller. I know about the body you stole.”

  “I took her out into the woods, where no one would see. He followed me and watched.”

  I ventured a guess. “Fuller turned you in.”

  Rushlo looked at me like I’d just grown donkey ears.

  “Barry didn’t turn me in. He was the one that told me to do it. He understood.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He came up to me, after class. Wanted me to get him and some of his fraternity buddies into the morgue. For hazing week.”

  “Did you let them?”

  “No. I would have gotten kicked out of school. But for fun, I let them see my embalming book. The guys were making jokes, acting tough, because they didn’t want to admit being grossed out. But Barry was different. He seemed . . .”

  “Interested?”

  “More like aroused. Not by the embalming pages. By the reconstruction pages. He liked the trauma pictures. Extreme disfigurement. Stuff like that. So a week later, he came by again, alone. We got to talking. We have a lot in common, you know.”

  Yeah, I thought. You’re both psychotic perverts.

  “Were you helping Barry with disposals while in college?”

  “No. That didn’t happen until I had to leave. During my internship, at the funeral home in Champaign-Urbana. We stayed in touch, and one day he calls me up and says, ‘Do you want a fresh one?’”

  “A fresh corpse?”

  “Yeah. He was still down at Southern. He told me she was untraceable, and he needed my help to get rid of her.”

  “This was someone he’d killed?”

  “Yeah. So I drove down to Southern to pick her up. He’d bloodied her up pretty good, but she was still warm.”

  Derrick got a faraway look in his one eye; the other one always had a faraway look.

  “You buried her in a closed casket with another body.”

  He fixed both eyes on me, a first for him. “How did you know that?”

  “Do you remember the names, Derrick?”

  “The girl’s name was Melody. Such a pretty girl.”

  “Melody Stephanopoulos?”

  He nodded.

  “How about the name of the person you buried her with?”

  “Last name was Hernandez, I remember that. Skinny guy. Tongue cancer. Most of his jaw was gone. I put them both in the same coffin, planted them in Greenview Cemetery. It was a beautiful ceremony. Lots of flowers.”

  I took out a pad and scribbled all of this down.

  “How many others were there?”

  “Kantner’s Funeral Home in Urbana didn’t have a crematorium. When I got a job in Chicago, it was much safer. I would still do an occasional two-for-one special, though, if I could get away with it. Cremation is such a waste. You might not believe this, but I think death is sacred. A funeral is a sacred ritual. I think everyone should have a wake, even if it isn’t your family kneeling at the casket.”

  “How many, Derrick?”

  “There were about eighteen women, total, over the last fifteen years. I buried nine of them.”

  “You have names?”

  He smiled shyly.

  “Of course. I remember them all. Each and every one of them.”

  “What if you didn’t have to testify? What if you just made a statement?”

  That flipped the switch in Rushlo. “I won’t testify! You can’t make me testify!”

  “Easy, Derrick. Calm down.”

  “I won’t do it!”

  “But you wouldn’t have to go to court. You could just . . .”

  “I love him.”

  Pludenza chose that moment to return with the coffee. He handed me a cup and saucer, a wince etched into his face.

  “Derrick”—I tried to sound soothing—“Barry wants to kill you.”

  “I can’t betray him like that. He understands me. He
’s the only one that understands me. But I don’t need to make a statement. You can prove Barry killed those women.”

  “How?”

  “He likes to bite. All of the girls I buried had bite marks on them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  That would be enough. If we exhumed Hernandez and found Stephanopoulos in the casket, with Fuller’s teeth marks on the corpse, he’d have to stand trial in Carbondale. And since this was years ago, he wouldn’t be able to use the tumor insanity defense.

  I set down the coffee without taking a sip, and dug out my cell. Derrick grabbed my pants leg.

  “You have to help me.”

  “I’ll send some guards over to watch the house.”

  “How about the witness program? Where they give people new names?”

  I punched in Libby’s number. “If Fuller gets out, that’s a possibility.”

  “Can they set me up at another funeral home?”

  “We dropped charges against you, Derrick, but I really don’t think the FTC, IDPR, or OSHA is going to let you practice again.”

  He began to cry. I thanked Pludenza and left Libby a voice mail on the way to my car. Then I called Herb.

  “What?”

  “Look, Herb, we can deal with our squabble later. I’m driving down to Carbondale and I need you to run interference for me.”

  “Tell me.”

  I filled him in, and he agreed to set the wheels in motion.

  Southern Illinois University was a five-hour drive.

  I hopped back on the expressway, my car pointed south.

  CHAPTER 42

  I was sixty miles away from Carbondale when Libby called.

  “The jury’s out.”

  “How was your closing?”

  “Not as good as Garcia’s.” I could picture Libby frowning. “If I were on that jury, I’d vote not guilty.”

  “If that happens, we need to keep tabs on Fuller until we can get an arrest warrant from Carbondale.”

  “What’re the chances of that?”

  “If Rushlo wasn’t lying, chances are good.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “You too.”

  I met the Carbondale chief of police, Shelby Duncan, at Greenville Cemetery forty minutes later. With him were a woman from the Health Department, the county coroner, the assistant director of the cemetery, and several workers.

  Herb had made good on his word; the permits were in order, and everyone who needed to be there was there.

  The day was cold and miserable, befitting a disinterment. We huddled together, hands in pockets and shoulders scrunched, while the guy operating the backhoe repeatedly dipped the big yellow shovel into the Hernandez plot.

  After an hour, he struck concrete. The vault. Illinois cemeteries required all coffins to be placed in a burial vault or grave box. That prevented the earth from collapsing the casket, which would leave the cemetery pockmarked with hundreds of obvious indentations.

  Two men in overalls went down the hole to widen the edges, and large spikes with eyeholes were driven into the vault cover. They secured ropes, and the backhoe lifted the section of concrete out of the grave. Straps were then attached to the coffin, and it was brought to the surface and gently placed next to the vault top.

  The coroner, a thin reed of a man named Russell Thompkins, brushed off some dirt at the foot of the casket, then fit a special hex key into a small opening. He cranked it, counterclockwise, and the rubber seal broke, releasing a powerful hiss of putrid air that I could smell from ten feet away.

  The casket unlocked, Thompkins lifted open the head and squinted inside.

  “Two bodies.” He pinched the nostrils of his pointy nose with long, slender fingers. “A man and a woman.”

  “Is that enough?” I asked Chief Duncan. Duncan looked like a stouter version of John Wayne, and must have known it, hence the plaid flannel shirt and cowboy boots.

  “It’s a damn good start. We need to establish that it’s Melody Stephanopoulos, and that your Barry Fuller was involved in her death.”

  “Did you bring her dental records?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about the faxes of the bite marks?”

  “I’ve got it all in the car.”

  I accompanied him to his vehicle, and took what I needed up to the casket.

  “We need to find bite marks, ones that match these.” I showed Thompkins the papers. He nodded, slipped on some latex gloves, and got to work.

  I took out a pair of my own, from the deep pockets of my blazer, and looked into the casket for the first time.

  Julio Hernandez occupied the left-hand side. He was skeletal-thin, swimming in the oversized brown suit he wore. His facial features were sunken, recessed, and he had no lower jaw—cancer, Rushlo had mentioned. His mouth and throat were packed with rotten cotton batting.

  The smell was so bad I had to take breaths from over my shoulder. Even the best embalming job couldn’t prevent decay, and the bacteria had eaten well for years before they too ran out of nourishment and rotted away.

  Melody proved to be in much worse shape than Hernandez. She wore no clothing, and her flesh had a light gray cast. The atrocities committed upon her stood out in bas-relief black: a jagged tear across her throat, slits forming X-marks over each breast, a deep gash running from her pubis to her belly button. And dozens of dark, round sores, covering her head to toe like polka dots.

  Bites.

  The major wounds had been sewn up, the stitches expertly done, though hardly cosmetic. Rushlo’s postmortem work.

  The coroner snapped pictures, and I borrowed his scalpel and forced it between Melody’s cold, dry lips, cutting the mortician’s glue that sealed them shut. The blade clicked against teeth. I pried her lips apart and found the suture, looping under her lower gums and up through her septum. I severed the ligature, and attempted to open the mouth.

  The mouth didn’t comply.

  Using the scalpel’s handle as a lever, I pried open her mouth until I could get two fingers inside. It took considerable force, and felt like I was being bitten, but I managed to stretch her jaws wide enough to get a penlight inside.

  There was a gold crown on her back molar, on the upper left side.

  The crown matched the one on Melody’s dental records.

  The records also showed a filling on the upper right canine, and I easily found that with the light.

  “It’s Melody.”

  “Russell?” the chief asked the coroner.

  “Too hard to tell. There’s a lot of decay.”

  “I’ll settle for your best guess.”

  “It’s possible they’re from the same man. I’d need more time, proper equipment, to know for sure.”

  My cell rang. Libby. I picked up.

  “Verdict came in. They didn’t take long to free the bastard.”

  “Hold on a second, Libby.” I turned to the coroner. “Is there anything you notice that can prove our guy did this?”

  Russell took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Actually, there is something pretty incriminating. See these two bites here, on her inner thighs? There are bite marks in the pictures you gave me, in the exact same places.”

  Chief Shelby unhooked the radio from his belt. “That’s enough for me. I’m calling Judge Dorchester.”

  “You’re getting an arrest warrant?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we are.”

  “Libby,” I said into the phone, “don’t let Fuller leave the building. Find a cop and arrest him.”

  “You’ve got a warrant?”

  “Yes. He’s being charged with the murder of Melody Stephanopoulos.”

  “Gladly. Nice work, Jack.”

  Chief Shelby walked away, barking into his radio, and I stripped off my gloves and headed back to my car.

  I wanted to be relieved, but I only felt empty. Empty and tired. The cop part of me would have liked to be there, to see Fuller’s face when he g
ot arrested. But mostly I just wanted to put all of this death, this ugliness, behind me.

  “Nice work, Lieutenant.” Shelby came over, offered his hand. “We’ll get started on these other names right away. Looks like you’ve closed a lot of cases for us today.”

  “I don’t envy you the media circus you’ll soon have.”

  “We’ll manage. We’re a tough little town. Anyway, thanks for your help. You interested in some supper? Wife’s a helluva cook.”

  “Thanks, Chief, but I have to head home.”

  The ride back to Chicago was the loneliest five hours of my life.

  CHAPTER 43

  Melody Stephanopoulos. Barry hasn’t heard that name in a long time, but he remembers her.

  You never forget your first.

  He wonders how they found her. Rushlo, probably. It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.

  Barry tries to scratch his chin, but the chain isn’t long enough; his handcuffs are attached to his ankle restraints.

  “I’ve got an itch on my chin. Can you help out?”

  The uniform seated to his right, a cop named Stephen Robertson whom he’d worked with out of the 2-6, scratches his chin for him. Fuller sighs.

  “Thanks, man.”

  The squad car is making good time down Route 57. No lights or sirens, but speeding nonetheless. Fuller can guess how anxious they are to get rid of him. Cops don’t like it when one of their own goes bad. It hits a little too close to home.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Fuller says to the driver, a Statie named Corlis. He has on a snap brim hat and reflector shades, even though dusk has come and gone.

  “Hold it in.”

  “C’mon, gimme a break. I was in court all morning, got declared not guilty, and I’m free for two minutes and the cuffs get slapped on me again. It’s been a real bad day, and I really need to take a shit.”

  “I’m sure Carbondale has johns. You can go there.”

  “I won’t make it. There’s a rest area coming up in a few miles. Please.”

  Corlis doesn’t answer. Fuller clenches his sphincter, audibly passes gas.

  “Jesus, Barry.” Robertson fans the air in front of his nose. “That’s disgusting.”

  Fuller shrugs, trying to look innocent. “Prison food. Not my fault.”

  “Stop at the rest area,” Robertson says to Corlis.