by Mark Zubro
Fenwick gave a sour look to the man’s retreating back and said, “I’m not sure I like him.”
Turner said, “If we arrested all the people you don’t like, we’d have to bring in all the Cubs’ losing pitchers for the past one hundred years.”
Fenwick grumbled. “Well, probably not the dead ones.” He sighed. “Unpleasant people make the best fodder for suspect lists, but he doesn’t strike me as our killer.”
While Turner agreed with that assessment, he said, “We’ll have Sanchez and the beat cops check with all the other employees and keep him on the suspect list.”
“We keep everyone on our suspect lists.” Fenwick turned to Sanchez. “Who’s our corpse catcher?”
“Some guy in a row boat who was going by on the river. Says he was fishing.”
“In Chicago? On the river?” Fenwick asked.
Sanchez said, “You gotta ask him.” He pointed to the patrol car. Sanchez’s partner, Alex Deveneaux, got out of the front passenger side and opened the back door of the patrol car. An athletic man in his mid-twenties emerged. He must have been six-feet-five and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. His logo-less gray sweatshirt with torn-off sleeves and his tight, black basketball shorts revealed rippling muscles.
As Deveneaux and the witness walked over, Sanchez said, “I notified the ME’s office. I told them to bring extra lights. Even though it’s still daylight, it’s kind of gloomy and hidden in there. We’ll get started with the preliminaries on the neighbors as well.” He glanced around at the vacant buildings. “Not a lot of neighbors on this one, but we’ll check.”
Turner liked working with competent cops who didn’t have to be told exactly what to do at each stage.
They thanked them. Sanchez and Deveneaux left to set up crime scene tape, make sure the area was secure, and begin their canvass. So far no curious onlookers had appeared.
The witness was Don Miezina. For all his musculature, Miezina’s hands shook. He spoke in a baritone voice that trembled.
The detectives stood in the middle of the quiet street to talk to him.
Miezina wiped his hand across his eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.”
Turner said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Mr. Miezina? What were you doing on the river?”
“Fishing. I told the beat cops that.”
Turner trusted Sanchez completely, but he always verified everything. He needed to hear the witness tell his story and then confirm later that it was exactly what he’d said to Sanchez.
Turner gave the usual bland assurance. “Thanks, if you go over everything, it’ll help us reconstruct what happened.”
“I guess. This is so weird. I’ve only ever seen dead people in funeral homes.”
“What kind of fishing can you do on the Chicago River?” Fenwick asked.
“I fish for bass. I start up around Ashland Avenue. You can go east all the way to the locks on the other side of Lake Shore Drive.”
“The noise of the city doesn’t scare the fish?” Fenwick asked.
Turner knew neither he nor Fenwick gave much of a rat’s ass about the fish at this moment, but if it helped the witness feel a bit more normal, he was willing to listen.
“I’ve never asked.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to bother them. Nah, you find little corners where there isn’t much current. The bass like to hang around in places like that waiting for food to come to them.”
“Do you eat them?” Fenwick asked.
“Nah. I release what I catch. I figure if they can survive being in this water, who am I to deny them a full fish life?”
Turner wanted to say to Fenwick, “He sounds kind of like you.” Instead, he asked, “So what happened today?”
“Well, I exercise as well as fish. I row quite a ways and then do a little fishing. It’s fun to watch the noise and hurry on the bridges overhead while I’m in the quiet down below.” He drew a deep breath. “So I got to this point just north of Goose Island, and I saw something odd on this bank.” He waved his arm toward the river. “It seemed out of place, you know. Kind of a flash of light and pink. I figured maybe it was just a bit of shiny trash some fool had tossed away. I got closer and I saw it was somebody’s glasses on the ground. The sun was reflecting off part of a lens that wasn’t smashed. By that time I could figure out what the pink was.” He gulped and shuddered. “It was someone. I called out. He didn’t answer. I got up to the shore, but he didn’t move. I saw a lot of blood. I got scared. I used my cell phone to call the police.”
“Did you go up to the body?”
“No. The 9-1-1 person said to stay where I was so I could direct the police to my location. I rowed a little away. I didn’t want to be too near to…that.”
“Did you see anyone, anything suspicious?” Fenwick asked.
“No, for a Saturday afternoon in May, it was pretty quiet. Most of the boats that would be going out to the lake would’ve gone by in the morning.”
They thanked him and asked him to wait. Deveneaux would take charge of him, get his information.
Fenwick let out one of his gargantuan sighs. “Once we establish the time of death, we’re going to have to find out which boats passed through here. All of the people on them will have to be interviewed.”
“And if there were sight-seeing boats that go up this far.”
Fenwick added a grumble to another sigh.
While they’d been talking to the witness, the Crime Scene vehicles had arrived. Sanchez came up to the detectives as they neared the stand of vegetation along the riverbank. “I checked on the computer in the car.”
The more modern police cars came with electronic devices which connected to various criminal data bases, so technically they were computers, but they only connected to those data bases and not to anything else.
Sanchez was continuing, “Our witness has no record, no wants or warrants.”
He led them to the edge of the trees and brush that stood along the river. “They’re about twenty feet in and slightly to the left of the path. Follow the stench and the flies.”
The detectives pulled on gloves and donned booties to avoid contaminating the crime scene and any footprints that might have led to or from it. As they walked in, they kept their eyes on the ground and the vegetation along the path.
Fenwick said, “At times like this I want signs along the road, like those old Burma-Shave signs.”
“I vaguely remember them.”
“I want them to say the killer is Fred or whoever.”
“Good luck with that.”
Fenwick asked, “How’d they get through the fence, and why here?”
“Check your Burma-Shave sign. Maybe that will tell you.”
Sanchez’s hints for corpse-finding were quite correct. They smelled it before they saw the Crime Scene tape.
“Been here for a while,” Fenwick said.
The fully clothed body lay on the ground. He wore black pants, a black shirt with a Roman collar, and an unzipped black, nylon, moto jacket. The pants were stained and torn at the knees, the shirt partially untucked. Turner got a view of bloody skin through the rents in the knees of the pants. Bits of cloth protruded from his mouth.
The corpse’s glasses were broken. A vast dark smear had gathered on the dirt and mushed-down weeds on the right side of his head. Your normal wounds to the exterior of the head caused extensive bleeding. Blood, bones, and brains oozed or extruded from that side of the head. Flies feasted. His eyes were closed.
Fenwick stated the obvious. “That much blood next to the head, he must have died here. With that head wound, gotta be a heavy weapon. Do bishops die violently?”
Turner shrugged. “This one sure did.”
In their regulation blue notebooks, they made sketches of the placement of the body and of the surrounding area. Yes, the crime scene people would have pictures and video of the scene. That didn’t stop Turner and Fenwick from keeping a written record of their own, filled with details and imp
ressions. They wanted their own memories, thoughts, and observations. After noting numerous details that may or may not have been crime related, they backed off to wait for the Medical Examiner to finish.
They walked up to a fire pit, which was fifteen feet from the body. Fenwick held his hand a few inches above blackened ashes. “I don’t feel any heat. Probably not lit last night.”
“We’ll get the Crime Scene people to check.”
FOUR
Saturday 4:16 P.M.
The Medical Examiner, Darryl Jones, pointed at the shattered skull. “Somebody was really pissed off.” He took a pointer from his pocket and extended it towards the victim’s knees. “And they wanted it to hurt. He could have suffered a while. His kneecaps are smashed. Somebody was very pissed at him.” The ME was in his early forties, stood maybe five-feet-six, and had slicked-down black hair.
“Knees capped while he was alive?” Fenwick asked.
“Yep.”
“Ouch.”
“Big ouch.”
Turner said, “Somebody either wanted information or hated him a lot.”
“Or both,” Fenwick added.
Turner said, “Since that was the order the wounds were inflicted, it had to be more than one person. Or the killer said would you please hold still while I kneecap you and then afterwards bash your head until you die.”
“More than one is logical,” Fenwick said.
“Nobody found a weapon so far,” the ME said, “but if it wasn’t a baseball bat, it was something very much like a baseball bat.”
Turner said, “They could just toss the murder weapon in the river.”
“Do baseball bats float?” Fenwick asked.
“Wooden or aluminum?” the ME asked.
“Wood floats,” Fenwick said. “Does aluminum foil? Is aluminum foil the same as an aluminum bat? And a piece of wood floats but does a baseball bat?”
Turner said, “They both float.”
Fenwick and the ME turned to him. “Brian left his baseball equipment out in one of those small backyard pools when he was ten. It poured rain that night. In the morning his wooden and aluminum bats were floating.”
Fenwick said, “So if we don’t find them in this underbrush, we have to hunt along the river for wooden or aluminum bats?”
“Pretty much,” Turner said. He clapped his heavily built buddy on the shoulder. “We won’t make you don a bathing suit and go swimming up and down the river looking for them.”
“Got that right.”
The ME said, “And I’ll let you know if I find traces of wood or aluminum or splitzfizzle on the corpse so you can have an idea of which you’re looking for.”
“I hate when you find splitzfizzle,” Fenwick said. “There’s just too much splitzfizzle on this planet.”
Turner said, “Didn’t you have splitzfizzle fried for dinner last night?”
The ME said, “You should try it with a red sauce, garlic, mushrooms, and a robust red wine.”
Turner said, “The killers could have come by boat.”
Fenwick looked doubtful. “One guy in a car, the others by boat. The bishop was willingly going to a meeting where he was going to die?”
“Maybe he didn’t know he was going to die.”
“I got nothing on that,” the ME said.
“Any signs of a struggle?” Turner asked.
“No obvious defensive wounds. No evident traces under his fingernails. We’ll check under the microscope.”
Turner glanced at the area around the body. “I don’t see evidence that there was a struggle.”
Fenwick said, “Somebody had to be holding him. He just stood still for what was happening to him?”
“Or he was tied up or drugged.”
The ME used his pointer to lift the sleeves from around the wrists. “I have no obvious ligature marks on here. They could have tied him on the outside of his jacket and the outside of his pants around his ankles. I would presume with the method of death, they’d have to have bound him in some way, duct tape, held his arms. If he was held, it would have to be one very, very strong person or several. Unless he was drugged. We’ll look for trace elements on the outside of the clothes.”
Turner added, “Or it was a surprise attack. He didn’t see it coming.”
Fenwick shook his head. “Someone walks in carrying a baseball bat to an assignation in the middle of the night, and you don’t get suspicious?”
“So, planted here,” Turner said, “gotta be premeditated.” Then he asked, “How strong do you have to be to break a guy’s leg with one swing of a bat?”
The ME chose to be picky. Turner actually preferred him that way. Better a persnickety investigator willing to be exact in getting things right. “I didn’t say the knee was broken. How strong do you have to be to incapacitate him? Depends on how pissed off you are. My grandmother could, if she had enough time and no one was fighting her off. As for the death blows to the head, if that was indeed what killed him, although that seems obvious, if he’s on the ground incapacitated, then you’ve got all the time in the world to keep on bashing.”
“Any notion on time of death?” Turner asked.
The ME said, “The bishop died at midnight.”
“You can be that accurate?” Fenwick asked.
With his gloved hand, the ME bent over to the corpse and picked up the lifeless arm. He used his flashlight to shed extra illumination on the watch on the wrist.
Fenwick said, “Is it time for the wrist joke?” Fenwick was referring to an ancient bit of humor that he still found so funny he couldn’t tell the joke without bursting into his own fits of hysterical laughter. Turner thought it was one of the dumbest bits of attempted humor Fenwick ever indulged in. Worse, Turner still laughed every time Fenwick told it.
The ME intervened in his most severe and officious tone. “You will not now, or ever, tell that joke again in my presence. At the trial, we will play a tape of you telling that joke. If the jury itself doesn’t decide to lynch you on the spot, they will most certainly come in with a verdict of justifiable homicide.”
Fenwick grumbled. “Your trial or mine?”
The ME said, “If you tell the wrist joke, you will be deader than the corpse.”
“How can you be deader than the corpse?”
“Watch me.”
Turner pointed to the wrist. “What does the watch prove?”
“The thing is smashed. The time is precisely twelve. I would presume it stopped when the other hitting and beating occurred. Or you have two separate crimes. One where someone attacked his watch for who knows what reason and the other when someone beat him to death.”
Fenwick asked, “Why attack an innocent watch?”
The ME asked, “Or why attack a guilty one?”
Turner groaned. “If you two don’t stop it, I will tell the wrist joke.”
They gaped at him for a moment. The ME recovered first. “I calculate he’s been dead around sixteen, seventeen hours.”
“He died at midnight for real?” Turner asked, “or the beating started at that moment and continued on, or it began before that, and they just happened to hit the watch at the random moment of midnight?”
“Probably, yes.” The ME smiled. “Lots of possibilities.”
“Why not noon?” Turner asked.
“The body’s been here. Maggots in the wounds.”
Fenwick sighed. “Or maybe he somehow got the watch smashed at midnight or noon some other day, and the beating had nothing to do with the watch being smashed. Or maybe the watch was stopped at the twelve position and just happened to be smashed at some later time, which may or may not have been connected to him being killed. Or even better, the watch was smashed long ago, and he wore a broken watch for sentimental reasons.”
The ME said, “That’s what you guys get the big bucks to figure out.”
“He still wore a watch?” Fenwick asked.
“Lots of people still do,” Turner said. “Did he have a cell phone?”
Turner said, “We’ll get it to our computer people. Besides the watch, what do the forensics say about the time of death?”
“The corpse never lies,” the ME said.
Fenwick said, “I hate chatty corpses.”
Turner frowned at him. “You got nothing on lying corpses? You’re slipping.”
“It’s a Saturday PM shift. Gimme time.”
The ME said, “I’ll know more after I cut him open, but for now the midnight time strikes me as about right.”
Turner said, “I see blood on him and dark smears on the ground. He did for sure die here, right?”
“Yep.”
“Must have made a lot of noise,” Fenwick said.
The ME said, “What looks like a rag protruding from his mouth looks to have been bitten through at several points. It would most likely have muffled any screams.”
“He choke on it?”
“Not as far as I can see. It looks like a very wet, very bloody, ordinary hanky. Wet from saliva and blood, I presume. As always, I’ll know more at the lab.”
“Anything else?” Turner asked.
“That’s what I’ve got here. You can process the scene now.”
“Thanks.”
With his gloves on, Turner took the wallet out of the back pants pocket. He checked the driver’s license. “This confirms the stuff in the car back there on the street. The address he lives in is one of those buildings on Lake Shore Drive just north of Oak Street.”
“Bishops can afford to live in high rises?” Fenwick asked.
Turner said, “I have no idea what they can afford or where they usually live.” He held out the ID. “This says he lived there.” He checked the rest. “Odd,” he said.
“What?”
“His voter ID says he lives on North Avenue, at an address which, I think, is a little west of Milwaukee Avenue at a place called the Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order abbey.”
“Bishops can afford two places?”
“I don’t think he’d own a whole abbey. We’ll have to try both.”
