Through the Flames

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  “Which was really stupid,” Ryan said. “Especially for me. I mean, LeRoy doesn’t know this car or Vicki, but he must have seen me staring at him out of the backseat. He slides to a stop and lowers the window and stares right at me. I slid off the seat and onto the floor. I said, ‘Vicki, get me outta here!’ ”

  Vicki picked up the story. “I shifted into drive and floored it, but I forgot to turn. We were on the side of the street, so I had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting one of those, you know, utility poles. LeRoy pulled right in behind me to pin me in, but when he got out of the van, I just shifted into reverse and backed into the van. That’s why your taillights are both smashed. Sorry. Anyway, he jumped back and screamed and swore at us, and I just yanked the wheel to the left, shifted again, and took off. He chased us all over the place, but I finally lost him. I was scared to death.”

  “He knew you could put him in that neighborhood where the murder and the arson happened,” Judd said. “He wanted you dead. Probably still does.”

  “If I’d known that,” Vicki said, “I probably would have been too scared to move.”

  “And you wouldn’t be here right now,” Lionel said finally. “LeRoy’s a murdering scumbag. I know he’ll kill me as soon as he finds me.”

  “He won’t find you,” Judd said. “He has no idea where I live, and we’re keeping this car in the garage once we get home.”

  “I don’t much care anymore,” Lionel said.

  Vicki turned in her seat to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “I failed André,” he said.

  “So you want to die too?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we love you,” she said. “That’s why. We need you in this family. I feel awful for you and sorry for your uncle, but from what you tell me, he knew the truth and had every chance to accept Christ.”

  As Judd stood in the shower now, he recalled Lionel’s shrugging and turning away. But Judd hoped the truth of what Vicki said would settle in on Lionel this morning and that he would realize that Judd and Ryan—yes, even Ryan—felt the same way about Lionel.

  Toweling off was an ordeal, because his raw burns stung. He applied petroleum jelly as Sergeant Fogarty had suggested. Judd looked forward to their ten o’clock appointment. The officer was coming to his house to talk to all of them about the next step.

  “I don’t feel like meeting with the cop,” Lionel told Judd in the kitchen a few minutes later.

  “Why not? You’re going to be the key to whatever he wants to do. You’re the one who knows who these people are and what’s really happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Lionel said, hunched over a bowl of cereal he had not touched. “I don’t feel like much of anything right now.”

  “You want to call Bruce? I can run you over to the church.”

  “Nah. I got to work this out for myself. I think I’ve had enough of talking with adults. First it was André, then Bruce, then LeRoy and the other guy, then Talia, then André again, and now this cop.”

  “Fogarty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You shouldn’t really put André or Talia in the same category as Bruce, should you?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore. To tell you the truth, Judd, this makes no sense to me. Why did both André and me get second chances, but I was the only one who did anything about it?”

  Judd shrugged. “You’re askin’ the wrong guy, Lionel. I never thought about stuff like this until last week. You’re asking now like you wish André had been saved and you hadn’t.”

  “That’s sort of how I feel.”

  “That sounds pretty biblical to me.”

  “Biblical?”

  “Like the way Jesus feels.”

  “He wants to be dead?”

  “He was willing to die so we wouldn’t have to die for our sins. Sounds like you wish you could have died in André’s place.”

  “Yeah, but mostly I want to die because I messed up and André missed his chance.”

  “You didn’t mess up, Lionel. I hate to say it, but André messed up. There was nothing more you could do. You explained. You pleaded with him. Plus, he knew all this from the beginning. He was raised the same way you were.”

  Lionel sat before his full bowl, hands in his lap, head down. Silent.

  Sergeant Thomas Fogarty of the Chicago Police Department showed up that morning in a late-model sports car and street clothes. “We have a bit of a problem,” he said as Judd showed him to a chair in the living room. Judd sat across from him, Vicki on the couch, Lionel on the floor against the wall, Ryan stretched out on the carpet.

  Fogarty turned to Lionel. “Son, ironically, your uncle’s body was taken to the same morgue the first murder victim was taken to. Of course the identification you gave me, and which we put with the body, ran into a duplicate record on their computer. I explained the situation to the medical examiner’s office, so they have André Dupree correctly identified this time. But now they want to exhume the body of the first André Dupree. You know what that means?”

  “Dig him up?”

  “Right, to do another autopsy, this time with murder in mind.”

  “Why is that a problem?” Judd asked.

  “That’s not the problem. I don’t know when or how they’ll do that or what they’ll do with any new evidence they uncover. Our problem is caseload and jurisdiction.”

  “What’s that?” Ryan asked.

  “Because we’re still trying to dig out from all the problems associated with the disappearances, everybody on the police force is already working overtime every day. We have to set priorities.”

  “And murder isn’t a priority?” Judd said.

  Sergeant Fogarty looked uncomfortable. “This is not easy to say,” he said, “especially in this day and age. But we have to face the facts. Prejudice is still alive and well, even among the police. Sometimes especially among the police.”

  “What are you saying?” Vicki asked.

  “Here’s the thing. I spent most of last night talking to my old boss in Homicide. I told him the whole story, and he thinks there’s a good chance we can nail this LeRoy Banks for both murders—André and the André look-alike. As long as LeRoy is living here in Mount Prospect, that’s where the jurisdiction problem comes in. The Chicago PD often cooperates—in a manner of speaking—with suburban departments, but here’s where, unfortunately, the racism surfaces.

  “My boss claims he was speaking for his bosses, but I think I know him better than that. He was speaking his own mind and pretending he wasn’t.”

  Lionel leaned forward. “What’d he say?”

  Fogarty pursed his lips and shook his head, as if he could hardly bring himself to repeat it. “He said to me, ‘Tommy, with everything we’ve got on our plates right now, everybody overworked and all, people are asking themselves what do they care about this element killing each other off.’ ”

  “I have no idea what you just said,” Ryan said, sitting up.

  “I do,” Lionel said. “Nobody cares if blacks kill blacks. Especially if they’re lowlifes like LeRoy and my uncle and whoever that first victim was.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Fogarty said.

  “So, you’re not going to help us?” Lionel said.

  “If I wasn’t going to try, I wouldn’t be here,” the cop said. “I’m a police officer because I’m a justice freak. The problem is, I represent the Chicago PD, and LeRoy Banks is living too far from home right now. I’d have to somehow get Banks back into Chicago.”

  “Because otherwise, your people don’t care enough,” Lionel said.

  “I’m afraid that’s right.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “You understand I can only advise you,” Fogarty said. “I can’t do anything for you or with you, and I have no official capacity outside Chicago.”

  Judd and Vicki nodded. Lionel turned his face away. Ryan still seemed puzzled.

  “Our people know of Banks and think we
can link him to other killings. But as long as he’s holed up this far from Chicago—”

  “And nobody down there cares enough,” Lionel interrupted.

  “—Right, that too. I think your best chance is to scare him out of your house and get him to set up shop back in Chicago where he belongs. Then he’s out of your hair, and he becomes Chicago’s problem.”

  “But they don’t care,” Lionel said, “and when he finds out I’ve moved back home, he comes back and wipes me out.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t move back there if I were you,” Fogarty said. “Even if you get him to move out. At least until you hear he’s been caught and charged.”

  “So until then, he wins.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m for trying to run him off,” Lionel said. “But how do we do that?”

  “That I cannot tell you,” Fogarty said. “I have some ideas about how someone might, how shall we say it, persuade someone to move on. But one thing I must caution you: Don’t ever confront him in person. You know already that he’s armed and dangerous. He’d just as soon kill you as to look at you. He’s done it, and he’d do it again. You already know he knows Lionel was with André just before he got there. And he knows Ryan and Vicki were in the neighborhood.”

  “I’m the only one who’s never seen him or been seen by him,” Judd said.

  “Unless he saw you when he came racing out of the alley last night,” Lionel said.

  “I doubt it,” Judd said.

  “I wouldn’t risk it,” Lionel said.

  “Neither would I,” Fogarty said. “But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’m going to investigate this story and these two murders on my own time. When I get enough evidence on LeRoy, I’m going to be looking for him in his old neighborhood. If you can spook him to the point where he will retreat to there, even one more time, I’ll stop him for any reason I can think of. If he so much as has a broken taillight or a loud muffler, I’ll pull him over and find a reason to take him to the precinct station house. Once there, I’ll find a way to fingerprint him, interview him about two mysterious deaths, and start working on getting him off the streets.”

  “I believe he’s already murdered the guy André told me about and, of course, André,” Lionel said.

  “Assuming you’re right on those, that makes at least four.”

  “Four?”

  “Didn’t you see the paper today? Two of the firemen who went into that building last night never made it out. If that was arson—and they found the source of the fire, a gas can, in an apartment rented under the name Cornelius Grey—deaths related to it can be considered homicides. Mr. Grey hasn’t been seen there for a long time, and we know he was not the murder victim. But Grey is a known associate of LeRoy Banks.”

  “Connie Grey is an associate of LeRoy’s all right,” Lionel said, sounding angry. “He’s livin’ in my house with his sister, Talia.”

  Fogarty was speedily taking notes. “So LeRoy Banks and Cornelius Grey are the two kingpins of the little group that moved into your house.”

  Lionel nodded.

  “And Talia is Grey’s sister.”

  Lionel nodded again.

  “Grey hasn’t been tied into any of this before,” Fogarty said. “Wonder what’s become of him?”

  “He’s the quiet one of those two,” Lionel said. “I don’t know if it means anything, but André always kind of liked him. André hated LeRoy. Said he was a bully, a big mouth, a know-it-all. Liked to intimidate people.”

  “Liked to do more than that to them,” Fogarty said. “Now let me just think out loud here about how I might encourage illegal squatters—you know what that means?”

  “People who move into a place they don’t own?”

  “Yeah. Here’s what a person might do to get them to move on. . . .”

  For the next hour, Judd took notes. Tom Fogarty told story after story of pranks, ruses, and tricks that had worked on stubborn cases. His favorite was the time the police sent notices to several known felons, informing them they had won expensive gifts, prizes, and trips in a special sweepstakes. All they had to do was come to the ballroom of a swanky downtown hotel to claim them. About 80 percent of the targets of the sting showed up and, at the appropriate and surprising instant, were arrested on their outstanding warrants.

  That wasn’t something Judd and his friends could pull off without a lot of money and help, but several others of Fogarty’s suggestions seemed right up their alley.

  TEN

  The Sting

  IT FELL to Judd, who believed he was the only one of the four kids who had never been seen by LeRoy Banks, to keep an eye on Lionel’s house. Fortunately, his mother’s minivan was also in the garage, and he was able to use that and not risk LeRoy recognizing the car that had backed into his brown and yellow monstrosity a few nights before.

  The first couple of days Judd tooled around the neighborhood, occasionally passing Lionel’s house. The only thing he noticed was that nothing seemed to be going on. He saw neither the old van nor the roadster Lionel had told him about. Maybe LeRoy was lying low for a while, more concerned about keeping out of sight than trying to eliminate the one person who could implicate him in the arson and murders: Lionel.

  Finally, though, Judd caught a break. He saw the old brown and yellow van, only it didn’t look so old anymore, and it wasn’t brown and yellow. It had been spruced up, the rust spots filled and the whole thing painted a muted cream. It looked pretty good. Judd checked in with Sergeant Fogarty, who found out that LeRoy had ordered new plates too. They were for an off-white van in Talia Grey’s name, but Fogarty said the van had the same vehicle ID number as LeRoy’s. What had not changed, however, were all the city stickers on the far right side of the front windshield. That was the one thing Judd remembered from the van that flashed so close to him in the alley the weekend before. At first all he had seen were the headlights. At the last moment that windshield came into view for the shortest instant, and Judd remembered wondering where in the world they would put another sticker.

  When he saw the “new” van, it all came back to him. Someone had had the nerve to park the thing right in front of Lionel’s house, as usual. Eventually they would have to get a Mount Prospect city sticker. On the other hand, Judd knew, that would be the last priority of the local police department. If the Chicago PD didn’t even care to investigate suspicious deaths in the black community, Mount Prospect might let a few delinquent city stickers slide during a season of international chaos.

  Judd could only wonder what type of trouble Talia had been in with LeRoy when LeRoy found out she had borrowed his roadster and taken Lionel, of all people, to see André. Clearly, it seemed LeRoy was intent on doing away with anyone who knew anything about the first murder. That likely included Lionel.

  Judd hadn’t seen Talia while staking out the area, but one day something showed up on the front porch that made Judd squint, shake his head, and wonder. It was a duffel bag with Lionel’s name on it, plain as day. Someone had set it on the top step. To normal passersby, perhaps it wouldn’t even catch their attention. But to Judd, and to anyone who knew Lionel and his situation, this seemed some kind of a signal.

  Judd drove to a nearby elementary school, closed since the disappearances, and parked in the deserted staff lot. He then walked idly through the neighborhood, passing Lionel’s house on the other side of the street. He still had seen no occupants of the home in all the time he had spent spying on it, but that bag and that repainted van meant someone had to be there.

  That evening he mentioned the bag to Lionel.

  “That’s the bag I used to take on my sports and Y trips,” he said. “I thought it was stuffed way deep in my closet. I have no idea what it means. I want to see it.”

  “I suppose if we go at night we’ll be safe,” Judd said. “Anybody else want to go?”

  “Not me,” Ryan said.

  “I thought you were getting brave on us all of a sudden,” Lionel said. “Don’t fall back
to being a chicken now.”

  “I’m not! But I don’t care if I never get chased by a van again—I don’t care what color it is—as long as I live.”

  “I’m not afraid of the van,” Lionel said. “But I wouldn’t want to run into LeRoy right now.”

  “I want to go,” Vicki said, “but I want to stay out of sight until we know no one is watching us.”

  “Promise,” Judd said. “That’ll go for you too, Lionel.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’d be pretty conspicuous in my own neighborhood when everyone knows I don’t live there anymore.”

  “I’m stayin’ here,” Ryan repeated.

  “It’s all right with me,” Judd said. “As long as you think you’ll be all right alone.”

  “I’ll feel safer here. Anyway, like I said, I’m not a chicken anymore. I just don’t want to push my luck too far with those murderers.”

  “I can’t blame you,” Judd said. “Let’s go.”

  Judd left Ryan with the car phone number, just in case. Several minutes later, with Vicki ducking down in the front passenger seat and Lionel lying out of sight across the backseat of the minivan, Judd drove past Lionel’s house. “What do you see?” Lionel wanted to know.

  “Nothing. Not a thing. I mean nothing on the porch anyway. The cream van is out front, and there’s a light on in a back room.”

  “That’s where Ryan said he heard Talia talking on the phone the other day,” Lionel said. “I wonder how she feels about André.”

  “Wait,” Judd said. “I just saw someone! It’s a woman, and she’s coming from that back room into the hall. The light just went out in that room and on in the hall.”

  “Park somewhere!” Lionel said. “I want to see if it’s Talia.”

  Judd pulled off to the side, several houses past Lionel’s. “You see anybody on the street?” Lionel asked. “Can I sit up?”

  “Yeah, but don’t do anything stupid.”