High Chicago jg-1

by Howard Shrier

  The doorbell was taped over with a note that said Knock Loud. I did. First with my knuckles, then with my car keys.

  No one answered. I checked my watch. It was five-thirty. Will had said he'd be home by four-five at the latest. I used my cell to call his number but it went straight to voice mail. I peered through the front windows and saw lights on and a TV flickering in one corner. There were textbooks open on a coffee table facing the TV, with a pen and highlighter next to them.

  I walked down the drive between the house and its neighbour to a side door that I figured would lead up to the kitchen and down to the basement. I knocked several times; no one answered there either. That left the back door. I walked through an unkempt yard, the grass long and matted and covered by rotting leaves. A small concrete patio was breaking up, having heaved through many a frost and thaw since it was first laid. I climbed three steps to a wooden porch that held a barbecue pitted with rust and peered through the kitchen door. All the lights were on. The counters were covered with fast-food wrappers and plates caked with old food. The sink was piled high with glasses. I could see two slices of bread in a toaster and a peanut butter jar next to it, its lid off, a knife planted in it like a flag.

  Someone was home. They just weren't answering.

  Had Will changed his mind about talking to me? Or had someone changed it for him?

  I tried the kitchen door. It was locked but didn't feel too sturdy. What the hell: I'd already broken into Rob Cantor's house-might as well make it a double-header. I picked up a piece of broken patio stone and smashed a pane in the kitchen door. I reached in carefully and felt for the lock.

  Damn it. A deadbolt that could be opened only by a key. I felt around the door jamb around eye level. Sometimes people left a key there on a nail in case they had to get out fast. Nothing. I took a step back: in for a penny, in for a pound. I tensed my core muscles and kicked the door handle. It broke away from the strike plate and swung open. I moved into the kitchen and closed the door behind me.

  "Will?"

  No answer.

  There was no one in the kitchen. No one in the dining room, which had been turned into a makeshift bedroom. No one in the front room where the TV was tuned to Much Music. A video by Arcade Fire was playing with the sound off. There was no one in the bathroom.

  That left one more room on the ground floor, a bedroom at the back next to the kitchen. I eased the door open and found Will Sterling at the foot of his bed with a pillow over his face. The pillow was stained with blood. At the centre of the bloodstain was a black hole. Bloody feathers fanned out around his head like a headdress.

  I felt his neck. It was cold but not icy and moved easily enough. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. He'd been dead less than an hour or two. I looked at his body, a cold black rage building inside me. Three dead now. Three obstacles removed. I wanted to go back out the rear of Will's house, race down to Rob Cantor's plush office, pull him out of his padded leather chair and dangle him out a window over Queen Street.

  All the drawers had been pulled out of Will's dresser, all his clothes thrown out of his closet and his school papers strewn everywhere. If there was anything to find, whoever had killed him had probably found it. I prowled around anyway, without knowing what I was looking for. I was about to leave when I noticed the white stains on his pant legs: this morning, I had figured they were paint or plaster, but there was no sign that any work was being done in the flat. I looked closer.

  It was bird shit. Gobs of it, with feathers stuck to it-feathers that didn't match the ones from the pillow that had been put over his face.

  I backed out of the room to the kitchen, where I used Will's phone to call Katherine Hollinger's office.

  "Jonah," she said, "I keep telling you I'll call you when I'm ready."

  "This isn't personal," I said.

  "What then?"

  "Business."

  "About Glenn?"

  "No."

  "Then it'll have to wait," she said. "I've got a murder to clear."

  "Got time for one more?"

  CHAPTER 21

  She came without McDonough, as I'd asked. Instead, she was accompanied by two other detectives, Graham Neely and Todd Gavin, who'd been assigned the case. I walked her through the flat, showing her everything I'd done, every item and surface I'd touched, as the detectives and crime scene officers examined Will Sterling's body and set up their equipment.

  "You wanted proof that Martin Glenn's murder was tied into the Harbourview project?" I said. "This is it."

  "How?"

  "Will Sterling knew something about the project that was going to stop it cold."

  "You don't know that for a fact."

  "He knew Maya Cantor. She was trying to help him. I think they found out something they weren't supposed to know."

  "You think."

  "Will said this morning it had something to do with PCBs."

  "But he didn't tell you what exactly."

  "Because they killed him first."

  "They who, Jonah?"

  "How about Mike Izzo?"

  "Who is…"

  "He owns Izzo Construction. They're building the Harbourview condos."

  "What connects him to this?"

  I gave her an abbreviated version of what happened when the two goons accosted Jenn and me in our office.

  "You don't have any proof that Izzo sent them."

  "They were working for Lenny Corazzo and he's Izzo's son-in-law."

  "I work in the real world, Jonah. You think I can bring in someone like Izzo for questioning or get a search warrant based on that? You should have called us when you had Tallarico in your office."

  "He told me everything he knew. And I have his address."

  She copied it into her notebook then flipped it closed. "All right," she said. "We'll bring him in for questioning. See if he has an alibi for Glenn's murder. Now let us do our work here. If there's a connection between these two killings, we'll find it."

  "Three killings," I said.

  "Maya Cantor's death was ruled a-"

  "I know damn well what it was ruled."

  One of the crime scene techs lowered his camera and looked at Hollinger. She grabbed my elbow and steered me into the kitchen. "Listen," she said in a low voice. "I value your opinions, I do. I respect your judgment. But don't raise your voice or second-guess me in front of my team. I'm a Homicide detective, Jonah. I have to let the facts speak for themselves. Facts, not guesswork or theories. The most the coroner did was concede Maya could have been-could have been-pushed. Not that she was, not even that it was likely. We are actively investigating the links between Glenn and his work for Cantor Development. We're looking into his bank records, his phone calls, his email. If there's a connection to Maya, we'll find it. And we'll do the same thing here. If Will Sterling was killed because of something he knew, we will find evidence of it. Evidence, Jonah."

  Her arms were folded across her chest, her lips tight, and her eyes, those eyes, whose colour always seemed to fall in the warmest part of the spectrum, looked flat and cold.

  "Are you done with me?" I asked.

  "Is this you pouting?"

  "No, this is not me pouting. This is me asking if I'm free to go."

  "I'll have to check with Neely," she said. "He's the lead on this one."

  Neely was about forty and had a brush cut that would have made a drill sergeant stand up straight. He made me go through everything from the start again: why I had been there, why I had broken in, why I thought Will's death was linked to other deaths. He took no notes, just stared at me while I spoke. After he'd heard it all, he said to Hollinger, "You buy any of this crap?"

  "We'll check it out," she said.

  "You know where to find him?"

  "Yes."

  "All right," he said. "He can go."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "After we test him for gunshot residue."

  CHAPTER 22

  At nine o'clock the next morning, I was back at
the Earth Sciences Building on Willcocks. News of Will Sterling's murder had hit the students and administrators hard. I approached a group of people who were crying and consoling one another. One red-eyed young woman walked me over to a man in his early twenties with a mass of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a soul patch that grew two or three inches past his chin. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve when we were introduced. His name was Jason Eckhardt and he had been Will's lab partner in their analytical chemistry course. We walked slowly down a polished hallway to a brightly lit lab with white walls, white countertops and white fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling like trapped, angry flies.

  He sat next to some kind of spectrometer and told me to pull up a chair. "Before I say anything," he said, "I want to know everything Will told you."

  "That won't take long."

  "I'm listening."

  "I know that there is something wrong at the Harbour-view construction site. Will all but confirmed yesterday that it has something to do with PCBs."

  "Not just any PCB," he said. "One of the most toxic of all, something called Aroclor 1242. Extremely dangerous for people and other animals. A known carcinogen-that means it causes cancer-the liver being the most common target organ. It's also a developmental toxicant, meaning it's very bad for unborn children. And it's suspected of causing a host of other illnesses or symptom clusters in shore birds, reptiles, amphibians and most likely humans as well."

  "Where does it come from?"

  "Most commonly from coolants in electrical transformers and turbines."

  I thought of the decommissioned generating station across Unwin Avenue from the Harbourview site, the transmission towers along Commissioners Street and the other heavy industries north of the site, and wondered whether long-buried toxins could have seeped into the earth.

  Jason showed me a printout from a gas chromatograph. It looked like the results of a polygraph done on someone who made wild swings between truth and lies. "Our course requires us to collect and compare soil and water samples from different sites, one clean and one dirty, analyze them and report the results. Will did most of the collecting." Jason looked away and swallowed and sucked at the inside of his cheeks. "We were perfect lab partners," he finally said. "I love the machines. The mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph. Loading up the tubes and watching them cycle around. Interpreting the results and confirming the hypothesis. Will was the outdoorsman. There's nothing he liked better than collecting samples, getting all muddy and buggy. I used to wonder if he actually rolled in the muck like a dog, he'd come back so dirty. He didn't have as much patience for the tech side, which was cool, because that's my thing.

  "This first sample," he said, "came from soil we knew to be contaminated with this stuff, on a site that once housed an oil refinery but hasn't yet been cleaned. As you can see, it clearly identifies a high level of Aroclor 1242. Dirty, dirty soil, not the kind you'd ever want to build on, not without extreme remediation."

  He laid a second sheet of paper beside it. "This was supposed to be the clean sample, the one we compare the polluted soil against. But look at these peaks and valleys, the way they scan from left to right. It's Aroclor 1242 again."

  "Where did this one come from?"

  "Down along the lake, near Tommy Thompson Park."

  "At the Harbourview building site?"

  "Yes."

  "The lakefront parcel, where the park is going to be."

  "That's why I thought there must have been a mistake, that maybe I had gotten the samples mixed up. I told Will we should collect new samples and run them again. He didn't want to. He wanted to call the developer of the site and get in his face about it-he's a lot more confrontational than me-but I told him our final marks depended on it. So he collected another sample. It took time to run-there's only one chromatograph here and it's constantly in demand-but in the end the same results came up. That's this third sheet here. Same chemical makeup as the first two. Confirmed presence of Aroclor 1242."

  "When did you tell him?"

  "Yesterday morning at class."

  Will had told me before class yesterday morning that he could guess what Maya and her father had been arguing about… that he'd know more about it later in the day.

  "Did Will ever mention Maya Cantor to you?"

  "The girl who killed herself? Sure. Her father is the one building those condos."

  "Did he tell her about the samples?"

  "Definitely. He was hoping she could-I don't know, pressure her dad into doing something about it. That's why he was so bummed when he heard she died. I think he felt like she bailed on him just when they were getting somewhere."

  Neither of them knew how close they really were, I thought. And that's why both were dead.

  CHAPTER 23

  "According to the Record of Site Condition that Martin Glenn filed," Jenn said, "the southern end of the site was squeaky clean."

  "But according to the samples Will took, it's anything but."

  "Which provides somebody with an excellent motive for killing him."

  "And Glenn. And Maya."

  "You honestly think her father killed her?"

  "Why not? I read somewhere that the vast majority of children who meet a violent end are killed by their own parents."

  "How could he live with himself?"

  "Let's ask him," I said.

  "Where would we find him this time of day?"

  "His office or the work site."

  "And?"

  "The site is out of the question," I said. "Full of guys who could throw us out with one hand and eat their lunch with the other. The office has a receptionist or two to get past, but I think we could handle them."

  Jenn thought about that then broke into a smile that would charm anyone who didn't know her like I did. The smile of a fox who'd just discovered an unguarded henhouse.

  "Want to mess with his head?" she asked. "I'd rather thump it a few times." "Want to mess with it first?" Half an hour later, she dialled Cantor's office and asked, in a voice dripping both milk and honey, if Rob was in. "No? Well, can you get an urgent message to him? Tell him I need to see him right away. At my apartment. My name? Look at your caller ID," she said, and hung up.

  We were calling from Maya's apartment. Jenn had played Maya's outgoing message a few times and practised pitching her voice in a similar range. Not as spot-on as her Scary Mary impression, but it got better with each try.

  It took Rob all of three minutes to call back.

  Jenn picked up the phone and whispered, "Hello?"

  I heard his voice blustering over the other end, asking what the hell this, who the hell that.

  "Please come, Daddy," she whispered, and hung up.

  "You're creepier than you let on," I said.

  "Who isn't?" Jenn grinned. Jenn and I stood on Maya Cantor's balcony, watching a long V-shaped formation of geese fly south toward the lake. The wall around the balcony came up to my waist. I was a few inches taller than Maya. It felt safe to me. Probably had to her too, until someone hoisted her over.

  How many seconds to fall from twelve floors up, I wondered. Probably three or four at the most. What did she feel in those last moments of her life? Did she see scenes of her brief life flashing by? Or was she just gripped with the terror of falling, the ground rushing up at her, unyielding black pavement ready to claim her broken body?

  No. It would be the horror of knowing it was her own father who wanted her dead. Whether he had done it himself, or hired it out, she had to have known in the last cold seconds of her life that he was the one behind it.

  My own father had died when I was fourteen, felled by a massive heart attack no one had foreseen. Unlike many of my friends, I never had the chance to see my dad grow old and weak. I had been spared the feelings a young man endures as his father is transformed from a giant, a hero, into an ordinary man-sometimes less than ordinary-flawed, fallible, unsure of himself. Buddy Geller would always be forty-four to me, with a full head of black h
air, seemingly strong and robust. He would always be warm and loving.

  He would never be my murderer.

  I went back inside, leaving the sliding glass doors open, and stood facing the balcony. How had they done it? Grabbed her collar and waistband and heaved her over? Stood her up on the balcony wall and given her a strong shove?

  I went back outside. "Let's try an experiment," I said to Jenn.

  "What kind, doc?"

  "Face the wall."

  "Like this?"

  "Perfect." I took hold of her belt and jacket collar and felt her whole body tense up.

  "Relax," I said.

  "Yeah, right."

  "Maya was, what, five-seven? A hundred and thirty pounds?"

  "Something like that."

  "And you're six feet."

  "Ask me my weight and you're a dead man."

  "I don't have to ask. I can feel it."

  "Was that a shot?"

  "A statement. Now Rob Cantor is my size… a little taller than me."

  "In shape?"

  "He works out." I bent my knees and hefted Jenn a few inches off the ground.

  "Jonah…"

  "Don't worry,"

  "Jonah!" she said.

  "I'm not going to throw you off."

  "I know that," she said. "I just wanted to ask what kind of car Rob drives."

  I remembered a silver Mercedes parked at the job site: the only luxury sedan amidst a bunch of muddy pickups and SUVs. "Grey or silver Mercedes, I think."

  "Then let go of me, doc. I think that's him down there." A few minutes later, a key slid into the lock on Maya's front door. The door opened and Rob Cantor stepped inside. He stood in the doorway listening, looking around, then closed it behind him. He wore glasses with transitional lenses, darkened by the outside light, but slowly lightening to reveal the eyes behind them.