by Bo Thunboe
He texted April that he was out front, then waited on the stoop. He heard pounding feet, then the front door burst inward and there she was.
“Hi!” Her voice was high, and the word left a fog on the glass of the storm door.
He pulled it open and stepped into her hug. Her hair smelled like strawberries.
“Who is it?” Mrs. Fox yelled. The kitchen door swung open. “Is it—oh.”
“It’s Conner, Mom. Isn’t it great that he came home from Northwestern to be here for me?” April pulled him into the house.
Mrs. Fox shook her head, then caught herself. “Yes,” she said. “Hi, Conner.”
“I’m so sorry about Mr. Fox…” Conner turned to April. “About your dad. I just can’t—”
“I’m so glad you’re here. Mom, we’re just going to go into my room—”
“Not in your room.” Mrs. Fox crossed her arms, staring lasers at Conner. “You know the rule.”
“But Mom. We just—”
“Of course, Mrs. Fox.”
Mrs. Fox dropped her arms, then crossed them again. Her eyes were red and her hair was pulled back from her face in uneven clumps. She turned around and went back through the kitchen door.
April sighed, then led him to the couch.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Better now that you’re here.” She put her head on his shoulder, then broke into sobs.
He held her.
* * *
Conner zipped up his coat and slung the backpack over his shoulder. Mrs. Fox had kicked him out after only twenty minutes, telling him she needed her daughter and April needed her mom, and to call before he came over again. April had been furious, but Conner had figured Mrs. Fox was at least half right: she sure did need April. The woman was a bottomless pit of need.
He walked back up to the tracks and then west along the right-of-way. The moon was bright and glinted off the rails stretching ahead of him. He stepped into the weeds as an empty commuter train roared past on its way back to the city, then continued on. A breeze kicked up as the tracks passed the Burlington Woods Forest Preserve, and the bare branches knocking together made him walk a little faster. He moved between the rails to cross the bridge over the Paget River, then scuttled down the embankment, surfing the last few feet on the loose stone. From there it was a short walk across the park and down a few blocks to his own house.
His dad would be home, as always. Sitting down there in his office with his door closed doing whatever the hell he did while Mom was out supporting the family. Conner checked his phone. 8:24 p.m. She wouldn’t be home from her work trip for a couple of hours.
Which meant he and Dad would be home alone.
With any luck, the old man would stay in his office and never even know Conner was there.
CHAPTER NINE
As Jake stepped out the front door, he spotted Detective Callie Diggs walking toward him down Redhawk Court, passing in and out of the shadows in the moonlight cast by the trees bordering Henry’s property. Up until a few months before, he and Callie had had a casual thing going—friends with benefits—but that dissolved when he tried to turn it into something more. Now they were working to turn what was left between them into a true friendship. It wasn’t easy. Callie wore tight black pants over low-heeled boots with a trench coat cinched tight around her waist. It accentuated her figure and grabbed his attention. She noticed, and smiled.
“Learn anything new from the canvass?” Jake asked while he stripped off his gloves and booties.
“The neighbor,” Callie pointed over her shoulder, “the one who called it in? She keeps a very close eye on Mr. Fox. I think she has a bit of a thing for him.” The wind flapped the tails of her coat but couldn’t move her hair, tight black curls she kept trimmed close to her scalp. Her dark skin glowed in the moonlight. “She says she noticed his lights still on at around eleven thirty and several more times during the night when insomnia had her wandering her house. None of his other neighbors saw anything.”
“Was that normal?”
“She says it wasn’t. He sometimes came home in the middle of the night—thinks he has a lady friend somewhere—a bit jealous, I think—but it’s always lights out within a few minutes of getting home. And get this. She walks her dog a lot and has seen the same guy, a stranger, lurking around the neighborhood twice. Most recently last Saturday night.”
“Description?”
“White. Tall. Big. Cowboy. Long coat.”
“Cowboy because he wore a hat?”
“Boots. He did have a hat on, but it was a baseball hat with a logo of a Van Halen album cover on it.” Callie shrugged. “That’s what she said, anyway. Red and white triangles?”
Jake remembered that cover. “Can she describe him to the sketch artist?”
“She says no. She could only say he was white.”
“What about his age?”
“Said he moved like a young man but she got the impression he was closer to fifty. I couldn’t get her to articulate what gave her that impression.”
She had pushed Mrs. Brueder to the limit of her conscious observations, like a good cop should. “Where’d she get such a good look at him?”
“Down there.” Callie pointed down the hill toward the barn. “She was walking the dog along the parking lot and he was under the yard light and coming toward her through the gap in the bushes.”
“When was the other time she saw him?”
“Last Thursday. Why? What are you thinking?”
“That I need to take a look at the barn.”
“Want help?”
“I’m good. Thanks, Callie.”
“What else do you want me to do?”
“Tell Erin what you learned. She’s looking at the patrol reports. And call Henry’s customers over the last two months to see if they noticed a change.”
“Got it,” she said, but didn’t move toward her car. “You okay, Jake? You seem a little… unfocused.”
“I’m good. Let me know what you find out.”
Callie nodded and stepped away, the night swallowing her up as a cloud passed over the moon.
Jake headed for the barn. He needed to decide whether to spend the city’s money on forensic work there before Fanning and his crew called it a night. Any evidence found after Jake released the crime scene was close to worthless in court.
Jake knew the barn well. As teens, the three of them—Henry, Jake, and Coog—had launched a lot of adventures from it. They’d even built a fort in the rafters and had sleepovers there, cooking their dinner outside in the firepit. Since Henry took over the place, he’d replaced the barn’s original side roller with a roll-up door and added large lean-tos off each side, each with a pair of steel doors of its own.
As he approached, Jake realized one of those lean-to doors was cracked a few inches. It shouldn’t be; Henry always kept it locked up tight. Jake pulled on the extra pair of latex gloves from his pocket and examined the slightly open door under the yard light. It was buckled where the latch met the strike plate.
He went inside, the whistle of the cold breeze dropping away. The air here smelled of sawdust and motor oil. He pulled out his pocket flashlight and shined it through the gloom until he found the light switch and flicked it on.
This lean-to was Henry’s woodworking studio. He reconditioned furniture and built simple tables of maple and oak. Aged lumber Henry had acquired from who knew where rose in a teetering stack along one wall, and woodworking machines stood in a row down the center—a planer, a band saw, a table saw, several types of sanders, and a lathe. Wood furniture in every state of disrepair was scattered across the back.
Jake stepped through a narrow opening into the original barn space, which housed Henry’s prized 1970 Chevy C-10 pickup, the only vehicle he ever drove. It was a rust-free import from Arizona, where Henry went to buy a
replacement whenever his current ride rusted through. This one was a dusty dark red and had Fox Handyman Services painted on the door.
In front of the truck, two tall wood cabinets held Henry’s hand tools. Normally these were secured by padlocks, but the locks now lay on the floor, and the wood was splintered where the hasps had been pried off.
Jake opened the doors and found tools hung on pegs and laid out on shelves with screws and nails and bolts and such in jars and little drawers. Jake wasn’t familiar enough with the contents to know for sure, but nothing appeared to be missing.
The opposite wall held a row of yard equipment: a rototiller, a commercial-grade mower, a snow blower, and some other things Jake wasn’t familiar with. Probably valuable, but bulky.
Jake continued into the other lean-to addition. Running his hand along the rough wood of the door jamb, he found the light switch and flipped it on to reveal Henry’s utility vehicle and its little trailer. Gas-powered and about the size of a golf cart, it had fat knobby tires and four-wheel drive. Henry drove it on his local jobs. The trailer held shovels, a pickaxe, and a stack of buckets for hauling dirt. Henry had probably been excavating another outhouse pit.
Jake turned off all the lights as he left the barn. It had clearly been searched, but not last Saturday when Brueder saw Cowboy. Henry would have fixed the door as soon as he saw it, so it must have happened sometime after Henry had parked the truck. Last night. Perhaps the killer started his search out here, and when he failed to find what he was looking for, he went into the house, ran into Henry, and killed him with a single blow.
Jake called FIC Fanning and asked him to come down and print the doors and the broken cabinets. Maybe the killer got sloppy out here and made a mistake.
You never knew.
CHAPTER TEN
Jake’s stomach grumbled as he got in the car. He needed to eat something or he’d get short-tempered. Mary had called it getting hangry. Although anger could be an effective tool to crack open a reluctant interview subject, he needed his brain to be in control of it, not his stomach. He shuffled through the energy bars he kept in the glove compartment and picked the biggest one. He chewed through its gritty protein as he drove, the flavor so bland he couldn’t decide if it was supposed to be peanut butter or blueberry. Not that it mattered.
As he headed west on Jefferson, his phone buzzed.
“This is Houser.”
“Still can’t believe it.” Coogan’s voice was soft. “Better man didn’t exist.”
Coogan’s sorrow amplified Jake’s own, and he had to suppress a sudden sob. “What can you tell me?”
“I got the warrant by fax. I’ve gone through everything I’ve done for Henry, and I have copies of the documents ready for you.”
“Can you brief me now? Starting with the will?”
“Sure.” Paper rustled in the background. “We redid Henry’s will and estate plan after the divorce. Henry created a trust that holds legal title to his house and truck and financial accounts. The will just pours his personal property over to the trust upon death. The trust will continue to hold the assets until whatever age Henry picked—I think it was twenty-five—then April gets it.”
“All of it? Nothing to Lynn?”
“Not a dime.”
“Does Lynn know?”
“Well…”
“What is it?”
“She called me on my cell a few minutes ago asking about it. I told her I couldn’t tell her anything about Henry’s estate. She kept at me, and I finally told her I could only talk to the trust beneficiary about it.”
“And since you wouldn’t talk to her, she’s obviously not the trust beneficiary.”
“Yeah, she picked up on that.”
“Was she surprised?”
“She said, ‘It figures,’ and that she would have April call me.”
“With a trust, the trustee handles the money until April gets it, right?” Jake’s memory of his trusts and estates course in law school was thin. “Is Lynn the trustee?”
“No, I am.” Coogan flipped through some pages. “Oh, and it’s thirty, not twenty-five. April gets the entire corpus of the trust when she turns thirty. Until then, the trustee—me—must use it for her health, education, and general welfare. Standard stuff.”
“Tell me about the child support.”
Coogan started with the divorce and worked his way forward to the present. Jake pulled out his notebook and scribbled down the important facts. Henry didn’t fight the divorce. They’d only been married for a couple years, so Henry didn’t have to pay alimony. And there’d been no assets to divide, only debts, which Henry had agreed to pay off. Henry was fine with all of that as long as he got joint custody of April.
“Three years later Henry inherited the house down by the river and Lynn tried to grab a piece of it,” Coog continued. “She alleged that the marital settlement agreement was fraudulent because Henry never disclosed the expected inheritance. But it wasn’t expected—Henry’s uncle never gave him a clue—so we won that. Then she went after the inheritance as income. We won that one too.”
“But the child support payments caused some problems, judging by Henry’s files,” Jake said.
“Child support is basically set by state law as a percentage of income. But Lynn claimed Henry was hiding income.”
“Was he?” Henry wasn’t a liar, but divorces could get bitter, and there was something funky about the math in those storage unit files.
“Absolutely not. But Lynn brought up the hidden income issue every few years. Henry settled most of those battles—against my advice—and his monthly child support payment worked its way up to thirteen hundred even. Way too much, and still never enough for Lynn.” Coogan’s voice went gravelly with suppressed anger. “Hell, she even came after him after his payments ended.”
“How?”
“Henry’s child support obligation ended when April graduated from high school. His last payment was June fifth. Within a month, Lynn’s lawyer filed a two-count complaint. First they claimed he lied when he said the storage unit business hadn’t yet made a profit. They claimed to have proof that it had, but they never sent it to me. Then they went after Henry for April’s college tuition, which is a kind of child support under Illinois law.”
“I thought Henry was already paying her tuition.”
“He was. To Paget Community College, where April goes now. But the petition asked for tuition to Northwestern, which no court would force him to pay. Not at his income level.”
“So what happened?”
“They failed to show for a preliminary hearing and the judge dismissed it. This was in, let me see… late July.”
“So it was dead?”
“Yep.”
“What do you know about the storage unit business?”
“You know Henry. It was a hobby he hoped to turn into something more. Like the outhouse excavations that he turned into books.”
“Well, let me know if you think of anything else,” Jake said.
“Will do.”
Jake’s phone had vibrated with an incoming text while he was talking with Coogan, and he checked it now. It was from Erin: Doc Franklin is working on Henry right now.
Jake fought to keep his mind off what Franklin was doing to his friend’s body, but he was glad the doc was moving quickly. The sooner Jake got the autopsy results, the faster he could use anything that turned up.
* * *
Conner’s dad had been surprised to see him. Apparently he thought his son was an emotionless robot—like him—who wouldn’t even come home to support his girlfriend when her dad had been murdered. After a brief and awkward conversation about school and the book his dad claimed to be writing, the old man went back into his office and closed his door.
So. Nothing had changed.
Conner nuked a couple of frozen bu
rritos and took them up to his room. They weren’t as good as the food at the dorm, but with some hot sauce they were edible. He sat at his desk and ate while he surfed the Internet. This time he found a news article with Mr. Fox’s name in it. He emailed it to his professors, explaining that the murder victim was his girlfriend’s father and asking to make up his assignments next week. Their responses trickled back to him over the next hour, every one of them agreeing to his request.
He got back to work on his current Empathy paper. It was about the Romani people—gypsies—living in Chicago. They’d come to Chicago in two separate groups in the 1800s, with a third group arriving in the 1970s. Conner had interviewed seven of them at their church and now had so much information he was having trouble focusing on one emotional hook to pull it all together.
His phone buzzed with an incoming call. April.
“Hey,” he said. He spun his chair to face away from his computer.
“I’m so glad you came here even though Mom kicked you out. It feels good just knowing you’re here. Even though you’re not right here, it almost feels like you are.”
“I can’t believe anyone would hurt your dad. Even your mom still loved him.”
“I can’t either. I know it’s stupid, but I always thought they’d get back together.”
Conner thought Mr. Fox could have done a lot better, but he kept that opinion to himself. “How’s your mom doing?”
“She’s a disaster.” April barked out a laugh that turned into a sob. “You know how dramatic she is. I finally put on one of those stupid movies she loves on Netflix. She fell asleep watching it.”
“How about you?”
“I’m… I mean….” April sobbed and sniffled. “The cops think my mom did it.”
“But only because she’s the ex-wife, right?” Conner had watched enough Law & Order reruns to know cops always looked at the spouse. “They don’t, like, seriously think she did it.”
