Trigger City

by Sean Chercover

The missing pages fell right in between.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Many people believe houses can hold the emotional residue of a terrible event that took place within. They say they can feel the lingering vibrations. I don’t buy it. I think, once we learn that a place has a tragic history, we project our own sadness onto it. But sitting in my car across the street from Amy Zhang’s town house, the feeling was strong. So strong that, had I been the superstitious type, I’d have thought I was picking up paranormal vibes. Since I’m not, I didn’t.

  The sky was a solid sheet of gunmetal gray right down to the horizon and had been making ominous threats of rain since morning. In the small front lawn, a FOR SALE sign swayed back and forth with the wind. The grass was brown in patches and needed cutting and the flowerboxes displayed dying dwarf dahlias in differing degrees of decay. Put all that together with the knowledge that a man shot himself inside this house, leaving his wife and daughter behind…easy to conjure a feeling of sadness without any vibrations from the spirit world.

  Amy Zhang had arrived about twenty minutes earlier. I figured she’d had time to settle in, so I left my car and crossed the street and rang the doorbell.

  “Very sorry to bother you, Mrs. Zhang,” I said. “I have just a few quick questions by way of follow-up on the investigation.” As I spoke, I withdrew my badge wallet from my breast pocket but didn’t actually open it. Her eyes darted to the wallet and as they left the wallet and returned to my face, I flipped the badge open and shut and returned it to my pocket. “If your daughter is home, we can do this tomorrow during school hours.”

  Amy Zhang sighed. “Come in and remove your shoes.” Her accent was soft but noticeable. I took off my shoes and followed her to the living room. She said, “I just made a pot of tea, Detective…?”

  “Dudgeon. Call me Ray. Thank you, tea would be nice.” Amy Zhang slipped into the kitchen and I slipped out of my raincoat and sat. There was a new couch and a freshly painted wall where Steven Zhang had blown his brains out. The wall was blue, a dark enough shade to keep the bloodstains from showing through. Amy Zhang returned and put a teacup in front of me and sat on the couch.

  She was a small woman—about five-two and slender—and pretty, with a heart-shaped face and deep brown eyes and raven hair cut in a pageboy. A pretty face, but the eyes were tired and dark circles under them spoke of nights without sleep and days filled with worry. She said, “I don’t remember meeting you…you weren’t one of the detectives from before.”

  “No,” I put a business card on the coffee table between us, “I’m not with the police—I’m a private detective, working for Joan Richmond’s father.”

  “But I thought—”

  “I know you did.”

  “You tricked me.”

  “I allowed you to make the wrong assumption.”

  Amy Zhang’s eyes moved to the right, then back to me. She said, “You helped me make the wrong assumption.”

  “It was the surest way of getting inside. But I don’t want to mislead you. You don’t have to talk to me.”

  She sat and looked at me for almost a full minute. Finally she leaned forward, put her cup on the table, and said, “Are you really working for Joan Richmond’s father?”

  “Yes. Mr. Richmond is having trouble coming to terms with Joan’s death. He feels that he might be able to accept it if he had a better understanding of how and why things happened the way they did.” Thinking Dudgeon, you are such a scumbag. If you were a human being, you’d just walk out of here and leave this woman alone.

  Again Amy Zhang examined me for a long time before speaking. “I will try. I owe him that. I don’t expect forgiveness, but please tell him how deeply sorry I am.”

  “He doesn’t blame you.”

  “With a thing this terrible there’s blame for everyone. I’m sure he has some for me. And not without reason. I misjudged how fast Steven’s condition was…deteriorating.” She said it like her words had no meaning, but she’d probably gone over it twenty times with the cops. “I should have called emergency and had him committed by force…for evaluation. I should not have waited.” She picked up her cup, put it down again without drinking any tea.

  She seemed more frightened than grief-stricken. Her delicate hands came up and thin fingers hooked her hair behind her ears. With her ears showing, she looked ten years younger. She pulled a Kleenex from her pocket, dabbed at her eyes, and smiled a shy apology.

  “Your English is perfect,” I said.

  “It has to be. I work as a translator.”

  “At the consulate?”

  “I would never work for them. I work at the university, helping Chinese students with their English. And at the UIC Medical Center, translating for Chinese patients.”

  “Was Steven’s English as good as yours?”

  “No, he was—” She stopped herself, formulated a new answer. “His English was fine. His accent was more pronounced and his vocabulary limited, but he was fluent.”

  I said, “The police file indicates that Steven did not have a history of mental illness.”

  “That’s correct. Nothing until about a month before…”

  “Do you have any idea what might have triggered it?”

  “No.”

  “Was he on any medications? Prescription, over-the-counter, recreational?”

  “None. Nothing.”

  “Any idea why he focused on Joan Richmond?”

  “No, and I doubt that there was a reason. He was ill.”

  “Did you know Joan? Were you friends?”

  “We never met.”

  “Reason I ask, I was reading through her old e-mails, and she asked Steven to give you her best regards.”

  “Well, I, um…we spoke on the phone a few times, when she called for Steven.”

  “Did that happen often?”

  “Just a few times. Steven often brought his work home with him.”

  “You mean his work at HM Nichols, or when they worked together at Hawk River?”

  Her eyes darted away. “I don’t know what you mean.” There was a tremor in her voice.

  “Steven worked on contract for Joan at a company called Hawk River, about a year ago. This doesn’t ring a bell?”

  She didn’t answer me, just stood up and disappeared into the kitchen again. She was gone for a few minutes and then returned with a small glass of what looked like sherry.

  “I understand this is a very bad time for you and your daughter—”

  “My daughter cannot even step inside this house anymore. She barely eats, suffers nightmares…. Sometimes I don’t think she’ll ever smile again. So do not pretend to understand. You may be able to come in here and ask me questions I’ve already answered, but do not talk about my daughter.”

  Amy Zhang’s attitude had changed, but it had changed before I mentioned her daughter and my spidey senses were now tingling. Yes, she was frightened and maybe I was a scumbag for inserting myself into her life while her grief was so fresh. But there was something wrong about her. Something very wrong.

  “So you never heard of Hawk River? That’s odd. Your husband worked there for seventeen weeks.”

  “I know very little about computers. Steven and I did not talk about his work. He was self-employed. I don’t know the names of the companies he worked for.”

  She was lying. And she was scared. I let the silence build. Her hands were clasped together in front of her chest and she squeezed them together so tight that I thought her fingers might snap like twigs.

  “Please,” she said, “what do you want me to say? I said everything right.”

  Said everything right?

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It…it’s nothing. It, I just…I said everything right. I told you, I told you everything I know.” Her hands unclasped, clasped again. She couldn’t look at me. Her performance was falling apart and she knew it. “I told you everything I know,” she repeated. “If it’s not good enough, I can’t help that.”
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  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Mrs. Zhang?”

  “You mean besides the fact that my husband killed a woman and then committed suicide?” she snapped. Before I could formulate an answer, she stood and gestured to the front door. “Just go. I’m tired, I have a headache, and I don’t like being tested.” She turned and ran upstairs and I heard a door slam.

  I saw myself out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mike Angelo said he’d let me buy him lunch but he didn’t want to see me at Area 4 HQ. I suggested Lou Mitchell’s, mainly because you can’t get any privacy there. That Mike didn’t want me in his office was a red flag—or at least an orange flag—and if he rejected Lou Mitchell’s and suggested some place more obscure, then I’d know there was real trouble on the way. But Mike agreed and we met at eleven-thirty and sat side by side at the long counter.

  We made it through lunch on the Bears’ impressive defense and weak offense and Rex Grossman’s latest injury. The waiter cleared our dishes and refilled our coffee mugs. I brought out my notebook.

  “Not here,” said Mike Angelo. “Meet you outside.” He stood and left the restaurant without waiting for a reply.

  I paid for our lunch and found Mike in front of the building, smoking in the warmth of the midday sun. It had rained overnight and the sky was clear and blue and reflected bright against the Sears Tower and the rest of Chicago’s skyscraper skyline.

  The sunlight landed heavy, a physical force touching my skin, warming my face. I always loved that feeling.

  Mike held a pack of Marlboro Lights out to me. I shook my head and he stuffed the pack into the patch pocket of his brown blazer.

  “You got that fancy little car around here someplace?” said Mike.

  “Left it at the office,” I said.

  Cops tend to be more aware of their environmental conditions than civilians but as we walked west on Jackson, it seemed Mike was casing the surroundings with even greater than normal care. His eyes never settling, always scanning, like he halfway expected to discover that we were under surveillance.

  I had enough paranoia of my own these days. I said, “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  He stopped walking and hit me with the patented cop stare. They give them out with the badges, but thirty years of police work had seasoned Mike’s to concrete perfection. He tossed his cigarette butt in the gutter, started walking again. We turned north on Jefferson, walked a block, and came to his car, parked in a tow-away zone. No ticket. The car was an unmarked blue Chevy Impala. Unmarked, but obvious.

  “Get in,” he said.

  I did.

  “Tell me what you’ve learned about Daddy’s little dead girl.” Mike Angelo piloted the car east on Lake Street, over the Chicago River, and hung a sharp left onto Wacker Drive. He drove like a maniac, even by Chicago standards. Most cops do. I avoided looking at the speedometer. Steering with one hand, he cracked open the side window and lit a cigarette, and now I wanted one.

  I flipped open my notebook. “Joan Richmond’s boss says her employment records, and those of Steven Zhang, were turned over to the CPD. But they weren’t in the Deceased file you showed me. Nor was there any notation that they ever had been. Also, Joan’s assistant made statements to the detectives, which seem to have been redacted out of her interview transcript.”

  “Sloppy police work,” said Mike with a smile just shy of sardonic. “Next?”

  “The missing statements and employment records point in the same direction: Richmond and Zhang worked together last year at Hawk River.”

  “That a fact?”

  “It is. And there’s more.”

  “Of course there is.” Mike swerved a right turn onto Wabash and headed south, under the El tracks. “Shoot.”

  “For Hawk River, the timing of Joan Richmond’s death was extremely fortuitous.”

  “You don’t mean fortuitous,” said Mike. He slammed the brakes and screeched to a stop for a red light and raised his voice to compensate for a passing train that rumble-rattled over our heads. “Fortuitous just means by chance, it doesn’t necessarily imply a positive development. You mean fortunate, or maybe even serendipitous, but not fortuitous.” He flicked ash through the opening in the side window and said, “Why was it fortunate for Hawk River that Richmond was murdered last month?”

  “You don’t know?” Mike didn’t answer. “Joan Richmond was supposed to testify before Congress. The Oversight and Government Reform committee is looking at the billing practices of military contractors, and Joan would be answering their questions right now if she weren’t dead.”

  Mike tossed the rest of his cigarette out the window and made a sucking sound through his front teeth—this was news to him. Car horns blared behind us. The light had changed to green. Mike glared at the rearview mirror and shouted, “Go pound sand up your ass!” and waited another ten seconds before stepping on the accelerator, just to make a point.

  “Go pound sand up your ass? A minute ago you sounded like you’d swallowed a dictionary.”

  Mike shrugged, “I can go either way.” We crossed the intersection and he pulled to the curb half a block down, across the street from my office building. He put the car in Park.

  I nodded across the street. “Got beer in my office.” Mike just lowered his window, lit a new cigarette. This time, I took one. “If you don’t want to come up, we could do this in a bar. I’m buying.”

  Mike reached between the seat and the center armrest, pulled out a stainless steel flask. He twisted the top loose and took a swig, handed the flask to me. This was not what I had in mind. The fact that Mike didn’t want to have this conversation in public, or even be seen visiting my office, bothered me more than a little bit. I took a swig from the flask. Vodka. Cops who drink on duty tend to prefer vodka because it doesn’t announce itself on your breath as strongly as any other spirit. The taste reminded me of Joan Richmond’s lonely and incomplete diary. I handed the flask back to him and he put it out of sight and said, “Cut to the chase, I gotta get back.”

  “Okay, check this out: Joan’s boss lied to me, pretended not to remember Joan’s previous employer, and emphasized that HM Nichols gave all their original paperwork on Richmond and Zhang to your detectives. He said if I wanted to learn about their previous employers, I’d have to ask the CPD. And he seemed nervous.”

  “So?”

  “So I find out that your detectives removed everything relating to Hawk River from the binder—”

  “Or never put it in, in the first place,” said Mike. “You’re making assumptions.”

  “Either way, there’s a lot missing.”

  “None of which would change the identity of Joan Richmond’s killer.”

  “No, but you’ve got the, uh, serendipitous timing of her death, and now the fact that every mention of Hawk River is missing from the case file. Taken together, it’s suggestive.”

  The flask came out again and Mike took a swig and handed it to me. I took a swig and handed it back and it disappeared again. We smoked and said nothing as a couple of trains shrieked their brakes above.

  When the trains had passed, Mike said, “You know what percentage of murders we clear?”

  “Slightly less than half?”

  “Slightly more, 53 percent, last year. The Richmond murder puts us one to the good. Why would I want to fuck with that? You’re not telling me that someone other than Steven Zhang pulled the trigger.”

  “But there may be more to it,” I said.

  “So what? Zhang killed her, killed himself, and the case has been cleared. I’ve got the other 47 percent of murder victims and their families crying out for justice—which they’ll probably never get—and you want me to reallocate my detectives’ time stirring shit in a cleared case? Even if there is more to it, Zhang is dead. And without him our chances of getting anywhere go from slim to none.”

  “That doesn’t explain actively tailoring the case file to cover up any connection to Hawk River.”

  Mike
took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew it out. He said, “That’s a heavy accusation and if I were you I wouldn’t make it in public. Think about it. They find a dead woman with a signed confession by her killer who then killed himself. Ballistics match, nice and neat. They go through the routine to dot and cross the appropriate letters, and witnesses confirm the guy was crazy. Even the guy’s wife agrees. So maybe they aren’t too careful preserving all the paperwork, since the case was closed and cleared from day one.”

  “Detectives under your watch just aren’t that sloppy, Mike. I’ve known you too long for that line.”

  Mike Angelo’s façade cracked and now he just looked tired. “You get to play Lone Ranger but I gotta work within a system.”

  “That’s what worries me. The system. Did an order come down from on high, to bury the connection to Hawk River?”

  Mike tossed his cigarette butt out the window and I did the same with mine and he rolled the windows up. “’Course not,” he said, “they’re not that stupid.”

  “Then what?”

  He didn’t offer the flask this time. Just took a swig for himself and put it away again. We sat in silence for about a year, me staring at Mike and Mike staring out the front windshield at nothing in particular. Finally he said, “God, I hate this job sometimes. Fucking politics.” He glanced my way, then stared back out the window again. “What I say now goes no further than this car.”

  “Yeah, and if I ever said anything, you’d call me a liar and never speak to me again. I know.”

  He looked at me hard. “You ever say anything, I’ll do a hell of a lot worse than that. We clear?”

  Mike had never threatened me like that before. He’d threatened our relationship a few times and he’d threatened my license more times than I could recall, but this was something else. I knew what he was saying, and I knew he meant it.

  “We’re very clear, Mike,” I said.

  “Okay. I tell you this, and then I’m out of it. The case looked like a no-brainer from the get-go. My dicks didn’t need me holding their dicks for them, you know?”