New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  The article described a groundbreaking ceremony for the Quiverfull. In the grainy black and white photo, a much younger Wayne Trueblood stood with his characteristic grin, a garden spade set into the ground, one foot hitched up on top of the blade.

  Next to him, to his left, was Ullie Anderson. On the other side was Randy Dubois. Dubois had his hand on Trueblood’s shoulder, reaching up.

  I did the math. Wayne Trueblood was approaching his mid-sixties, so that made him just around thirty at the time of the ceremony. I knew Trueblood was well-off, and a self-made man, but had he actually been that well-off at that age?

  He wasn’t exactly a millionaire, or so I suspected based on his lack of luxury cars and a house that was, while impressive, not what one would expect of a person who was actually wealthy.

  So there was one thing bothering me. Didn’t most people with money wait until they earned it before embarking on philanthropic expeditions?

  I did a brief, manual Google search and confirmed my suspicions: Marquette County Insurance hadn’t been founded until 1985.

  So where had the money come from? Or was the Quiverfull the real business venture?

  The article on the groundbreaking ceremony went on to say that Trueblood had donated one hundred thousand dollars personally, and with the help of “private donors” had increased that amount to nearly one million. I looked at Anderson and Dubois, filtered my search results on their names and the Quiverfull, and found two more articles.

  Anderson had donated ninety thousand, Dubois twenty.

  Were they all business partners?

  I went back to the original article and read the caption. Anderson was listed as the attorney for the Quiverfull, Dubois as ‘Officer Dubois of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department’.

  Another search, and I discovered that Dubois had been elected sheriff in 1990.

  I found Trueblood’s divorce. 1990. He’d filed, citing irreconcilable differences. The attorney for his wife?

  Vic Daniels. He would have just gotten out of law school.

  Saving the app’s search, I restarted it and put in just two sets of keywords: ‘Vic Daniels’ and ‘Illinois State Bar Association.’

  Knowing that with such a small amount of information the software would run through in under five minutes, I got up and went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. It was past five, and although I wanted to sleep another hour or so, I knew that I would only toss and turn.

  Outside the dawn had already begun. When I pulled the curtain over the sink aside, in the graying light I could just make out the bushes and the window above them at the house next door.

  I’d just turned on the coffee maker when the doorbell rang.

  I jumped and put my hand in my pocket. It was empty. I’d left the gun on the desk in the office.

  Moving quickly down the hall, I reached in and grabbed it off the table in the office, flipped off the safety and kept it in my hand as I went through the living room to the front door.

  Peering out through the small window slit in the door, I saw that it was Percy Trueblood. He was standing about three feet away, his hands on his hips, looking over toward the next house. How had I not heard him pull up?

  As I looked, he turned and saw me in the window. He gestured for me to open up.

  Unlocking the deadbolt, I opened the door, forgetting I still held the nine millimeter in my hand.

  “Uh,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll be needing that.”

  He pointed, and I turned on the safety and placed the gun in my pocket.

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  “Looks like you were up, though,” Percy said. “Mind if I come in?”

  I realized not for the first time that he hadn’t inherited his father’s charismatic face. While Wayne Trueblood wasn’t exactly much to look at in an objective sense, he knew how to move his expressions around so that people liked him.

  Percy, on the other hand, had a mouth that was fixed in an almost constant sneer, though upon closer examination I realized that it probably wasn’t intentional. He had a small scar on his upper lip that accentuated its tendency to curl up naturally on one side.

  Still, I could see the resemblance. He had the same hair, and something about his shoulders and the way he carried himself told me that Percival Trueblood wasn’t adopted.

  “Uh,” I said. “Sure.” I opened the door wide and stepped back, allowing him to enter. “You want a cup of coffee or something? I just put on a pot.”

  “Coffee would be great,” Percy said.

  I turned on the light in the living room and gestured toward the sofa. “Be right back,” I said.

  I got the pot of coffee from the burner and two cups, and then hesitated before calling out, “You want milk or sugar?”

  “Black’s fine,” he said.

  I went into the living room and set the pot and the cups down on the low wooden table in front of the sofa. After I’d poured coffee for the both of us, I sat down in the chair opposite.

  Percy picked up his cup and blew on it, then held it in both hands. “We got a report about a break-in,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  His lip curled. “Around nine-thirty last night.”

  “And you’re just now getting around to checking it out?”

  “Wasn’t a 911 call,” he said and took a sip of his coffee. “Besides, it went into Pekin PD. They sent somebody by, didn’t see anything, no signs of forced entry. Then you drove in, and it seemed like everything was okay. Figured it was a false alarm.”

  “Great police work,” I mumbled. I realized I was clenching my teeth. I also realized I hadn’t noticed a police cruiser when I’d arrived the night before.

  “Hey,” Percy said. “You do what you can.”

  My coffee was still too hot to drink, so I set it down on an end table and leaned forward on my knees.

  “Why are you here, Percy?”

  Percy mimicked my movements, placing his cup down and leaning forward. “I got the Roe and the Sweeney cases now,” he said. “And I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

  I wondered exactly what kind of foot we’d ever gotten off on. I’d only seen the guy three or four times, and I’d only spoken to him once, when I was standing on Elizabeth Street the day before.

  I studied his face for a moment before answering.

  “Don’t you want to know if there really was a break-in?” I asked. If someone in the sheriff’s department had done it, I thought, and if he knew about it, it would show in his face.

  He sat back on the couch. He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Was there?” he asked, watching me over the rim of his coffee cup as he took a sip. “That why you’re walking around with that nine millimeter?”

  I didn’t really know if I could trust him, but I remembered what Kelly had said about him being one of the few good cops in the county.

  “Somebody took Tad’s computer,” I said.

  “What?” Percy asked. “Anything else? Any signs of breaking and entering?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then we need to get somebody down here to process this place.”

  “To find what?” I asked. “Fingerprints?”

  “Well. Yeah,” he said. “Among other things.”

  “Whoever it was got into the house, took a computer, and didn’t leave a footprint on the carpet,” I said. “I highly doubt they left any fingerprints, because they obviously knew what they were doing.”

  Percy started talking, and I held up a hand.

  “To tell you the truth, I figured somebody from the sheriff’s office probably did it,” I said.

  His eyes flared, but he took his time answering.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t know what impression you got from Rassi, but we’re not all a bunch of goobers. We may not be Chicago PD, but we are all trained professionals.

  “Come to think of it, I don’t know how they do things up there in the city, but
we don’t break into people’s houses looking for evidence, either.”

  He took a drink of his coffee.

  “Why would anyone else want Tad’s computer?”

  “Why would anyone from the sheriff’s office want it?” he asked.

  He had a point, if only because he hadn’t been privy to the information Rassi had given me the night before.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange,” I said, “that the computer was the only thing that was taken?”

  Percy nodded. “It sure is,” he said. “I told you we needed to get somebody in here to check out the place. You refused.”

  He shrugged.

  “Why are you here, Percy?”

  He had picked up a copy of Tad’s Guns & Ammo. He leafed through it as he spoke.

  “I know why Dubois tossed Rassi out,” he said.

  “You do?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “What exactly do you know?” I asked. I was sitting with my elbows on my knees, my hands clenched together.

  “I know that you’ve been looking into Alisha Stamm,” he said slowly. “And I know that Rassi fed you some information where he claimed Dubois switched the guns that were used in Tad’s murder.”

  I got up and went over to the window. The glint of the sun was just coming up over the house across the street.

  “What do you think about that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Percy said. “It’s a pretty serious allegation.” I looked at him. “What I do know is that Dubois reported a gun stolen a month before Tad was killed. I also know that Rassi could have found that out on his own and made up the story. And without any evidence to back it up,” Percy said. He shook his head.

  “What about the forensics woman who changed the serial numbers on the bag?”

  “I talked to her,” Percy said. “She can’t remember anything about it.”

  I turned around and looked at him. “So, what? You think Rassi made up the whole story and then confronted Dubois in order to — what? Why would he do that if he didn’t have anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Percy said again. He picked up his cup of coffee and set it down. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Why are you here?” I asked again as I came back over to the coffee table. I leaned forward to look him in the eyes, and Percy looked away. After a while, I sat back down in my chair.

  “I was pretty pissed off when Tad gave Rassi the position of head deputy,” he said. “But I had no beef with him.”

  “With Tad?”

  Percy nodded. “Or Rassi. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with either one of them, and they didn’t like me much anyway. Most people don’t.”

  His smirk flickered something of a frown through it, and then he continued.

  “But Dubois,” he said, “Dubois is a politician. He doesn’t care about these homicides being solved, not beyond what it’s going to mean for him in the next election.”

  He was studying me carefully.

  “He’s going to bring him in, you know,” he said quietly. “Rassi.”

  I looked at him for a moment, and then changed the subject. “Your dad said that he and Dubois had a falling out years ago,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “You’d have to ask my dad. Or my mom. The bitch.”

  “I will, don’t worry,” I said. I wondered what kind of childhood would move an only son to refer to his mother as a bitch to a virtual stranger.

  He looked at me again in his strange crooked-mouthed way, his hands folded in his lap.

  “So are you in or are you out?” he asked suddenly.

  “On what?” I asked.

  “Roe and Sweeney,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  I wanted to ask him why he thought I would be interested, but that would have been pointless. Tad had spoken to Roe about something the day before Roe had been killed, and nobody seemed to know what that was. If I wanted to get into that angle, I would be stupid not to play along.

  Percy must have seen my silence as hesitation, because he added, “I put in a call to Alden Corcoran. He says you’re the real thing.”

  Alden Corcoran was the primary detective on the case when we’d brought down John Wallace in Chicago.

  “How do you know Corcoran?” I asked.

  Percy smiled. “We went to the academy together.”

  He filled me in on what he’d done the day before. He was tracing lists of people who had purchased arrowheads in the Tri-county area over the past year. That list would have run to several hundred, had he not discovered one critical fact: the urine on Sweeney’s body had come from a woman. State Forensics had gotten back to him late in the afternoon.

  That had narrowed down the search to just five people, three in Tazewell County, one in Metamora, and another in Brimfield.

  “There weren’t any fingerprints at the scene,” Percy said. “But we still haven’t found Sweeney’s car. Once we do, we hope we’ll find a match.”

  “Have you talked to all of the women?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m going to do today,” he said. “Once I get some sleep.” He eyed the sunlight coming through the window.

  “What is it you expect me to do?” I asked.

  “You work on Colby,” he said. “I’ll call you if I need anything.”

  “I have been working on her,” I said. “I haven’t found anything.”

  Percy leaned back in his seat and yawned. He rubbed his eyes and looked at me.

  “You’ve been looking into Alisha Stamm,” he said. “I know where you went yesterday. You haven’t done shit about Colby.”

  I let that go, and put my hand down on the top of my coffee cup. “So you’ve been tailing me,” I said.

  He laughed. “This isn’t The Untouchables,” he said. “But you can’t do much around here without somebody telling someone else.”

  He waited a beat before explaining. “Stamm’s husband called. Ullie Anderson called Dubois.” He shrugged. “It’s a small place.”

  I chewed at my lip for a moment.

  What the hell. “I’m in,” I said. “But you have to help me with Alisha Stamm.”

  Percy screwed up his face at this.

  “Fine,” he said. “That’s the wrong tree to be barking up, but if you want to, fine.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why’s it the wrong tree?”

  “Because she fucking did it,” Percy said, setting down his empty cup on the coffee table. “Come on, man. You’re the only person who doesn’t see that.”

  I nodded. “Other than Alisha Stamm,” I said. “You said Dubois is a politician. Wouldn’t he be the main person to benefit from Tad’s death?”

  He gave me a pitying look and then moved toward the door.

  “I have to get home,” he said. “My wife thinks I got off duty just now,” he said. “Come by the office after the deposition.”

  I realized I had no idea what time that was.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Deposition’s at nine,” he said.

  He was walking out onto the porch when he turned. He pointed to the bulge of the gun in my pocket.

  “I didn’t see that,” he said. “I know you don’t have a concealed carry license.”

  I looked down at it and back up at him.

  “Just don’t get caught with it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said and put my hand on his arm.

  “Yeah?”

  “You think Dubois would be capable of doing what Rassi is alleging he did?”

  He looked out at the street and scratched his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just don’t go off half-cocked.”

  I watched him as he went down the walk and got into his car and drove away.

  Twenty-Seven

  When I returned to Tad’s office to Google the telephone numbers of the people on the list I’d written down in Kelly’s kitchen the day before, Vic Daniels' search was
finished.

  I’d nearly forgotten that I’d plugged it into the application, but there it was, Done! and on the desktop with a smiley face.

  There were twenty-five articles from various government and private watchdogs. I selected an article from a popular blog out of Chicago and scrolled through a list of disciplined attorneys in the State of Illinois. It was astounding to see the number of lawyers in Illinois who had been disbarred. I was wondering what the percentage was when I found his name.

  Vic Daniels, Morton, Illinois: “disbarred for conversion of more than $100,000 of a client’s cash.”

  Searching on “conversion,” I discovered that this was the legal term for stealing from a client. “To appropriate funds or assets from a client and make them his or her own.”

  Theft. Why they couldn’t just say theft, I didn’t understand.

  So, Vic had stolen a substantial amount of money from someone.

  I went down the list of articles and found one entry from the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission from the State of Illinois, which had a summary protocol describing the proceedings against Vic Daniels.

  In the summary, it was stated that Daniels had stolen $125,000 from his client, Marquette County Insurance. Wayne Trueblood was named as CEO of Marquette County Insurance, and the plaintiff. A Diane Trueblood was listed as a witness for the defense.

  None of the testimony had been printed in the summary, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t find any more detail beyond the resulting disciplinary action, which was permanent disbarment.

  An out of court settlement was mentioned regarding damages to be paid to Trueblood, but in the ten minutes I devoted to it, I couldn’t find further mention anywhere of that settlement.

  This had all taken place in 1991. Daniels would have been around twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, a few years out of law school. His student loan debt wouldn’t have even been paid off by then.

  And now he and his wife were cozying up with drinks and dinner next to the pool with Wayne Trueblood and his new wife. Granted, Daniels hadn’t seemed all that comfortable in the presence of Trueblood and his friends, but still, he was there.