by Shane Lusher
The NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI and hosting a database of criminal background information, among about a million other things, was what I’d asked Corcoran to check for me.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you have the name of the girl?”
“What do you need that for?” Corcoran asked. “Not that I have it. That kind of thing was generally left out back then, because she was a minor. But what would you do with it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I mean, it was forty-five years ago,” Corcoran said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “It’s not really relevant now, is it?”
Corcoran shrugged. “It might be, but the victim wouldn’t have anything to say about it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, knowing that he was probably right. “What else did you find on him?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing at all?”
“Not even a speeding ticket. I found his divorce, but that was all handled out of court.”
“What about the alibi?” I asked.
“I haven’t been able to look into that,” Corcoran said. “I can call around, but they’re not going to tell me anything you don’t already have in your file.”
Corcoran was about to say something further when our beers arrived. He immediately ordered the steak I’d promised, extra rare. I’d just eaten, so I started to wave off the server, but Corcoran insisted I eat with him, and I got a kid’s hamburger.
“I have a few names,” I said, pulling out my list. “And-”
“And you want me to run them, too,” he said. He took it from me and held it out at arm’s length. “A few names? There are like ten on here.”
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“No, no problem. What are you looking for?”
“Anything I can’t find on Google,” I said.
Corcoran looked at me. “Alright then, I’ll just check the box for ‘exclude Google’ when I do the background check. What kind of other support do you have on this thing, anyway? You got anybody in the sheriff’s department down there?”
“There’s one guy, he’s working on two of the cases I’m looking at, but I’m not sure if I can trust him,” I said.
He started to respond to that, but the waitress returned with our silverware and we stopped talking for a moment.
“You started to say something before,” I said after she had left.
“I did?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. Trust. I was going to say to trust your gut, but that sounds like some TV bullshit.”
“So, what do I do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You just figure it out.”
“And what if I can’t?”
Corcoran shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Maybe you can run their Amazon statistics. There’s got to be some kind of logarithm you could do on trustworthiness.”
“Not funny,” I said.
“Shit, Dana,” Corcoran said. “It’s not like there’s a book on the subject. Well, there is, but somebody from the FBI wrote it and it doesn’t help in the real world.”
I remembered back when we were working on the Chicago Shopper case, and a few FBI profilers had been in and out of the department.
“White, mid-thirties, single, lives alone, frequents bars on his own,” Corcoran had told me after he’d emerged from the meeting and the FBI agents had headed out to O’Hare Airport on their way back to Quantico. “So, we’ll just bring in roughly two million guys and go through them one by one.”
Our food arrived, and we talked about the old times, which really only consisted of the work we’d done together to bring down Wallace.
I told him about my guardianship of Erin, he talked about his wife and his baby son. I’d always gotten the feeling that had Corcoran and I met years before, when both of us were single, we would have become lifelong friends.
But the unfortunate thing about making lifelong friends is that you don’t meet them in the middle of your life. I was left with a sad feeling that there had been something I missed, in spite of the four beers I’d managed to pound by two-thirty.
After I got the check and we’d gone back out onto the street, Corcoran asked:
“When do you need these by? Yesterday?”
“Last week,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “You want to splurge on cab fare, I can run up to the 18th and do some preliminaries on my office computer.”
“Do I need to come along?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. Here the guy was doing me a favor, and I was ready to split on him. “The thing is, my um girlfriend is kind of a new thing, and I need to-”
“Get your ass back over there,” Corcoran said. “No sweat, man.”
He was getting into a cab, with me leaning over on the open door, when he said:
“A bit of advice, Dana?” He leaned forward.
“Yeah?”
“Before you go meet your girlfriend, go pick up some gum or something. You stink.”
I could hear his cackling laugh even after he closed the door and drove away. I got my bearings and started walking up toward River North. I’d have to come back and get the car when I was sober.
When I got to the Du Sable Bridge, which runs Michigan Avenue over the Chicago River, I called Kelly. As the phone rang, I realized that the traffic around me would make it difficult to hear her.
When she picked up the phone, however, her voice was crystal clear.
“Where are you?” she said. There was a panicked note in her voice. Just then my phone beeped in my ear: a missed call, and then another, and then another.
“What’s wrong? Is Erin-”
“Erin and Casey are fine,” she said. “I just forgot that I’m on call, and I have to get back down to Pekin as quickly as I can. I’m in the hotel room. Can you get up here?”
“Is it a birth?” I asked, assuming that it was the hospital that had called.
“No,” she said. “That guy you mentioned, the one that got the cocaine for Colby? Jasper Stevens. They found his body.”
Another one. Another junkie. And the only new name I had to associate with Colby.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be up there as soon as I can.”
“How soon?”
“Twenty minutes? And Kelly?”
“Yeah?”
“Why the hurry?”
“They found the body right after we left yesterday. Everybody’s pissed off at me. Decomposition has set in, and my assistant was out of town so they had to bring somebody in from Peoria County, and now Dubois is screaming about how it was a mistake anybody elected me in the first place.”
“He said that.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said. “Dana? Just hurry. Please.”
It wound up taking me a half hour to get back.
I’d heeded Corcoran’s advice and gotten a pack of gum as well as a bottle of mouthwash I drank as I double-timed it down to the parking garage on Jefferson. I’d never actually consumed mouthwash, and it made my throat and my stomach burn like hell, but I figured it was better than the alternative.
When I got to the SUV I plugged my phone into the console and flipped up my messages. Two from Kelly, another one from Percy. As I squealed down the ramp and out into traffic, I hit the automatic dial function on the steering wheel and rang Percy.
He picked up right away.
“Motherfucker,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“I know about it, Percy. Sorry,” I said as I hung a left onto Michigan.
“Looks like you’re going to get to see Jasper Stevens after all.”
“I know,” I said as I pulled up to a red light, tapping on the steering wheel.
“Good,” Percy cut in. “Well, then you probably know I’ve been up half the night calling people all around the tri-county area to get someone to come in and bag the bodies, run the scene, make sure the chain of custody remains unbroken.”
“You knew we were coming up here,�
� I said.
“Yeah,” Percy said. “That's why I tried to call you last night at ten. I told you to take a vacation. I didn’t tell you to turn off your phone.”
I took a deep breath and let it out.
“I heard Dubois is pissed,” I said as the light turned green and I stepped on the gas, tailgating an old Ford pickup across the Michigan Avenue bridge I’d just been standing on not twenty minutes before.
“Dubois is always pissed when we have an actual crime,” Percy said dismissively. “Anyway, neighbors called about a smell. We knocked down the door, found your boy Stevens dead on the couch.”
“Any leads?” I asked as I turned left onto Ontario and down into the hotel’s parking garage. “Hey, I’m going to lose my signal,” I said.
“Arrow,” Percy was saying. “Nobody urinated on the body, though.”
The phone cut out to the beep-beep sound that indicated the connection had been broken. I parked the car and ran over to the elevator and pushed the button. I held my palm to my hand to check my breath.
It would have to do. Four beers on a full stomach wasn’t really all that bad, was it?
Kelly was all business from the point I arrived in the hotel room until we got in the car, pulled onto Lakeshore and merged onto I-55. She had given me a look when she smelled the mouthwash, and then insisted on driving, but she hadn’t mentioned the alcohol.
The girls in the back filled the car with noise: Erin telling me about what she’d gotten, going so far as to pull items of clothing out of bags and hold them up so that I could see them.
By the time they had settled down and contented themselves with staring out the window and listening to more Top 40 on the radio, we were past I-80 and over the Des Plaines River.
“How was your morning?” I asked Kelly, breaking the silence.
She jumped a bit. I glanced over at her. Her face was stiff, her eyes frozen on the acres and acres of corn and more corn that stretched a hundred miles ahead of us.
“It was fine,” she said. She didn’t turn to look at me.
“Is everything okay? Between the two of us?” I ventured.
“Fine,” she said. She waited a mile or two before going on. “We’re fine. I just hate fucking up.”
The last two words were silent, mouthed out in the front seat where the girls couldn’t hear. Eventually Casey and Erin nodded off in the back, Erin snoring, Casey with her mouth wide open and drooling.
“Look,” I said to Kelly and pointed.
She turned around and, for the first time since Chicago, she grinned. “I told them, you know,” she said.
“About what?”
“About us.”
“You told them about last night?” I watched her for a moment and then turned back to the road.
“I told them we were together,” she said. She glanced at the girls in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t tell them about the sex.”
She looked at me.
“Great,” I said. It was so much easier when you didn’t beat around the bush. “So, I’ll just move in tonight, if that’s cool with you. Can we put in a bar in the basement? Maybe get a pool table?”
“Stop it,” she said, and reached over to pat me on the leg. Up high. “I’ll just settle for another weekend away, together, when all of this is over. Just the two of us this time.”
“I’m looking forward to it already,” I said.
The storm that had been approaching that morning was already in full force when we got closer to Bloomington. That was another part of Midwestern summer: you could watch a front rolling in all day, stirring up dust and water all the way from the Rockies, but when it hit, it got to you in a curtain of water denser than any fog.
Kelly slowed down and flipped the windshield wipers up on high, and squinted into the rain.
The first run had slackened off by the time we got onto I-74 at Bloomington, which meant that it was now possible for Kelly to drive the speed limit.
I took out my phone and dialed Percy.
Kelly had already spoken to him briefly on her hands-free unit, explained the weather situation and that we were on the way, and so when he picked up he’d returned to his usual, somewhat civilized manner.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Almost to Carlock,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Let me give you a rundown. The neighbor called it in. A Jermaine Potts. Works nights in security over at Blue Moon Storage, that place over in West Peoria? He says he saw an Asian guy knock on the door and look in the window Thursday morning. His exact words were ‘this fat-ass Asian dude.’” Percy coughed. “Now, who does that sound like to you?”
“Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “Though he can’t be the only overweight Asian dude in the area.”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “Except his fingerprints are on the door.”
“Where did you get a match?” I asked. “Did you bring him in?”
“No,” Percy said. “The Quiverfull. When I got the statement from Potts this morning, I ran over there. They have prints for most of the kids who went through there in the 80s.”
“They fingerprint their kids?” I asked.
“They used to,” he said. “The state fingerprinted all the kids in Illinois back in the 80s. Don’t you remember I-Search?”
Something clicked at the name of the program, and then I remembered. I was eight years old. The entire class lined up and went down to the gym, and a police officer rolled my fingers in ink. We all thought it was cool. “That was supposed to be in case anyone was kidnapped,” I said.
“Exactly,” Percy said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Exactly,” Percy said again.
“Tell me about the body,” I said.
At this point Kelly looked over at me. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Tell him not to touch anything else. Tell him to-”
She reached over and grabbed the phone. “Percy, hold on,” she said.
She swerved a bit as she hooked up the headphones, and then attached the telephone to the console. We were driving across the Mackinaw River and got boxed in by two semi-trailer trucks fighting their way up the long hill.
“No,” Kelly said, holding the microphone up to her mouth. “I know.”
Percy said something.
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I’m going to be there in a half hour. They can wait. No-”
Percy cut her off, and she listened for a moment.
“No,” she said again. “They don’t get to do that unless I sign off. Then good. Then you tell them that.”
I heard Percy’s voice in the background, and Kelly listened for a long time. By the time she said something back to Percy we were almost to Morton.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”
She hung up, and I asked, “Tell me what?”
She sighed. “They ran Stevens' information though the computer, and that must have sounded some kind of alarm, because this afternoon a few guys from the State Police showed up.”
“State Police?” I said. “How does that work?”
Kelly shrugged. “I don’t really know how they do it, but the way it works is, if you want to track someone’s evolving criminal career, if they’re relevant to whatever you’re investigating, then you put some kind of automatic tag on them. That way if they get picked up in another jurisdiction, you know about it. Apparently it was big doin’s when Stevens was found dead,” she said. “The State Police are now officially present, in an advisory capacity, though knowing them, they won’t stick around. They’ll just send somebody over on Monday, once they get their paperwork through.”
“Advisory capacity,” I said. Kelly managed to get around the semis, only to hit another wall of rain, and had to slow down. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means Percy has to do whatever they say, or come Monday they’ll consider taking over the whole investigation.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“I�
��d say Stevens, Sweeney and Roe,” Kelly said.
“And not Colby,” I said.
“I don’t see why they would be looking into that,” Kelly said. “They’ve only got the one hit. And they don’t know about Stevens selling her the cocaine.”
She looked at me. “Not unless you tell them.” She left the rest unsaid.
“Oh,” she said. “And Percy says to let you know that they’re going after Nguyen today, as soon as he can get a search warrant. Apparently Stevens isn’t the one the State boys were looking for. They just hung the alarm on his file, because Tuan Nguyen is listed as a known associate of Jasper Stevens.”
“Percy told me he was at his house on Thursday,” I said. I shook my head. “Somehow I can’t see him as our killer.”
“Well, Percy will have to figure out that part,” she said as we left 74 and got onto 155. “But that’s not why they’re picking him up. The State Police want him for something else.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Child pornography.”
I stared at her a moment, and then looked into the back seat. The girls were still sleeping.
“What?” I asked. “Wait. I have to talk to Percy-”
“You can’t,” she said. “The guys from State came in while we were on the phone. He’s got to locate a judge. On a Saturday, and in this weather, there are really only two places you might find one: asleep in front of the TV, or drunk somewhere in a bar.”
Forty-Four
I dropped Kelly off at the morgue, which was in the basement of the cafeteria next to the sheriff’s department, and then drove the girls home.
Gabby McMurtry was spending the weekend at a water park somewhere in Iowa, and the two other babysitters Kelly called weren’t available, so we had agreed that Kelly would call me when she was done with the autopsy so that I could make whatever plans I was able to.
I needed to get in with Percy and talk to him, but I also wanted to run over to Rassi’s to see if he was at home. When we drove through Tremont, his phone was still going to voice mail, and after nearly two days of radio silence, I was beginning to get worried, beyond whether or not his suspension from the sheriff’s department would wind up being permanent.
