“Righty-o.”
Drexel stuffed the phone in his pocket and kept pace behind Marshall. Three blocks down, the suspect turned left, crossed the street, and walked half a block and stopped before a church. He bounced the Bible in his hands two times before walking up the steps and entering. Drexel walked by the St. Matthew Confessional Lutheran Church. The sign outside listed a Bible meeting at 8:00 p.m. that night. The “p” hung only by the top-right corner. He called Ton and told him to meet him in the diner across the street from the church.
Drexel entered the diner. Red-cushioned booths were mirrored by the chairs. A long bar stretched away from the street windows to the back. A black man wearing an apron smiled at him as he poured coffee in a sturdy ceramic mug. Drexel secured two seats at a booth with a view of the church entrance. Ton joined him a few minutes later.
They ordered loaded cheese fries and pops and waited.
“So what’s your theory?” Ton bit into a steak fry dripping with bacon, cheddar, and ranch sauce. “Damn, that’s good.”
“I think he went to Bible study.”
“Hah hah.”
“I don’t know. We have so little to go on. Whoever killed those people, it’s definitely ritualistic. It may be acting out some religious perversion or something. But whatever it is, it ain’t Christian.”
“I guess it depends on what you mean by Christian?”
“What?” He agreed—the fries were excellent.
“Well, I mean, it’s not the Christianity you and I grew up with. But there’s a lot of variances out there. Have you heard of the Holy Grail?”
“Yeah, the cup Christ drank from or something.”
“That’s the traditional interpretation, yeah. The cup from the Last Supper. But there’s a whole set of evidence out there that what you and I know about the Grail is wrong. All wrong. The Grail wasn’t a cup. It’s a person.”
More of the conspiracy babble thought Drexel. He finished off his pop.
Ton continued. “Jesus didn’t die on the cross. He married and had a kid. And that kid is the Grail. Well, more properly, the bloodline of Jesus is the grail.”
Drexel could not help himself. “You mean descendants of Jesus are alive and well today.”
“Yes. And they’re being protected from the Catholic Church. Think about it. If Jesus is alive, it undermines the very foundations of the Church. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross, then what’s the point, right?”
Drexel shook his head. Ton continued to elaborate on the theory and its implications for Europe and Christianity as a whole. Two coffees appeared eventually, and Drexel paid the check as Ton rambled and they both drank. At 9:04 p.m., a number of people exited the church, Marshall among them. He shook hands with a few of them and then started walking back toward his apartment. Ton and Drexel repeated their earlier tail in reverse. Marshall walked back by the same route and entered the apartment complex. Ton and Drexel waited until 2:00 a.m. before calling it a night, by which time, Drexel had been thoroughly schooled on the conspiracy of the Grail.
* * *
Back at his apartment, Drexel petted Hart and crashed in bed. His alarm woke him at 6:00 a.m., and he let himself hit the snooze once. He skipped shaving but showered. He put on a light-blue Oxford, light brown pants, and a dark brown sport coat. A cardinal-colored tie, thinner than he usually wore, completed the ensemble. The tie—as so many of them were—was a gift from Zora. After receiving several as gifts or “just because” as she used to say, Drexel realized he could never remember the occasion on receiving them, so he had taken to writing on a slip of paper the date and anything notable, which he clipped to the tags with paper clips. This particular tie she had bought him for his birthday four years ago. She was hoping to bring him more into fashion, she had said.
In the kitchenette, Ryan was pouring a cup of coffee. Hart was in the windowsill looking over the central garden area. “Morning,” he said. Bacon sizzled in a small skillet.
“Morning.” Drexel walked around his brother and to the sink. He grabbed a mug from the cabinet and filled it from the carafe full of coffee. He poured in sugar and half-and-half. As he drank it, he petted Hart, who purred. “Smells good.”
“Yeah?” Ryan flipped four slices of bacon with a fork. “Over-easy?” He set a smaller skillet on the stove and turned on the burner.
“How are you having them?”
“Scrambled.”
“Same for me.” Drexel sat at the bar seat and held the cup of coffee in his palms.
Ryan whisked the eggs with a fork and poured them into the skillet, stirring with a wooden spoon. “Remember when mom would make this with bologna instead?”
Drexel did. As the bologna cooked, it bubbled into a bowl shape, which she then placed on toast and filled with scrambled eggs. His brother slid a plate of eggs, two slices of toast, and two slices of bacon toward him. Drexel buttered the toast and bit into it. “Thanks. I remember when you doused yours in ketchup.”
Ryan grimaced. “Yeah. I was a young fool.” He pulled out a jar of strawberry jam and slathered his toast with it. “I was going through all those digital photos of Zora’s last night.”
Drexel looked at him but did not say anything.
“I was looking to see if I could find the other parts of that one you found at the restaurant.”
“And?”
“I found it.” Ryan opened the laptop sitting on the counter and turned it so Drexel could see it. What Ton and Drexel had found was the bottom-right corner of a larger photo, one of nine blocks. He could tell by looking at the way she took the photo that she had intended the blocks to be kept together as a group. However, an artist’s intentions mean nothing once the audience has it—so she had said. In the full picture, the top of the man’s head was covered by a fedora. The brick building extended to the edge of the photo. Rows of windows filled up much of the space for the building, which looked like one of many old-style apartment buildings built in the earlier part of the twentieth century. At the far right was a street sign, which Zora had colored very lightly with red. Delaware and DeWitt. A corner in Streeterville.
Drexel shook his head. “I can’t believe you found it. How?”
“Brute strength. Seriously, I just clicked through photos until I found it.”
“That’s thousands.”
Ryan shrugged and scooped the last of the eggs into his mouth. “Have to get to work.” He patted Drexel’s shoulder on the way out.
Drexel finished his breakfast, stroked Hart’s back, and then rode the L to State Street station. He walked the few blocks to Delaware and DeWitt. Nothing matched the photo. No brick buildings. Just high-rise steel and concrete. He had hoped to see what she had seen, to trace the echo of her steps. Afterlife is the memory of us recalled in the living. If he had a creed, it was that. And here he hoped to trace a bit of her.
He looked east out toward Lake Michigan. A cloudy day.
Chapter 13
At the station, Drexel filled a cup with cheap coffee and walked into the conference room. The whiteboard was too empty, reminding him of how little information they had obtained. He fretted they were heading the way of the Green River Killer or many other serial killers where years, indeed decades, passed until a mistake or a long chain of evidence finally pointed to a perp. Or worse: the Zodiac Killer or the Monster of Florence. He rubbed his head and sighed audibly.
“Rough day already?” Victor stood at the threshold of the conference room.
“It’ll get better.”
“Where’re we at with our perp, that Marshall guy?”
“We’ve still got nothing other than those fingerprints. That may be all we get. And it’s probably too soon to call him our perp.”
Victor nodded. “I think it’s time to talk to him, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
Daniela slipped b
etween Victor and the doorjamb. “Yes. And I think I found our latest victim.”
Drexel sat upright.
She pulled off her light-blue jacket and tossed it on an empty chair. She rubbed her head. “I kept pouring over the MPU files. And I found this.” She laid a folder on the table and then shoved it, sliding it across the table to Drexel.
He opened it. “Jodi Schmidt.”
“Last seen on July fifth last year. The fingerprints match to her university records.”
“Both of our victims are affiliated with a university somehow. Brittany with Chicago and now this one?,” said Victor.
Drexel opened the file. “She worked at DePaul. In their finance department. Not a student though.”
“Last seen with Kyle Jones. ForeverMate.com date. Her boss at DePaul reported her missing and the police did a welfare check on July eighth.” Drexel opened the calendar on his iPhone. “July fifth was a Friday. The eighth was a Monday.”
“No signs of a break-in or anything at her apartment. But that doesn’t mean much, I don’t think,” said Daniela, “given that Brittany was nabbed off the street.”
“We’ve got a list of friends and family here?” He flipped the pages and saw a basic list. “I think we should talk to them first. Let’s flash Marshall’s photo to them. And to the Days. See if we get anything that we can leverage on him.” He scratched his chin. “Maybe even rule him out.”
Victor patted the doorjamb. “Do it.”
* * *
To speed up the task of gathering information about Jodi, Victor allowed Drexel to task fellow detectives Kendall Starling and Jameson to conduct interviews of Jodi’s friends and co-workers. Connor would research possible connections between the victims by reading all the reports, witness statements, and conducting other research. Drexel and Daniela would inform Jodi’s parents and interview Kyle Jones. He gave each detective a copy of Jodi’s file and a picture of Brandon Marshall. After doling out the assignments, the detectives each took his or her copy of the file and sat down to review.
Jodi, twenty-six, had worked at DePaul’s Finance Department for two years. Prior to that, she had completed her master’s in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Outside of not being able to find a job in her field, life had seemed normal. She dated. She partied on Friday and Saturday nights. She worked. She had saved some money and was preparing to go to Costa Rica with her friends in September, but disappeared two months prior. No steady significant other. She had joined ForeverMate.com last year. The details of her disappearance were thin, at best. She told her friends she was going on a date with Kyle Jones on the night of July fifth. They were meeting at El Sitio at 8:00 p.m. She had called her friend Rebecca at 7:45 p.m. The call lasted five minutes. Witnesses in the restaurant had seen Kyle and Jodi at their table until 9:30 p.m. as well as on the sidewalk outside the restaurant a few minutes after they left El Sitio. Kyle had been cooperative and insistent that he and Jodi had parted outside the restaurant and that was that. He had not intended to call her again. At 9:48 p.m., Jodi called Rebecca again. The call lasted two minutes. Jodi, apparently alone, appeared on a camera in the ATM from across the street from 9:30 to 9:50 p.m.
Drexel and Daniela took Congress Parkway, which merged onto the Kennedy Expressway going north. A single-car accident near the Ohio Street exit brought traffic to a crawl. Beyond that, the pace increased to normal late-morning traffic. They exited onto Diversey Avenue and headed west. The Just Like Home manufacturing plant and headquarters, where Jodi’s father worked, sat behind a bank off of Oakdale Avenue. Just to the south, St. Hyacinth Basilica’s three red-brick towers loomed over Jackowo, part of the Polish Village. The domes atop the lanterns seemed flavored by the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches.
The plant itself, from the outside just deserving of the name, was a squat, box structure. Drexel guessed it was a converted retail store. The front entrance had a shape he recognized but could not recall what it reminded him of. At the front desk, they indicated who they were and that they wanted to see Ted, Jodi’s father. The receptionist, dressed in light blue jeans and a Just Like Home yellow polo shirt with her name—Tricia—embroidered beneath the logo, called back for him, and while Drexel waited, he asked Tricia about Just Like Home. The company, which made skin creams and bath soaps, had begun out of the owner’s apartment, just a few blocks away. It had grown over the past year from two people to forty-five, shipping its signature product, Just Like Home Anti-Aging Cream, as far away as Los Angeles.
Drexel asked if there was a conference or other private room they could meet in with Ted. Tricia frowned and her shoulders dropped. “Is it about Jodi?”
He nodded once.
“The owner is traveling and her office is just down the hall. I’ll let you in.”
They followed her down a short hall to the right of the entrance. She unlocked the door and reached in to turn on the lights. “I’ll bring Ted down in a moment.” She walked back to her desk.
Drexel stood before the cabinet displaying various creams, serums, shampoos, and conditioners and a picture of what he presumed to be the owner standing with the mayor, shaking hands and receiving a plaque. The plaque sat next to it and read “In Honor of Exceptional Entrepreneurial Spirit.”
“You’re wanting to see me?”
Drexel turned around. Ted Schmidt was average height, with light brown hair enriched with gray and a week’s growth of beard. His face was rugged, and his nose was large and flat. He wore a Just Like Home ball cap, light blue jeans, and a yellow polo shirt. A safety mask hung by its rubber band around his neck. His light brown eyes were moist, and he licked his lips nervously. Drexel walked over and extended his hand before introducing himself and Daniela. “Can we sit down?”
They sat, and Drexel broke the news. Ted pulled his black-framed eyeglasses off his face and rubbed his eyes, shaking his head. He looked up and his lower jaw quivered. “I knew something awful happened to my Jodi.” He stood up, sat down, and held his lips together tight and by force of will. “Are you sure it’s my girl?”
Drexel pursed his lips and nodded once. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Schmidt.” The words, as they always did, hung weightless. Words embedded with good intent, seeking connection, but in the end powerless to puncture through the grief. Drexel offered to call his wife, but Ted shook his head no, Mrs. Schmidt had passed the previous year from leukemia. He let him cry for a few minutes before having to cut him off, to engage him in finding his daughter’s killer. Ted knew she had been using ForeverMate.com, and he had warned her to be careful. She had assured him she was. He did not know about Kyle Jones. He knew she had enjoyed her job, and everything had seemed to be going well, but it was not her ambition.
“What was her ambition?” asked Daniela.
Ted smiled and shook his head. “After the Costa Rica trip,” he put his hand to his mouth, grief threatening to overwhelm again. He inhaled, and shook his head once and pulled on his mouth, distorting his lips before letting go. “After the trip, she was going to apply to doctoral programs. When she was in school before, she didn’t want to do that. But being at DePaul daily, I think she got it that she wanted to be an academic. She loved college life.”
Drexel showed Ted the picture of Brandon Marshall. “Do you recognize him?”
Ted took the picture in his shaking hands. He stared at it and then shook his head. “No. Is he—is he the—”
“He’s a person of interest only.”
Daniela let the receptionist know they were leaving, who sat with Ted as Drexel closed the door behind them. Once at the car, they stopped and grabbed falafels from a nearby restaurant Daniela had heard about. After they finished eating, she said, “It doesn’t get any easier, does it?”
Drexel shook his head and stared out the windows to the street.
* * *
Daniela drove them northeast to Edgewater, where Kyle ha
d a second-floor condo at Winthrop and Ardmore Avenues, walking distance to the beach. Other than speeding and parking tickets, the Chicago police had had no significant encounters with Kyle. Drexel presumed Kyle was not at home, and he was correct, so he left Daniela with the car and told her to sit on the place and wait for him to show. He called the Day residence, spoke to Whitney, and confirmed they would be home for the next few hours, so he took the Red Line at Bryn Mawr station. As he passed from the north through downtown to the south side, he watched the sky and the building of clouds—white oval cotton balls. They invaded like a squadron of fighters from the northwest against a brilliant blue sky. When he did think about something else, it was of Zora’s photo, how she had taken it just days before he found her body on the kitchen floor. He could not help tying importance to that fact even as his mind fought the urge. He got off the Red Line at Garfield station, where he hopped on to the Fifty-Five bus, which cut across Washington Park, the cricket fields north of the route and then just north of Stagg Field.
He walked down Kimbark Avenue to the Days’ home, enjoying the tree-lined streets and red-brick buildings, many covered with ivy. Some trees were just budding, green nodules their only signs of surviving the winter. Others, eager to capture the warmth and sun, were fully bloomed. He paused at the sidewalk leading up the Days’ porch. Looked up at the tree leaves fluttering in a wind he could not feel himself. He nodded once, walked up the door, and rang the bell.
Jeffrey opened the door. “Detective, please come in.”
Drexel walked in and turned as Jeffrey closed the door.
Brittany’s father gestured to the right. “We’re in the living room.”
Cheryl sat beside Whitney, and a man Drexel did not know sat in a dark leather club chair, sucking on an e-cigarette. Whitney stood up. “Hello, detective.”
Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2) Page 11
