They talked for another hour. Drexel offered to get dinner for the three of them, but Vivaldi declined, saying she had paperwork to do before she could call it a night. He and Daniela thanked her for her work.
“So?” asked Daniela after Vivaldi had left.
“Let’s get Benoit’s work logs. See if we can find an alibi for him.”
“Sure.” She looked up at the corner of the conference room. “Another thing. A question, really.” She paused and pursed her lips. “Why not get IA involved?”
Drexel smiled. “Well, in some ways, Carl’s right—a painful thing for me to say. IA’s usually focused on misconduct or corruption crime. This is different. They don’t have this kind of investigative experience.”
“But?”
“Well, they should be looped in. The thing is, the head of IA. Do you know him? Darnett Waterson? He and Carl are rivals. Have been for years. Darnett’s got the upper-hand cause he’s a chief. Doesn’t stop Carl from trying to screw him. The commander’s playing the odds that Benoit’s innocent. No credit to the IA for clearing. And if he’s guilty, then all the glory to our commander. The potential prize is worth the small risk—at least in the eyes of Commander Carl Sobieski.”
“Jesus.” Daniela shook her head. “Forget I asked. Let’s hope we find an alibi for Benoit.”
Drexel hoped they would. For some reason, deep in his guts, he hated the idea that a fellow cop might have done this, but he was frightened how a lot of what he had been thinking about the killer matched Vivaldi’s profile and Benoit. Drexel rolled his fingers on the table. “We can get a warrant to get his call logs. See if there’s anything odd there. He wouldn’t know about it.”
“That makes sense. But we also need to talk to him without interrogating him. I think I know how to do that.” Daniela waited for Drexel to ask, but when he did not, she continued. “I know a detective in Missing Persons. Works on the same shift as Benoit, and they all go to Riggin’s after shift. I say we join the party today. Have a casual conversation with him.”
“I like it. What about Marshall’s surveillance?” He tapped the desk. “I imagine we can get a couple of officers to stick to the location to see if anything changes.” Drexel called the Captain of Patrol and asked if patrol officers looking for some overtime could be assigned. The captain agreed, so Drexel then texted Ton “no surveillance, definitely tomorrow.”
Daniela asked, “Who wants to tell the cap we’re looking for two now instead of one?”
“I’ll take the short stick on that one.”
“Thanks, boss. I’ll meet you at Riggin’s.”
As she walked out of the conference room, Drexel said, “And I’m writing all this in a report. Fuck the commander.” He thought he saw a smile cross her face.
Chapter 21
Riggin’s was a dozen blocks south of the station. The first floor in a four-story, red-brick building, the windows along the street brandished neon signs for Miller Lite, Coors, Sam Adams, and Budweiser. A large Open sign blinked on and off. Inside, the bar stretched along a third of the back wall with a scattering of tall tables in front of it. Booths and tables surrounded the bar in an L shape. Two pool tables surrounded by players stood on a raised platform with windows looking out onto the street. The double-doors to a kitchen broke the space between the edge of the bar and the tables. A group of patrol officers and plain clothes officers stood and sat in the bar section. A few of the booths were occupied, but this was a cop bar. Any cop or felon would know it upon stepping through the door. Drexel saw Benoit in the crowd standing and sitting around a large round table and Daniela at a standing table with another officer.
Drexel walked up to her and the tall, thin man. She turned her eyes away from the officer and smiled at Drexel. She looked back at the man. “Harrison, this is Detective Sergeant Drexel Pierce.”
Harrison’s long-sleeve, orange-striped shirt was tight, but not in a way intended to show off his build—rather, a man whose strength despite his thinness showed. He had a mess of blond hair, slightly darker eyebrows, and blue eyes. He extended his hand. “Ah, the famous Pierce.”
Drexel took it. Strong grip. He wanted to ask why he was famous, but thought better of it. “Perhaps you mean infamous.”
The man winked. “Perhaps. Harrison McCallum. I work the 0623.” The sixth district, twenty-third precinct. The Gresham area on the south side of the city.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Let me buy you guys a round. What’ll you have?”
Daniela went for Zombie Dust ale. Drexel looked at the taps and opted for a Honker’s Ale. After Harrison returned with their beers—including one for himself—they chatted for a while. Drexel learned that he hated to be called Harry, was an avid swimmer, and played left field on the police baseball team, the Finest. They managed to talk a lot of baseball before Daniela nudged the conversation back to why they were there.
Drexel looked over and saw Benoit moving to the bar for a refill. “Harrison, it was a pleasure meeting you, but I want to catch up with someone.”
Harrison smiled. “Pleasure’s all mine. If there’s a spot open in Homicide, let me know, okay?”
Drexel nodded and shook his hand. “You take the WQT yet?” The Written Qualifying Test, the first of two tests required to apply for a detective job.
“Taking it in the next go.”
Drexel smiled, turned, and walked over to the bar and stood next to Benoit. “Hello.”
“Ah, Pierce. Hello. I’ve never seen you here before.” The bartender poured some red wine into a glass and slid it in front of Benoit.
As he reached for his wallet, Drexel said, “I’ve got this round.” He looked at the bartender. “I’ll have another Honker’s.”
As the bartender pulled out a glass tankard and filled it with Drexel’s ale, Benoit said, “So what brings you around here?”
Drexel gestured with his thumb over his back back toward Daniela. “She knows that Harrison guy and dragged me along. Besides, I wasn’t going to say no to a beer.”
When the tankard arrived, Benoit held up his glass. “To drinks.” They clinked. “Santé. Any luck on finding who killed Brittany Day?”
“Not yet. We’ve got a good suspect, but not much in the way of evidence. He’s careful. It hurts us that he holds his victims for a while.”
“Tortures them?”
“No.” Drexel took a drink of his beer and licked the foam from his lips. “No. No injuries indicating anything like that. Other than the torture of holding them and killing them slowly. All the bodies are left at different sites.”
Daniela thumped her elbows on the bar and set down an empty tankard. When the bartender saw her, she pointed at it. “Zombie Dust.” The bartender nodded. She looked at Drexel and Benoit. “Living the highlife, eh?”
Benoit raised his glass. “Your partner is telling me about your case.”
“He’s not my partner. Just for this. Lone Ranger here usually works alone.”
“That so?”
Drexel nodded. “Never got along with people very well.”
“I find that hard to believe. You seem entirely agreeable to me.”
Drexel grunted.
Daniela peered around the bar to look directly at Benoit. “So how’s this for odd? You’re the investigating officer for all of our victims when they went missing.”
Benoit set his wine glass down and bit his lower lip. Drexel did not read any surprise in the expression. Benoit said, “How very strange. I hope you catch him soon before I am asked to investigate more missing persons he’s responsible for.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, I must be going.” He stood up, opened his wallet, and set two dollars on the bar. He said, “À la prochaine.”
After Benoit was gone, Daniela looked at Drexel. “Well, that bombed. He didn’t even blink.”
“Maybe that is our blink
from him. I don’t know.” He grabbed a few peanuts and washed them down with the last of his beer. “We should have his call logs tomorrow.”
Drexel left her with Harrison, who she kissed on the cheek as Drexel looked back before leaving Riggin’s.
* * *
Hart greeted Drexel as he walked into the apartment. He scooped up the cat and petted him a few times on the head before he scrambled out of his grip. The mail consisted of the electric and cable bills, which he left on the counter. The cable bill had ballooned after Ryan moved in. His brother insisted on the package with the most channels and the premium ones. He opened the refrigerator to find an assortment of vegetables and jars Ryan must have purchased recently. Shoving aside a clump of carrots, he grabbed a Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, popping off the top and pouring half of it into a cocktail glass. He did not see anything he wanted to make for dinner, so he called for a pizza. He grabbed his computer and sat on the balcony with the door open with his beer. He googled about the building in Streeterville. He finally landed on a set of results that seemed related.
Zora had died in July almost two years ago. His memories were so vivid the day he found her, he was always shocked when he forgot how hot and humid it had been until he started thinking it over in detail again. A string of elderly had died, and he stopped by a number of those homes, confirming nothing suspicious other than he lived in a city where people died from the heat because they could not even afford a fan. He had arrived home in the evening, the air still muggy and heavy. Then the memories he did not need a prompt for. Her arm was visible around the bar of the kitchenette. He knew then she was dead. He had seen enough death to know. Still, he raced around to the kitchenette and found her. She laid on her left side, her head on her outstretched left arm. Her right arm bent and resting on the floor in front of her chest. A small bruise on her right temple, where she had landed. A small pool of bile-laden vomit. Her eyes opened but unseeing.
One of his first collected thoughts as he had sat beside his wife’s body, waiting for the ambulance and police, was how she hated trying to fall asleep on her left side, claiming she could never get comfortable. After an appendectomy, she could not lay on her right for a couple of weeks, leading to frustrated nights.
He had seen death at its most gruesome and so had no illusions about the body. How even though the EMTs, medical examiner, mortician, and others in a long train of people would take every effort to treat the corpse with respect, it was still, finally, a body without life that would be abused by the medical examiner’s blade and the mortician’s hands as she was placed in a box for cremation. Zora was gone long before he deposited most of her ashes in Lake Michigan. She was gone before he walked into that nightmare evening.
The cause, officially, was a heart attack. But she was young and active. Drexel had not understood it, had not really accepted it. He had been in a daze. His suspicions mounted, but he had never been able to find evidence of any wrongdoing. Shortly before a woman who plummeted to her death, she told him she had seen proof that Zora was murdered. Drexel then determined that this time, he would not stop until he had all the answers.
Zora had died a week after taking the photo of the Dewitt building. Google had found a number of links to articles in the Tribune, Sun-Times, and other media outlets. The narrative was a familiar one. Developers wanted to replace the old building with a new building, taller and with more condos and apartments than the old. They wanted to charge more, but existing residents of the old building proved recalcitrant. One of them even had the bright idea of submitting the building to be a historical landmark. The building developed a sudden tendency to lose power or water pressure. Things started to break and took a long time to get repaired. Violence appeared more often than normal, including in the hallways. At first slowly and then in a flood, the tenants started packing up and moving out, many losing money in deals in their rush to escape. The landmark request stopped in its tracks due to obscure bureaucratic red tape, arriving at the desk of the decision makers weeks after the building had succumbed to the wrecking ball. The request was shredded. The oversight cited to bureaucratic error.
All of this was familiar to Drexel, who had seen it on his beat in the Ukrainian Village years before. The power of the developers, unions, and construction companies combined with corrupt officials in the city sounded no new notes or melodies. He had busted a couple of officers years ago who had dressed in plain clothes and were breaking windows in a building for pay by a developer seeking to pressure the current tenants to leave. But now, he wondered if what Zora captured on film is what got her killed. She may not have even known what she was seeing. Or she did. He threw his head back against the couch. It was all speculation, and he knew it, but he could not help it. He looked up contacts on the computer. He had kept all of hers. He found her old boss, Sally Roche, at the Sun-Times. He last saw Sally at the memorial service. He emailed her and apologized for not keeping in touch and then asked what was the last assignment Zora had been working on.
He ate a final slice of anchovy and cheese pizza, washed his hands, and grabbed the photo from his bedroom. He stared at it a long time, but it offered no answers. He heard the front door open and walked out to the living room, dressed in sweat pants and a thread-bare “Han Shot First” T-shirt.
“Howdy.” Ryan was still dressed in his Plumber Savior uniform.
“You’re home late. There’s leftover pizza in the fridge.”
Ryan opened the refrigerator, removed the box, clinked a plate from the cabinet, and started the microwave. He pulled out two Honker’s Ales, popped open the tops, and handed one of the bottles to Drexel. The microwave dinged, and his brother poured some buffalo sauce over the pizza, grabbed his beer, and walked out to the balcony. Drexel followed him out.
Between bites, Ryan said, “This lady said she had a small leak. Nothing big, but she couldn’t find it. I get in there, and there’s pots and bowls and cups lined up from the living room to the downstairs bath. And drops of water are landing in each one pretty consistently. I mean we’re talking a dozen or so of these. I ask her, ‘How long has it been doing this?’ ‘A year,’ she says. A fucking year.” He shook his head and placed the edge of the pizza crust on the plate and picked up another piece of pizza. “I had to tear apart half the ceiling’s drywall to replace the pipe.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Beautiful night.”
It was. The glow of the city rose up the edges of the night’s dome. A few stars—disembodied loners plucked from their constellations—dotted the sky. Drexel sat and closed his eyes. Traffic on the streets. Sounds of children in the nearby park—playing under the lights of the diamond. A buzz, a hum scorched through every pulse and sensation. He and Zora had often wondered what it would be like to live away from the urban, out in the more lonely, quiet plains and fields of the Midwest. They usually laughed it off because Chicago was too much a part of them. Only on the occasional Florida beach holidays had they escaped. Even then, feet in the sand, sun on the face, and falling asleep in the most peaceful sleeps he had amongst the sound of waves against the shore, even then, he could never let go of the electricity of the city—the call of steel, concrete, and glass.
Ryan took a big gulp of beer. “I read some more of the Gnostic book.”
“Anything interesting?”
“The whole damn thing is interesting. I didn’t realize there were so many competing Christian sects. The Gnostics were a pretty big one. I mean, it’s almost not Christianity. At least not the way we think of it. They were declared heretics for good reasons. But they flourished regardless until emperors picked sides. Everything’s a dichotomy with them. Good and evil.”
“The Gnostics?”
Ryan nodded.
“How much have you read?”
“I’ve skipped around. Read a lot of the Cathar stuff. You know there was a crusade against them?”
Drexel nodded.
“In Langued
oc—someplace in southern France. Anyway, at the last siege, when the leader of the crusade was asked about sparing the lives of the Cathars and being able to distinguish Cathars from honest Catholics, he said, ‘Kill them all. Let God sort them out.’ Brutal man.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. They were pissed about a lot of things, but when the Cathars kept going with the idea that Jesus was not real—in a ‘physical’ sense—that really sent the pope over the edge.”
“Not real?” Drexel put his feet up on the railing and took a long draft from his beer.
“Yep. Think about it. If the physical world is bad, then how can the perfectly good Jesus be of the physical world.”
“Any thoughts on how this relates to a serial killer?”
“Nope. Maybe the guy is looking for esoteric knowledge, wants to touch the divine or some shit like that. How the hell do you tell anyway?”
Drexel sighed and stared out across the space of sky in the center of the complex and let his eyes drift upward. “You can’t tell. I’m just hoping for a clue, anything that might give me an idea of what he’s up to, what’s next. How to stop him.”
Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2) Page 18
