‘Much calmer than yours, I think. I’m getting phone calls from my fellow tycoons, asking if I know what’s going on with Tim.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I was shocked. And I’m going to stay publicly shocked until your name gets identified with the whole mess. Then I’ll say that this was obviously not a political dirty trick because you’re not a political hack, and because not even a neophyte would be loony enough to stage a body search the day before an election.’
‘Thanks, I think.’
‘You’re welcome, I think.’
‘Wade will tar you once the press links us.’
‘No, he won’t. I’m too rich and I’m too friendly with the others on his Committee of Twenty-Four. If the Wades are asked about my being married to you once, they’ll simply cluck and murmur and say none of this is my fault. As for the press calling, one particularly disgusting creature already has, that jerk from the Argus-Observer.’
‘Keller,’ I said. Rarely troubling to get the facts of a story, he’d trashed me years earlier when I’d been played in the fake evidence scheme. ‘Details to follow,’ was his signature tag line, though his columns rarely carried any factual follow-ups.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Details to follow,’ she said.
I laughed a little, and she hung up.
I got up, pulled the tangle of washer jugs from the river and threw them in the back of the Jeep. I had to take such stuff to a recycling center across the city line in Chicago because the lizards that ran Rivertown didn’t encourage the recycling of anything beyond parts stripped from newer cars.
News of the search at Wade’s estate spread fast on the Internet. Timothy Wade was well-respected and a potentially superb future presidential candidate. Most of the reports accepted the lead that Wade offered up in his video – that the search was a clumsy political dirty trick and that one particular Cook County sheriff’s deputy, a Sergeant Bohler, had been manipulated and played for a chump.
I wasn’t mentioned anywhere, nor was Amanda. That would change the next morning, when Keller’s column in the Argus-Observer came out. He’d report Amanda’s link to Wade’s campaign, my presence at the search site, and remind his readers that she and I were once married. Details to follow.
And from there, I would be oozed, much like the molten Peeps beneath my microwave door, into the news. Other reporters didn’t like Keller’s ethics but they respected the man’s nose for stink. They’d look past his innuendo and study the video recorded at the search. More than one of them would recognize me and remember my past involvement in the phony evidence scheme. And they’d recall that, as Keller said, I was once married to Amanda. Because of her new prominence in Chicago’s business circles, they’d summon up what was old and stupid about me, and infer, reservedly, about what might be new and stupid about me. The story would be dropped into the business news like spoiled meat. Amanda’s board of directors would go ballistic.
Amanda knew that. She’d simply been talking brave.
I keyed up the satellite photos again. Looking down at the sides of the Wade house and the long slope in back, searching it seemed ludicrous now. Too many trees had dropped too many leaves. Too many years had hardened the ground. And Timothy and Theresa Wade had always been too smart. Even as kids, they’d never have chanced burying Halvorson on their own land, just as now, as adults, they’d never risk planting John Shea there. If they’d even killed him at all.
And now the Wades, those smarties, had gotten me, Bohler, the press, and the whole Cook County Sheriff’s Department to shut down any further investigation of the Wades’ complicity in Marilyn Paul’s murder. No cop would ever again risk a career-ending embarrassment of investigating the Wades.
I moved the cursor to the woods across from the Wade estate, trying again to imagine why Jenny and Jimbo had been attacked there. Nine sheriff’s cops, including Bohler, had just combed the Wade estate. They’d found nothing troublesome at all, nothing that could have been caught by the surveillance cameras placed across the street.
Across the street.
The property across the road wasn’t big, perhaps six acres spanning the same width as the Wade estate. The woods were surrounded on three sides by houses built on half-acre plots. The undeveloped woods had to be worth millions.
I clicked over to the Cook County Assessor’s website. It showed that the property had been purchased in 1924 by an entity called 100 Partners. I did an Internet search on the name and came up with nothing. Whoever those hundred partners were, their heirs had been sitting on a small real estate fortune for almost a century.
I then looked to see what the assessor showed about the Wade estate. It had been owned by Timothy Wade and Theresa Wade since the deaths of their parents. Before that, ownership of the land and house had followed the expected progression, inherited down the generations by children from parents, going back to when the whiskey runner, Samuel Wade, Sr bought the land in 1924, the same year that the 100 Partners acquired the property across the street.
Both parcels had been purchased in the same year. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, for the whole plat could have been subdivided for development and offered for sale for the first time that year.
Not sure of anything at all, except the need perhaps to apologize once again, I called Bohler’s cell phone. ‘I think the Wades might own the small woods across the street from their house.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘How far-reaching is your warrant?’
‘It allows a search of all land and buildings owned or controlled by Timothy or Theresa Wade in Winnetka.’
‘Check the ownership of that land across the street. You might find the Wades own it under a dummy name. Send your team back to Winnetka.’
‘I’m meeting with my boss tomorrow morning, remember? By noon I’ll be writing parking tickets with Officer Gibbs.’
‘Blow off the meeting with your boss. Don’t give him the chance to bust you down before you can search that ground.’
‘Screw this,’ she said, sounding almost hysterical.
‘That land across from Wade’s estate is worth a fortune yet it remains undeveloped. It was purchased by something called the One Hundred Partners the same year Wade’s great grandfather bought his own land. I’ll bet anything the Wades own that land.’
‘Those purchase dates are probably just coincidence.’
‘I’m going to check it out anyway.’
‘Stay the hell away from that land, Elstrom,’ she said, sounding frantic now. ‘You’re going to make things ten times worse for me.’ She hung up.
I called Jenny. She picked up right away. ‘All set to fly?’ I asked.
‘I’m not leaving without regret,’ she said.
‘And ghosts?’
‘I’ll probably be bringing two now,’ she said with a small chuckle. Meaning, I supposed, that I’d become her newest ghost.
‘Where exactly did you get assaulted?’
‘I told you, already. Across the street from Wade’s house.’
‘I need to know exactly.’ I asked her to go to the same satellite website we’d used before.
‘See that cluster of three trees, sort of in the middle, the largest one being off to the right?’ she asked after a moment.
‘About fifty feet in from the road?’
‘That’s where Jimbo was standing. He’d mounted the second camera in that cluster because it gives an excellent sight of Wade’s front door.’
‘And an excellent sight from the guard shack, in reverse.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘How far were you from Jimbo?’
‘About five yards farther south.’ Then, ‘What exactly are you up to?’
‘I’ll tell you after dusk,’ I said.
‘I’ll be gone after dusk.’
‘You might hate me if you are.’
‘I could never …’ Then, ‘What’s going on?’
&nb
sp; ‘I’ll call you after dusk.’
SIXTY-EIGHT
Even if John Shea was buried across the street, it was going to be a crap shoot. Internet satellite photos can be old, sometimes three or more years. The trees would have grown; the terrain would have changed.
I parked on the residential side street closest to the southern edge of the 100 Partners property. Most of the houses that abutted the woods across from Wade’s estate had fences to keep deer out, but one dark house had a yard that ran back unobstructed to the tree line. I waited until the dusk was thick enough to move unseen but still light enough to check out the five likely spots I’d circled on the satellite photo. I estimated I had fifteen minutes, at the most, to scout for low growth or, even better, no growth at all.
I ran into the woods.
The closest spot was fifty feet in, a ragged clearing in a copse of seven trees. I’d brought a small shovel to jam into the ground. The dirt was hard. I ran on.
The second spot was in a direct line from the first, twenty yards closer to the road that ran in front of Wade’s house. It, too, was nestled in a copse of trees but the clearing was larger.
My foot sank two inches into the dirt as soon as I ran up. The ground was spongy, as if loosened by the last rain.
I stabbed my shovel at the ground to be sure the boundaries were far enough apart. It only took a couple of minutes to find a rectangle of soft earth, six feet by three feet. Nature doesn’t like straight lines but whoever had dug in this spot certainly had. It was enough.
By now, it was almost completely dark. I began to pick my way back through the thin woods, toward the row of house lights filtering through the leafless trees.
A twig snapped behind me. Before I could turn, he hit me square across the back, knocking me face down onto the ground.
And then he was on me, a fast blur in the dark, beating at the back of my neck with his fists. Raising my hands to cover my head, I raised my knees enough to buck him off. His hands grazed the soft skin of my neck as he fell away.
I pushed my heels hard into the ground, clawed at the ground ahead and found the handle of my shovel. Clutching it tight, I scrambled up to stand and swung into the dark. I hit something soft, like a belly or a neck.
He wheezed hard; I’d caught him but he was up, too. I swung again, hit nothing, threw the shovel where I hoped he was and ran for the house lights at the edge of the woods.
All I could think was that the Wades’ guards had guns.
He came crashing loudly behind me; he was following the sound of my feet. But no flashlight lit the night. I was as invisible to him as he was to me.
I slammed hard into a wall, the rough cedar crisscross of a fence. I stabbed a toe into its thick lattice, climbed up a foot, and another. He was swearing loudly, only a few feet behind me.
I pulled myself onto the top of the fence, rolled over and fell onto a flowerbed. A patio was ahead, lit with little lights.
He crashed into the other side of the fence, bending it toward me. I scrambled up and ran toward the little lights.
I tripped a motion detector and a high-wattage security bulb flooded the entire yard with bright light. I didn’t dare look back. I was lit up now, easy enough to shoot.
Twenty feet ahead, a woman stood looking out her kitchen window, lifting a telephone. Cops would come. Cops would be good now. Cops would be very good.
Other security lights tripped on ahead, and from the house next door. I ran between them, past the sidewalk and out onto the street. The Jeep was several houses farther down. I heard no one pounding behind me. I pulled out my ignition key. Fifty feet, twenty feet and I was there.
I jumped in, twisted the key and sped to the main intersection. Two cars were approaching from the direction of the Wade estate. I slowed, to be normal. Oh, please, I begged the night, let them be cops.
I turned the other way and drove slow enough to watch in my rearview mirror, coming up fast. They got to the intersection.
They turned in, lit up for an instant by the street lamp, before disappearing into the housing development. They were cops, running without their bubble lights.
Coming for me, but now I was gone.
SIXTY-NINE
My breathing had calmed enough by the time I got to the outskirts of Winnetka to pull over and call Bohler with the good news. ‘Your career is saved. We got the wrong woods. There’s soft ground the size of a fresh grave across the street.’
‘I’m done,’ she said.
‘I’m telling you, the ground is soft.’
‘Damn it, I told you to stay away from there.’ She was speaking fast. ‘If the Wades own that land their ownership will be impossible to trace. I wouldn’t be able to use any warrant, even if I could get one, for years. They’re powerful people, those Wades. If they find out you’ve been poking around across the street they might sue you and me for harassment. Stay the hell away, Elstrom.’ She hung up on me, maybe for good.
I stayed at the side of the road, thinking hard. The way she saw it made sense. I hadn’t tossed her a lifeline for her career; I’d offered up a chance to get in even more trouble. But the longer I sat, the louder the empty plastic jugs I’d fished from the river, tied with thick twine, beat in time with the idling engine, and against each other at the back of the Jeep.
Beating, too, with the beginnings of an inspiration.
I called Jenny. ‘Still in town?’
‘Until tomorrow.’
‘There’s a soft rectangle in the woods across from Wade’s place.’ I told her of the 100 Partners, my shovel and the guard who chased me. And I told her of Bohler’s refusal to take a chance on resurrecting her reputation.
‘You can’t blame her, Dek. And she’s right about the ownership of those woods. It could take years to untangle it and probably longer to find another judge willing to issue a new warrant.’
‘You once told me Jimbo stays up nights, listening to his police radio scanner.’
‘He says he gets the best stuff in the middle of the night when the crazies come out to play,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You shouldn’t leave tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Tomorrow is election day.’
SEVENTY
Jenny called me at five-fifteen in the morning. I was awake.
‘What the heck …’ Her voice disappeared into the sirens blaring in her background. ‘I can’t believe this!’ she yelled. Her voice vanished into sirens again.
‘Shout loud, Jenny,’ I said in a normal voice.
‘Dek?’ she screamed. ‘The woods across from Timothy Wade’s house are on fire!’
I expressed appropriate amazement.
‘Can you believe it, but then …?’ she asked, and then oddly, she laughed. ‘Luckily, it’s contained to a small patch. Someone phoned in an anonymous tip before it could spread.’
Her voice faded away. She was talking to someone there with her.
I picked up my travel mug and took another sip of Bohler’s excellent coffee. I was pleased to wait.
‘Anyway,’ she said, coming back to me, ‘Jimbo was listening to his police scanner. He was tuned to the North Shore, hoping for something new about the fuss yesterday, when the fire department radioed the Winnetka police, saying there was a fire across from Wade’s.’
‘I’ll meet you up there,’ I said.
‘Oh, and Dek? I called the cell number you’d given me for Sergeant Bohler, figuring at least she’d be interested in the fire. She wasn’t, not at all. She sounded afraid, just as you said a few hours ago. Gotta go. Bye.’
I already had my pea coat on. I took a last sip of coffee, put a Peep in my mouth to keep from whistling and walked out to the Jeep.
The flames were out by the time I got there, of course. I doubted they’d ever been big.
The road was blocked off. I parked behind the police tape and walked up. The gate to Wade’s driveway was closed. Strangely, I saw no guards. Jenny and Jimbo stood beside a fire
truck a hundred yards ahead, talking to a young fire department lieutenant. Two Winnetka police cars were parked a little farther on.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Who might you be?’ the lieutenant asked.
‘Insurance investigator and a friend of these folks,’ I said, smiling at Jenny and Jimbo. ‘I was supposed to meet with Miss Gale on another matter this morning but she called to cancel because of this. I thought I’d swing by.’
‘Nothing to see here,’ the lieutenant said.
‘Ah, but there is, isn’t there?’ Jenny asked him. She turned to me. ‘They say there’s a scorched shovel next to an odd patch of soft ground that might have been freshly dug, right at the point where the fire was set.’
‘Set? It was arson, perhaps to cover up strange digging?’
‘They think gasoline was carried in plastic jugs, though they’re all melted. They think the fire was reported by the arsonist almost immediately after it was set.’
‘He used thick twine, probably soaked in gasoline, as a fuse to buy him enough time to get away and phone in the fire,’ Jimbo added.
Jenny was watching my eyes. ‘To make sure the fire didn’t spread to the houses,’ she said.
‘Unusual for an arsonist,’ the young fire department lieutenant said. ‘Usually they want a big blaze.’
‘Any idea where he called from?’ I asked, because it was expected.
‘The pay phone outside the library. It’s only a half a mile down the road, easily visible to anyone driving here.’
‘Surveillance camera?’ I asked, because I really didn’t know.
He nodded. ‘A police officer just checked it. All we got was a blurry image of a man in a short dark coat with a wool hat pulled down over his eyes.’ He took a long look at my pea coat, one of what I was sure were many thousands in Illinois, and shrugged it off.
Jenny was studying my coat, too, but only for an instant. She looked up. The smallest of smiles had started on her lovely mouth.
Hidden Graves Page 22
