The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Jack Fredrickson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Recent titles by Jack Fredrickson

  A Milo Rigg mystery

  THE BLACK CAGE *

  The Dek Elstrom mysteries

  A SAFE PLACE FOR DYING

  HONESTLY DEAREST, YOU’RE DEAD

  HUNTING SWEETIE ROSE

  THE DEAD CALLER FROM CHICAGO

  THE CONFESSORS’ CLUB *

  HIDDEN GRAVES *

  TAGGED FOR MURDER *

  Other titles

  SILENCE THE DEAD *

  * available from Severn House

  THE BLACK CAGE

  Jack Fredrickson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Many thanks to Mary Anne Bigane, Eric Frisch, Ted Gregory, and Terry Riley for helping to smooth this story. Special thanks to Sara Porter and Penelope Price for their superb editing of this project.

  This first world edition published 2019

  in Great Britain and 2020 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Fredrickson.

  The right of Jack Fredrickson to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8916-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-657-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0355-7 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Susan

  For what was,

  For what is,

  For what will be,

  For forever.

  ONE

  The color had been sucked from everything, not just the dead.

  The sky, about to drop new snow, had clouded into charcoal, rubbing away the horizon. Both ends of the two-lane country road, narrowed into a ragged ribbon by the jumble of dark official vehicles, had disappeared into the gauze of gray mist rising from the sudden melt, unusual for late January. It was what the melt had revealed.

  A mud-spattered red ambulance idled low in the center of the rough stone bridge that crossed the Devil’s Creek. Fifty people milled about: cops in blue uniforms and ball caps, others in suits and dark trenches; television cuties in clingy coats and cameramen in cargo jackets and big-pocket pants; and a few print reporters. They crowded the north side of the bridge, kept back by a steel guard rail scraped bare by the bumpers of beer-buzzed teenagers and factory workers drifting home late from the taverns in Joliet. Most looked away, but some kept staring directly down into the ravine, transfixed by the horror.

  They lay nude, like contorted marble mannequins, whiter than the melting snow. Beatrice Graves – at fifteen, the oldest – was on her right side, her knees drawn up as though against the cold. Priscilla – three years younger, but already taller – lay on her back, across her sister’s head, as if slung to form a rough cross. No obvious signs of trauma were visible.

  Milo Rigg made notes of none of it. After a quick glance down into the ravine, he moved back along the edge of the woods. He knew most of the uniforms and the detectives and the reporters, and they knew him. He wasn’t there to report. He wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

  A fat hand shot out to squeeze his upper arm from behind. ‘What the hell, Milo, back on the beat?’

  Even under the overcast sky, the fake diamond on the man’s pinky sparkled cheap – a fraud, like the sheriff’s most senior deputy himself. He’d come up like a panther, silent behind the cars parked along the road.

  Rigg shrugged himself free. ‘Glet,’ he said.

  The deputy made a show of studying him. ‘You’ve dropped what, twenty pounds?’

  It was closer to thirty, the last time he’d owned a scale. And that was months ago, right before he’d given away most of his and Judith’s things, hoping to rid what was left of his life of some pain.

  ‘Just clean, honest living, Jerome,’ Rigg said, stepping back from the foul cigar that smoldered in the man’s other fat hand. ‘You need to try it.’

  There was need for that. Jerome Glet was pushing sixty. His dirty black trench tugged at the buttons like he’d gained Rigg’s thirty lost pounds. The deputy had been heavy before, but now he was a mess, and not just from the weight he’d piled on. New furrows cut into his cheeks, his hair was grayer, and, despite the cutting wind, sweat was beading on his pasty pallor. Glet was dragging demons, too.

  ‘So, what gives, you being here?’ Glet said.

  ‘I was in the neighborhood.’

  Glet smiled at the lie and gave his cigar a wet suck. ‘Still living on some damned dune in Indiana, drifting into town half-time to write non-news, uncredited, for the Examiner’s daily suburban stuffer?’

  ‘You can relax, Jerome. I’m not reporting this,’ Rigg said, without adding that, soon, he might not be working at all. The Examiner’s next round of cost cuts was rumored to include its suburban outpost, known at the Bastion downtown as ‘the Pink’.

  ‘Yo
u’ll always be Milo Rigg, conscience of the unavenged.’ Glet’s anger still festered, like that of most of the cops milling about this newest discovery site. Most had turned away when Rigg walked up, though a few had given him the acknowledgment of a frown.

  Rigg gestured at Joe Lehman, Cook County sheriff, keeping back the throng stomping their feet against the cold, like tethered mules. ‘Your boss is not letting them trample the crime scene?’

  ‘Not like last time?’ Glet wheezed. ‘Live and learn, Milo. Live and learn.’

  ‘What, exactly, is not like last time?’

  ‘This ain’t a repeat,’ Glet said.

  ‘Naked kids found by water is new?’

  ‘These girls ain’t bruised. Not a mark on them. Bobby Stemec and the Hendersons, they were battered.’

  ‘Nice you still remember, Jerome.’

  ‘We’re still chasing leads on them, but, for now, I’m seeing only two dead girls. So should you queens.’

  Glet was dreaming if he thought the three queens of Chicago’s newspaper trade – the Tribune, the Sun-Times and Rigg’s own Examiner – wouldn’t touch back to the still-unsolved killings of three boys, the October before last. The memory of those murders still grated raw in the minds of every praying parent in Chicagoland. Pressure to solve these two new kid murders, related or not, was going to howl at the county’s sheriff’s and medical examiner’s departments fiercer than the winds icing Lake Michigan.

  At the bridge, Sheriff Lehman began waving people back so the two EMTs could lift a gurney over the guard rail to get down the shallow embankment. Lehman made sure to face the television cameras as he did so, every bit a posturing showboat.

  ‘The girls were found exactly like that?’ Rigg asked, trying to keep his old fury out of the words.

  ‘Up yours,’ Glet said, his face flushing with fresh sweat.

  Rigg had nicked one of the deputy’s big nerves. Fifteen months earlier, a television cameraman had recorded Glet repositioning Bobby Stemec and the two Henderson boys, supposedly for a better look before the sheriff’s forensics team arrived. Glet had needed to do no such thing; he was preening for the lens.

  The video went viral. All six of Chicago’s local television news shows broadcast it later that evening. Hell rained down on Glet and his boss, Lehman, for ruining the crime scene. It was merely the beginning of their bungling.

  The ambulance men lifted Priscilla Graves from across her sister’s head, set her on her back on the gurney and started up the embankment. Her legs remained frozen together, but her rigid, wide-flung arms began flexing gently up and down from her shoulder joints, as though they were wings and she was attempting to fly away. A young blond man in a camel-colored wool topcoat noticed the grotesque movement. He grabbed a blanket from the ambulance, jumped the rail and held the blanket down to cover the girl’s arms as the attendants lifted her over the rail. It helped. Priscilla’s arms continued to beat, but less noticeably, as the blond man and the two attendants made their way to the ambulance.

  ‘Johnny-on-the-spot,’ Glet said of the young man. After the girl was loaded into the ambulance, Glet gave the young man a wave, motioning for him to come over.

  ‘Milo, have you met Mr Feldott?’ Glet asked, a small smile forming around the wet cigar.

  In stark contrast to Glet’s greasy appearance, Feldott was dressed more for an Ivy League alumni dinner than a death scene. He was slender and no more than five foot eight. Visible beneath his camel overcoat were sharply creased black pinstriped trousers, a spread-collared white shirt and a narrow, bright red necktie that centered the whole ensemble like a flaming exclamation point.

  The young man offered up a wide grin and stuck out his hand. ‘We’ve not had the pleasure,’ he said.

  Rigg shook the hand. He knew of the Cook County assistant medical examiner from several long, laudatory features in the Examiner. A product of a working-class suburb and scholarship private schooling, Corky Feldott had attracted notice when those that moved and shook Chicago jammed him down the throat of the hack that ran the county medical examiner’s office just days before the Stemec Henderson murders. Rumor was, he was being prepped to ultimately become governor.

  ‘He was lucky,’ Glet said, placing a paw on Feldott’s shoulder. ‘He wasn’t here long enough to get slapped around when you were beating on the rest of us during Stemec Henderson.’

  Feldott shrugged Glet’s hand from his shoulder.

  ‘You’ll autopsy today?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘Tomorrow, if they thaw,’ Feldott said, ‘but please don’t report that they’re frozen. Too gruesome.’ He turned then and saw that the EMTs had descended back into the ravine. He hurried to join them.

  ‘Not much younger than you, Milo,’ Glet said, ‘but so much prettier.’

  It was true enough. Rigg was thirty-five, only several years older than the impeccable Corky Feldott, but, since Judith, he felt like he was pushing eighty.

  ‘He’ll make sure things are done right?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘Bet your ass. All by the book.’ Glet reinserted his cigar and headed up the center of the road, decades ahead of, and miles behind, a young medical examiner dressed in better clothes than anyone should wear to a discovery site.

  Snow began to fall in big wet flakes, like tiny shrouds descending to cover the horror of what had been found there. The two EMTs knelt down to lift Beatrice, frozen fetal from rigor and cold, on to the gurney. Feldott grabbed the blanket from the ambulance, went down and covered her. Keeping her on her side, for it would be nightmarish to roll her on her back with her knees frozen up in the air, the three men carried her up the ravine to the ambulance and slammed the rear door.

  Glet made his way down the embankment and helped the forensics team unfurl a yellow plastic tarp over the site where the bodies had lain. Other cops and sheriff’s men came over the guard rail to fan out into the woods and down to the creek, trampling another crime scene. Unlike the Stemec Henderson fiasco, this time the trampling could not be helped. The melt was about to be covered with fresh snow.

  It was pointless, Rigg thought. The girls had most likely been tossed nude from an idling car by people who knew not to leave even clothing behind.

  He watched for a while more, until the air turned colder and the snow came down harder, brittle and cutting like little daggers. He began to shiver, maybe from the cold, maybe from the mess of the last investigation, most probably from the sight of the two girls who’d just been discovered. And he supposed he shivered from Judith because he always shivered from Judith. He tugged his coat to his chest and headed back to his car.

  TWO

  It was four o’clock when Rigg got to Elm Grove, a blue-collar suburb two towns west of Chicago. The Examiner’s branch office was in a windowless concrete tower above a windowless ten-lane bowling alley, which was itself above a bank on the ground floor, which did have windows but rarely any customers. The building was made of concrete, poured gray in the late 1920s but darkened almost black over the next ninety years by diesel soot from the bus yard next door. Rent for the walk-up, third-floor tower space – formerly a beauty salon until the elevator blew its bearings and was deemed too expensive to fix – was cheap.

  The Pink’s entire staff, such as it was, was in the preposterously pink-walled and pink-floored newsroom. There were two other reporters, both part-time, kindly women past retirement age who kept track of bridge scores, weddings and the like; the receptionist who doubled as the copy editor for the terse paragraphs jammed online and in print between advertisements, also elderly; and the supplement’s relentlessly smiling advertising salesman, dressed as always in a conflict of plaids – and they were all huddled in front of the old television. The discovery at Devil’s Creek was being broadcast on the early evening news.

  Harold Benten was not quite among them. The supplement’s editor, 140 emaciated pounds of leathered skin, limp white hair and rheumy eyes, sat in his usual cloud of cigarette smoke behind the filmy glass wall that separated him
from his small staff. As always, his office thrummed. Once a place for shampooing and toxic hair dying, the room now pulsed from an exhaust fan laboring irregularly on worn bearings, now to rid the air of Benten’s carcinogenic cigarette smoke. Nothing could be done about the two black, curved sinks plumbed into his side wall, but Benten had moved the leaned-back red vinyl shampoo chairs to the front of his battered, black metal desk to serve as guest seating. Money had not been spent to enliven the Examiner’s satellite operation.

  Benten raised a nicotine-yellowed finger to motion Rigg into his fog.

  For once, the editor’s desk was barren of anything except the cigarette smoldering in the huge, overflowing yellow ashtray that sat atop a burn-pocked linoleum desk pad advertising a heating-oil company. Like Benten himself, the desk pad was a throwback to the time when most people needed heating oil, desk pads and newspapers. Benten’s empty desktop signaled he’d lost his appetite for work, likely sitting, smoking and staring at nothing since word came that the Graves girls had been found cast off a bridge. He carried the demons of the unsolved Stemec Henderson murders, too.

  ‘Dumped nude, like the boys?’ Benten asked, not pretending to wonder why Rigg had showed up for work on a Monday, a day early, or where he’d been.

  ‘In a ravine next to a dribble called Devil’s Creek, if you can believe the name.’ Rigg sat on the front edge of one of the red shampoo chairs, careful not to set the tired chairback into an almost inescapable full recline.