The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘It’s been four hours,’ Rigg said. ‘Why so long to send me pictures?’

  ‘Plenty happened after I got pictures of McGarry greeting you with a shotgun,’ Pancho Rozakis said. ‘He took a cab to O’Hare Airport right after you left. I followed him. Luckily, it must have taken him some time to decide on a destination. I was able to park and catch up to him inside. He finally bought a one-way to Paris. I couldn’t go past security, so I’ve been watching the board. His plane just took off.’

  ‘Pictures of him at O’Hare, too?’

  ‘Plenty. Check your phone.’

  He brought up the photos as he walked back to Aria’s doorway.

  ‘Breaking news?’ she asked.

  He selected one of the pictures and handed her the phone. ‘Charles McGarry at O’Hare a couple of hours ago, buying a one-way ticket to Paris.’

  She studied the photo. ‘This could have been taken anytime.’

  ‘Dial back a few photos until you get to him with a gun, ten feet from me.’

  She clicked back, nodded and asked, ‘This could have been taken anytime, too.’

  ‘Pancho Rozakis. It was his drone. He’ll corroborate.’

  ‘Still not enough.’

  ‘Probably, but notice the mound.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I set McGarry to running by suggesting I knew what was beneath it.’

  ‘Richie Fernandez,’ she said.

  ‘Forever on my mind.’

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’

  ‘I haven’t decided,’ he said.

  ‘Like hell,’ she said. ‘You’ll be looking through your famous wall of boxes for mention of Happy Times Stables.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s in there.’

  His shoes squeaked as he shifted on his feet. She leaned forward so she could see them. They were still wet and the leather had bubbled. ‘Aren’t your feet cold?’

  ‘I’m going to the shoe store down the block.’

  ‘Dinner afterward sounds fine,’ she said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  He awoke confused by the sunlight. He never woke to sunlight, not in his apartment, not since the cage began coming. But there’d been no cage this past night.

  He felt the floor for his phone. It was 8:15.

  She shifted beside him.

  Startled, he rolled over, thinking he was dreaming, hoping that the grandmother of all nightmares was over. Praying that Judith was there.

  Aria’s eyes were wide open, fully awake.

  He felt shame. ‘How the hell did we get here?’ he said.

  A slow smile formed on her lips. ‘I’m not memorable?’

  ‘It’s not that, it’s …’ He stopped. Her face was simply and totally beautiful.

  She smiled widely then, or, rather, she leered. ‘The living-room floor was too littered.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You asked how we got here.’ She rolled on to the floor and stood up, magnificent now in only pearls. He remembered exactly how they’d gotten there.

  She walked to his closet slowly, perhaps to not agitate the pearls, more likely to agitate his memory. ‘Why do you have nothing but white shirts?’

  ‘I got rid of most of my stuff.’

  ‘Everything even remotely festive?’

  ‘I was thinking of moving full-time to the dunes.’

  ‘And moving away from Chicago memories, I suspect,’ she said. She pulled a white shirt from a hanger. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, slipping it on with no haste at all.

  ‘In the cabinet above the stove.’

  A moment later, she called from the kitchen. ‘It’s instant.’

  ‘The kettle is on the stove.’ He got up and slipped on trousers and yesterday’s shirt, wishing for the first time since Judith died that he had a blue shirt, or red, or one of any other color except white.

  ‘Yuck to instant.’ She came back into the bedroom, picked up her clothes and walked into the bathroom. ‘Real coffee is essential,’ she called through the door.

  And so, now, would be searing regret, but he didn’t call that back to her.

  She emerged, dressed, a moment later. They left the bedroom and began stepping across the files they’d scattered on the living-room floor.

  He remembered then.

  ‘Peter Tanson,’ he said.

  She looked at him, startled to realize he’d just now remembered. ‘Of course, Peter Tanson,’ she said. ‘Peter Tanson, thanks to me.’ She went out the door without a kiss or another word.

  Peter Tanson. Horses, the Happy Times Stables, the vaguest note in one of his files. Peter Tanson.

  He knelt to cram all the files into the boxes, in a hurry to stuff them away as worthless. All except one, but even that one was unnecessary to leave out. He’d never again forget the name.

  Peter Tanson.

  He sat on the love seat to rethink the evening. Not what came with Aria afterward, borne of an odd conflict of elation and desperation, a mix that kept them up so late that the cage hadn’t the time to come – but before.

  He’d bought black Oxfords and a pair of socks at the shoe store down the block from the Pink, and then headed to meet her for dinner, as agreed, at a Chinese restaurant out by the highway. But, when he arrived, she was standing inside the door, holding a paper bag. General Tsao chicken, and pot stickers, fried rice and lemon chicken – takeout, she said, so she could see his wall of files. They got to his apartment at six thirty.

  ‘Minimalist,’ she’d said, stepping inside.

  ‘It used to have furniture,’ he said, of the living room.

  ‘Now it has only the love seat …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that tall wall of file boxes with a small television balanced on top.’ She went over to the boxes and began reading their labels. ‘“Discovery”,’ she began, and then, ‘“Autopsy” … “John Henderson, Senior: life and associates” …?’ She turned. ‘“Life and associates”?’

  ‘The father was in the building trades, a contractor. Not particularly wealthy, but successful enough, perhaps, to have angered someone along the way. It was a theory that went nowhere.’

  ‘Thorough you,’ she said. ‘What do you do with all these, exactly?’

  ‘Look for something I missed.’

  ‘Incessantly?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And now stables and Kevin Wilcox?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s no mention of them in any of the files.’

  She pointed to the only item hung on the walls – the framed front page of the last edition of the Chicago Daily News, its headline bold: SO LONG, CHICAGO.

  ‘March 4, 1978. Neither of us was born yet.’ She turned to him. ‘This resonates with you?’

  ‘A eulogy, almost an elegy, written by the great Mike Royko.’

  ‘We read it in college,’ she said. ‘Do you ever wonder if one will be written for the Examiner?’

  ‘I fear we’ll just slip away unnoticed.’

  They took down boxes and sat on the floor, resting their backs against the seat cushions of the love seat, and passed the four containers of Chinese food back and forth – she’d spurned his offer of paper plates and plastic forks, his only dinnerware – eating with chopsticks and looking through the files he’d looked through so many times before.

  She found it at ten o’clock, faint and easily missed. ‘What about this kid, Peter Tanson?’

  He didn’t remember the name.

  ‘On a list of Bobby Stemec’s classmates,’ she said, holding out a sheet. ‘You wrote horse rides next to his name.’

  He looked at the list. ‘It was just a note, something I probably got from someone else. I didn’t make any connection.’

  ‘Nor should you have. Nobody had interest in horses or stables at that time.’

  Something oily worked up his throat. ‘Anything in there about which stables … which stables …?’ He didn’t want to finish the thought, frightened at what he might have missed.

  She
fanned some papers, shook her head. ‘No. Just that one horse rides reference on a list of classmates.’ She smiled. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  He got up and walked – horrified or ecstatic, he didn’t know – to the kitchen. A kid, one he’d never bothered to chase down, might have been linked to the Happy Times Stables; a kid who might have known something about Kevin Wilcox. A link – maybe the link – had been there, in the damned boxes, all the time, waiting for him to see it, to interview the kid, Peter Tanson, to learn maybe that Bobby and John and Anthony had gone riding at the Happy Times Stables the last damned day of their lives.

  His hand shook as he took the Scotch from the cabinet. If he’d seen, maybe more kids – girls, this time – would be alive.

  He poured two small Scotches and brought them back to the living-room floor. ‘Why is my gut sure Peter Tanson knew the boys went to Wilcox’s stables?’ he said, slumping down against the cushions.

  ‘Because you want it to be so, for closure, and because the Happy Times Stables is so close to Robinson Woods, and because Glet is so sure Wilcox links to the boys.’ She took one of the glasses. ‘How long do you expect to live like this?’ she asked, motioning with her free hand at the barren living room, littered now with folders strewn on the floor.

  He looked around, trying to see it fresh with her eyes. ‘I haven’t wondered about that.’

  ‘You ought to store these boxes where it won’t be so easy to access them.’

  ‘If I had, you wouldn’t have come up with the name of a potential witness linking Wilcox to the boys, someone I should have found months ago.’

  He wasn’t sure what happened next, whether she shifted, or he did, but their shoulders had touched. And, after a time, she touched his hand and they got up off the floor. It was to be a night of frightening new discoveries all around. Good or bad, he could not tell.

  ‘This way?’ she asked.

  He nodded. They walked into the bedroom.

  She laughed. ‘Don’t you have a bed?’

  He tried to pretend confusion. ‘It’s that rectangle,’ he joked.

  ‘A mattress on the floor, no matter how neatly made up with a bedspread, does not make a proper bed.’ She turned to him, her face serious. ‘You’re still married, aren’t you?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Oooh, risky,’ she said. ‘I’m here with a married man.’

  Neither of them said anything more. The time for that, for him, had just passed.

  Now, in the morning, she called three minutes after she left the apartment. ‘Turn on your television! Route 83, just south of Plainfield Road!’

  ‘What’s—?’

  ‘Maybe three clustered freckles,’ she screamed.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GIRL FOUND SLAIN

  Milo Rigg, Chicago Examiner

  The naked body of a girl found early this morning by a couple hiking along a creek in the woods beside Route 83 has been tentatively identified as Tana Damm, 15, of Villa Park. She was reported missing six days ago by her grandfather, Jeffrey Damm, with whom she lived. Miss Damm was a freshman at York High School and was last seen alive by a classmate last December 29 or 30, leaving a McDonald’s restaurant on Route 83, 500 yards south of where she was found.

  According to an aunt, who also lives at the Villa Park home, Miss Damm had a history of running away. Authorities at York High School repeatedly inquired about her frequent absences, she said. Miss Damm last attended classes in early December.

  The victim had been decapitated. Acting Cook County Medical Examiner Cornelius Feldott supervised a brief, preliminary autopsy this morning. It failed to determine a cause of death, or whether the girl was alive at the time her head was removed, though Feldott said it’s almost certain she’d been dead for some time. A more thorough examination is scheduled for later today, to be conducted by the same forensics experts that were brought in for the autopsies of the Graves and Day girls. Miss Damm was found less than two miles from where the Graves girls were discovered.

  In a related matter, Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry – rumored to have become ill following the disappearance of Richie Fernandez, a suspect in the cases of a string of recently murdered girls – was spotted at O’Hare International Airport yesterday, purchasing a ticket for a flight bound for Paris, France. It has not been determined whether his departure was planned.

  Rigg watched Aria through the glass as she read what he’d forwarded to her. She looked calm enough and waved for him to come in.

  ‘Oh, what the hell are you doing, Milo?’

  ‘Reporting all the news that’s fit to print,’ he said, quoting some ancient newspaper’s motto.

  ‘You don’t know that McGarry was actually fleeing.’

  ‘I showed you the pictures Rozakis took at O’Hare.’

  She shook her head. ‘He bought a ticket for Paris. He could be on vacation. And, in case you’ve forgotten, Donovan told you to lay off McGarry. He’ll cut the McGarry part. Ah, hell,’ she said, tapping a key to send the entire piece downtown.

  In a perverse way, he was faintly relieved for the distraction of the latest discovery. Aria had gone home to change before coming in, and he’d left his apartment to race directly to the discovery site. Now, at the Pink, the bad breaking news swept away any opportunities for awkwardness about the previous night.

  ‘At least you were somewhat circumspect, only hinting at a connection to the other girls’ murders,’ she went on.

  ‘Another girl who disappeared at the end of December, found nude, decapitated like the last one, beside a shallow creek along a well-travelled road like the first two? When we learn Tana Damm has a tiny cluster of three freckles, the last unassigned physical mark on the yellow card, we’ll know it’s our man.’

  ‘Or woman,’ she said.

  ‘A woman?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘Women kill, Milo. Surely you’ve considered our killer could be a woman?’

  ‘I suppose it could be, though women serial killers are extremely rare.’

  ‘We’re more cautious,’ she said, fingering her pearls, ‘so that probably means it’s a man. A woman would have been more worried about being spotted and wouldn’t have dumped the boys and the girls so close to a road.’

  ‘Now who’s speculating? You’re linking the boys to the girls.’

  ‘Glet seems to be speculating, too,’ she said.

  ‘About more than the boys and the girls, apparently.’

  ‘You’ve got no progress on that?’

  He shook his head and stood up, anxious to leave her office before anything could be said about the night before.

  ‘Milo?’ she said.

  He stopped and turned back around.

  ‘You’re not overstepping, are you? Spooking McGarry enough to flee? Newsman becoming newsmaker?’

  There was nothing he wanted to say to that. The question no longer mattered to him.

  Glet hadn’t been at the discovery site that morning, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone. Corky Feldott was in his office, ever accessible, and said Rigg could come in for a chat. He got to the Dead House thirty minutes later.

  ‘You’re sure: three freckles, tightly clustered?’ Rigg asked.

  Feldott was nervous, close to being distraught. ‘Just as you expected, apparently. They look like one bigger freckle, behind her knee.’

  ‘Just like the yellow card said.’

  ‘Not for publication, Mr Rigg. Sheriff Lehman was firm about me insisting on that.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘This is a damned bad time for Mr McGarry to be off sick,’ Feldott said.

  Rigg brought out his phone to show Feldott some of Rozakis’ drone pictures. ‘I went out to his estate, brought him soup. He came out into the snow, spry as a chicken and, as you see, carrying a shotgun. After I left, he cabbed to O’Hare.’

  Feldott’s face froze. ‘None of this is on the Examiner’s website.’

  Rigg had checked the website befo
re walking into the Dead House. As expected, Donovan had clipped the mention about McGarry fleeing, as well as one of the photos of McGarry at O’Hare.

  Rigg showed him more of the photos on his phone. ‘McGarry has friends at the Bastion,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Has Mr McGarry gone nuts?’ Feldott asked.

  ‘Hard to tell. He didn’t take the soup, but he didn’t shoot me, either.’

  ‘What does all this mean?’

  ‘Nothing I’m able to report, apparently.’

  ‘Stop with the mysteriousness.’ Tiny beads of sweat had broken out on Feldott’s unlined brow.

  ‘McGarry blew town for Paris and, from there, who knows? I think you’re going to be medical examiner for a long time.’

  ‘Nobody signs up for this kind of grief,’ Feldott said.

  ‘This is exactly the kind of grief you sign up for.’

  ‘Not headless, for God’s sake. Not butchery, not young girls.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Northwestern prepares you for that sort of thing,’ Rigg said, glancing at the drawing of the campus on the back wall.

  Feldott fingered the day’s sleek, narrow tie, a yellowish thing with blue dots that hung a little too loose around his neck. The gesture reminded Rigg of the way Aria sometimes fingered her pearls.

  ‘Why wasn’t Deputy Glet there for the Damm girl this morning?’ Feldott asked. ‘Too busy at ATF?’

  ‘Don’t you talk to Lehman?’

  ‘I don’t think he knows what Deputy Glet’s up to. He always changes the subject.’

  ‘Speaking of changing subjects, what’s the status of comparing Wilcox’s DNA to the foreign DNA you got from Bobby Stemec and Johnny Henderson?’

  ‘The analysis is incomplete.’

  ‘How incomplete?’

  ‘Mr McGarry says no information is to be released—’

  Rigg held up a hand. ‘McGarry’s in Paris, damn it.’

  ‘He’s still in charge, even if nominally, Mr Rigg.’

  ‘Glet’s talking like he’s solid on Wilcox killing the boys.’

  ‘Not because of DNA results,’ Feldott said. ‘I told you: they’re incomplete.’

  ‘Any hope of recovering foreign DNA from Tana Damm?’