‘Donovan formed a limited partnership to buy the paper. The identities of the other investors are shielded,’ she said, but her eyebrows remained high. She knew something she wasn’t saying.
‘If Charles McGarry is among them, it would explain a lot,’ he said. ‘He needs McGarry’s cash, and I chased the man right out of the country …’
‘As I said, the identities of the other investors are shielded. But they do know each other very well, Milo.’
‘Donovan killing my Fernandez reporting to protect an investor would trash our credibility.’
‘It might not matter if he can’t meet his balloon payment,’ she said. ‘What’s in your new bag?’
He set the Ziploc on her desk. ‘Carlotta got another card.’
‘Blank on both sides,’ she said, picking it up. ‘Why?’
‘To get me to go to her house in the wee hours.’
She groaned. ‘For pictures?’
‘Even worse, I paused outside to raise a finger.’
She laughed hard enough to open a drawer for a tissue. ‘I’m sorry, none of this is funny,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘So, was it the killer again who dropped off the card, or some hound who got tipped about the yellow cards and saw a way to snap a picture to sell to the Curious Chicagoan?’
‘The lid’s on the yellow cards; there’s been no mention. I think it had to be the killer, like the first time, but now he’ll submit pictures anonymously to ruin my credibility.’
‘Maybe Donovan will frame one of you and your upraised finger to remind him why he should never have bought the Examiner. And you can hang one in your caboose, which is where you’ll be exiled for forever, to remind you of the journalist you’ll never be again.’ She leaned forward across her desk. ‘You need a huge story. You need to learn what Glet’s chasing. No idea what’s bigger than the boys and the girls?’
‘He won’t say.’
‘But he’s still acting solid on linking Wilcox to the boys, right?’
‘For reasons I don’t understand. He says the proximity between the stables and the forest preserve matters, but, according to Feldott, he doesn’t have DNA. I just tipped Glet to have Bobby Stemec’s classmates interviewed to see who worked for rides at the stables. He’ll come across Peter Tanson.’
‘He won’t do it himself?’
‘Too busy with that mysterious bigger stuff.’
She said nothing, and Rigg got the feeling that she was looking right through him, as if she couldn’t see him.
‘Aria?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I’m worried that Glet and his hack boss, Lehman, will drop the ball on the girls like they did on the boys.’
‘I’m hounding Glet to make a call. I need some digging.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, but she said it without surprise. She’d expected it.
‘You said you like risk, Aria.’
She stared straight back, forming a slight smile. ‘Wouldn’t that be … crossing a line?’
‘Risks often are.’
‘Poor Donovan,’ she said. ‘Call Lehman to come get the latest card before you break out your shovel. And see if you can make some progress on those other stories I’m expecting.’
He left her office, but he looked back through the clean glass and saw that she’d turned to look at Benten’s woods poster, and she was smiling full out now.
He called Lehman. He was put right through. ‘I got another yellow card. It’s blank on both sides.’
‘Those cards, they’re being left for you how, again?’
‘My car.’
‘Bullshit. You’re at the Pink?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll send somebody by.’
‘Have you talked to McGarry lately?’
Lehman hung up.
Rigg called Glet’s cell phone and this time got through. ‘You’re moving on my tip about the classmates?’
‘I got men on it.’
‘I got another yellow card. Lehman is sending someone to pick it up.’
‘What’s this one say?’
‘Nothing. Blank, front and back. Stick your nose in it, Jerome. See if Lehman gets fingerprints.’
‘Why send a blank card?’
‘To take pictures of me picking it up. How are you doing on my phone call?’
‘I’m on it,’ Glet said.
Rigg picked at the stack of stories he’d been dodging and was on the phone, interviewing the owners of a new carwash, when two of Lehman’s deputies came to pick up the envelope and the card. After that, he was to call a school district superintendent about the need for a new swimming pool in a high school, and then he supposed he ought to write something about a miserable stretch of road that contained a miserable number of new potholes. The afternoon ahead looked like what his career had become – a miserable road of potholes.
It was too much. Without a glance through Aria’s glass wall, he left. He drove into the city, found a cabbie who took ten dollars to call his dispatcher. Rocco Enrice was still on vacation or off sick or something.
There was yet another new desk man at the Kellington Arms who didn’t know a damned thing about any damned thing.
Potholes, every one of them, deep enough to stall a story.
He drove home. After climbing the exposed central stairs, he had the thought to go to the balcony rail and look out over the street.
Someone was there, in a black hoodie and a long black coat, beside a tree. A man or a woman, he couldn’t tell.
He stood still in the cold night air, knowing he was backlit by the new lightbulbs and totally exposed. The person across the street could have been out for a walk, or waiting for a ride, or doing any of a number of different, innocent things. Not all the people out in the night were evil.
He was tired. It was late. He went to his door and his Scotch.
TWENTY-NINE
The sun was out when he woke up. No cage, not anymore. Cops were interviewing kids, forging links to Kevin Wilcox. The arms that had beckoned in his subconscious had been satisfied.
Digging for Richie Fernandez, though, still beckoned.
Glet’s cell phone sent him to voicemail. He left his name and number and called the sheriff’s department. ‘Deputy Glet’s not in,’ the operator said, adding, ‘It’s Saturday.’
Saturday. Another Saturday. The second since the Graves girls were found.
‘Sheriff Lehman, then,’ Rigg said.
He was put right through, because Lehman couldn’t afford to be known for taking a Saturday off, not with the murders of four girls remaining unsolved, and because Lehman needed something from Rigg about the latest yellow card.
‘It would help if you were precise about how you got the card,’ Lehman said.
‘I leave my car open.’
‘You lie.’
‘Did you get anything off the card?’
‘Nothing; no prints. Nothing off the Ziplocs either; thought they must be your bags.’
Like last time, he’d switched Carlotta’s for new ones. ‘They are. I used gloves.’
Lehman clicked off.
Rigg called ATF and was told Deputy Glet was unavailable. He asked if that meant Glet was in. He was told it simply meant Glet was unavailable. He took that to mean that Glet was there. He drove downtown.
‘Jerome Glet?’ Rigg asked at the desk.
The guard checked his sheet. ‘Unavailable.’
‘Does that mean he’s here?’
‘That means he’s unavailable.’
‘Is Agent Till unavailable, too?’
‘Name?’
‘Milo Rigg.’
The guard shrugged, made a call. Rigg expected the dust – it was Saturday, as had been pointed out to him several times already – but the desk man surprised him. ‘Agent Till will be down in a minute.’
He wasn’t. Agent Till took a full half-hour to come down in the elevator. He hadn’t used the thirty-minute delay to spruce up. Even though it was a Saturday, he was wearing a brown
suit and brown tie – perhaps the same suit and tie that he’d worn to the presser a few days earlier. His white shirt looked to have been changed, though today’s seemed to be more yellowed than the one he’d sported the last time.
‘The infamous Milo Rigg,’ Till said, not bothering to extend his hand. He motioned to a cement bench against a blank cement wall. ‘What brings you here on a weekend?’
‘Jerome Glet’s investigation.’ He wanted no such thing. He’d come to breathe on Glet to make sure he made the call he’d asked him to make.
‘Here’s the update: we are progressing.’
‘On your gun case?’
‘That’s the only case that officially interests the ATF.’
‘You didn’t come down from your office just to tell me that.’
‘How can I locate Glet?’ Till asked.
‘He’s not here?’
Till shook his head.
‘Glet can be elusive,’ Rigg said. ‘I had to resort to coming down here in hopes of finding him.’
‘We scheduled an important status meeting on Wilcox for this morning, one that Glet would be sure to attend. He did not show up. I assumed illness, and had our secretary call his office and his cell phone. No answer, either one. When I was told you were here, looking for him, I tried his cell phone and his office again. Still no luck. Glet’s not one to skip a status meeting on his own prime suspect, even on a weekend.’
‘He’s working other cases, he’s fond of saying,’ Rigg said.
‘He could still answer his cell phone.’
‘Glet say anything about those other cases he’s working?’
‘You’d have to ask him about that.’ Till stood up. ‘Let me know when you find him.’
‘Best you phone before you knock,’ the ever-vigilant old crone next door said. Despite the cold, she’d stepped out from behind her weathered wood door.
Rigg stopped at the base of Glet’s front steps. ‘Why?’
‘Remember the last time you were here, you asked if Jerome had a sweetie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Remember I laughed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he might have got someone,’ she said.
‘You know this?’
‘Someone came around last night. Jerome, he don’t get visitors on account of his personality. Except last night. Someone came at nine o’clock, right up his steps to ring the bell.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Couldn’t tell. Long coat, hood or big collar or something. Could have been a man, could have been a woman. An escort whore, maybe. Even that slob must have needs.’
‘You just told me to call him first. You’re telling me the visitor is still in there?’
‘I didn’t see anybody leave.’
‘When did you go to bed?’
‘Maybe later than them,’ she cackled.
Rigg climbed the steps, rang the bell, and braced himself for the horror of Glet with a cigar, in a robe, perhaps with lipstick smeared on his cheeks and bite marks on the folds of his neck.
There was no answer.
He rang again. Still no answer.
He went through the gangway between the two bungalows, to the garage at the alley. He wiped the filthy window clean enough to see Glet’s black county car parked inside.
The door to the enclosed wood rear porch was unlocked. He went up the steps, went in and crossed to knock on the kitchen door. Hearing nothing, he tried the knob. It turned easily. He stepped inside.
‘Jerome?’ he called out. ‘It’s me, Rigg.’
The kitchen was a mess. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, a box of bran flakes sat on a porcelain-topped table next to a bowl of dried spaghetti.
‘Jerome, damn it – it’s me, Milo Rigg,’ he yelled.
The house gave up no response.
A back bedroom opened off the kitchen. It was furnished as an office with a yellow metal desk topped with plastic fake woodgrain, a black four-drawer file cabinet and a brown fabric desk chair that leaned forty-five degrees to the right.
Rigg stepped back into the kitchen. ‘Glet!’ he shouted, but, again, there was no response.
The dining room was empty – no table, no chairs, no chest for good dishes. Another bedroom opened off it. It held an old dresser and a scratched nightstand. A three-year-old calendar from a bank was tacked to the wall. There was no bed. Probably Glet had gotten what furniture was in there for free.
Rigg walked into the front parlor.
And found Jerome Glet.
THIRTY
Two Chicago cops in a blue-and-white SUV raced up first, followed five minutes later by Lehman, two of his deputies and two of Feldott’s forensics people. Corky came last, alone, white-faced, small and frail, looking like he was going to throw up. He wore no stylish, slender necktie that Saturday, but his shirt was a deep burgundy, the color of long-dried blood, as if he’d known the day was going to be bad.
Lehman must have been quick about claiming jurisdiction, because the Chicago cops left within minutes. Corky Feldott went in, but was out in a couple of minutes.
‘I’m no forensics man,’ he told Rigg. For a man running a morgue, it might have seemed a strange thing to say, but it was honest. He was the CIB’s kid, destined for bigger things.
‘Besides,’ Feldott went on, ‘what’s to see besides he blew half his head off?’
Rigg nodded. An instant’s look had been plenty before he bolted back through the house and out the kitchen door to call the cops. ‘But you’ll autopsy, right?’
‘Suicides don’t need much of an autopsy, but I won’t be in the room then, either.’
‘You better get used to this stuff. If McGarry never comes back, you’ll be in charge for a good long while.’
‘I can’t reach Mr McGarry,’ Feldott said.
‘Richie Fernandez,’ Rigg said. ‘You saw the pictures. Him with the shotgun, then at O’Hare, just an hour or so later.’
‘I still can’t believe that.’
‘When’s the last time you talked to Glet?’
‘Late yesterday,’ Feldott said. ‘I was upset.’
‘About what?’
Feldott turned to face Rigg. His eyes were glassy. ‘About nothing I can share right now.’
‘DNA?’
‘I can’t—’
‘Come on, Cornelius. The man’s dead. Off the record, if you like.’
‘It’s all so disappointing.’
‘Disappointing?’ It was an odd choice of words for a man just discovered dead. ‘Glet?’
‘Some time ago, one of our technicians confronted him where he shouldn’t have been. Down in the basement, outside the lab where we store the DNA samples. I called him to demand an explanation. Again.’
‘To demand to know what he was doing down there?’
‘He hung up on me.’
‘Are the samples OK?’
‘Johnny Henderson’s was missing.’
‘That’s the problem you haven’t wanted to explain?’ Rigg said. ‘Glet took it?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
‘You were able to have the foreign DNA taken from Bobby Stemec analyzed?’
‘It didn’t match to Kevin Wilcox,’ Feldott said. ‘We don’t know whose it is, so Deputy Glet’s taking a key sample was inexcusable, because now that sample is particularly vital. But yesterday, like previously, he lied, denying he took Johnny Henderson’s sample.’
‘And of course there are no samples from the Graves girls and Jennifer Ann Day,’ Rigg said.
‘We got nothing from Tana Damm either, so there are none from any of the girls. The Graves girls were scrubbed with bleach, and Jennifer Ann Day was too long contaminated by the oil residue that was in her barrels, so there’s nothing from any of the girls.’
‘Cautious, knowledgeable killer.’
‘You bet.’
‘Why would Glet take the Johnny Henderson sample? What would he do with it?’
‘I don’t know, but obviously
he was upset when I accused him of taking it.’
‘Are you seeing that as reason for killing himself?’ Rigg asked.
Lehman stepped out from the front door. ‘Your people are done in here, Cornelius,’ he said.
Feldott blanched even whiter as Lehman came down the stairs to join them.
Rigg looked down at the cement urns, domed white from the most recent snow. One recently snuffed cigar, standing particularly straight up from the crusted snow, reminded Rigg of the childish way he’d raised his middle finger the last time he left Carlotta Henderson’s house.
Nothing felt childish now. Despite what Rigg had seen inside the bungalow – Glet’s arm dangling above a revolver fallen to the floor – and despite Corky’s far-fetched suggestion that Glet had panicked at being accused of pinching DNA evidence, suicide was a non-starter. Glet wouldn’t have let a pup like Feldott intimidate him, let alone sour him into suicide. Glet was on the road to his own redemption, cocksure he was about to prove Wilcox was the doer in the boys’ murders. And, trumping it all, Glet was hell-bent on setting off fireworks on an even bigger case. A man aiming that high didn’t aim for his own head. His suicide had been staged.
Feldott walked quickly to his car. Lehman stayed at the base of the front stairs, next to Rigg.
With almost anyone else, Rigg wouldn’t have noticed. But Feldott was a lithe, streamlined young man. His clothes fit like they were custom-made. But, that morning, he had a bulge. He’d jammed something partway into his left coat pocket. It was one of the county’s distinctive orange and tan paper evidence bags.
Lehman didn’t seem to have noticed. ‘He’s just a damned kid,’ he said as they watched Feldott drive away. ‘Exactly how much did you see inside?’
‘I’m not good with shattered heads. I saw, I went out the back, I called the cops.’
‘You saw the gun?’
‘On the floor, and his right hand hanging down above it.’
‘I can’t stop you from reporting this, Rigg. All I ask is that you not sensationalize.’
‘Like Fernandez, you mean?’
‘This isn’t one of your fancies, Rigg, nor is it murder. Glet shot himself.’
‘Glet was on a roll, excited about chasing new leads.’
‘What do you know about those new leads?’
The Black Cage Page 17
