He found his pants on the floor, his shirt in the living room. He opened the door barefoot.
Four uniforms stood outside. Two Cook County sheriff’s deputies, one Winthrop County deputy and Winthrop County Sheriff Olsen.
‘Milo Rigg,’ Olsen said.
‘What the hell?’
‘I’d like you to accompany us.’
Rigg rubbed his eyes, unsure if he was dreaming.
‘Milo?’ Aria appeared ten feet behind him, wearing one of his shirts and, most obviously, nothing else. Except her pearls. Always her pearls.
She was no dream. He turned back to Olsen. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘With or without handcuffs?’ Olsen said.
Aria walked up to stand next to Rigg. ‘What’s the damned charge?’
Olsen met her stare. ‘You are?’
‘An editor of the Chicago Examiner, in charge of making sure travesties get posted online immediately. What’s the damned charge?’
‘No formal charges yet,’ Olsen said to Rigg, ‘but, if we do file, it will be for arson, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence – and those are just for openers.’
‘Whose fire?’ Rigg asked, but it was for show. Now he understood the previous night’s call.
‘Cuffs, or no cuffs?’ Olsen said.
‘I need clothes,’ Rigg said.
Aria, challenging, taunting, confronting, tousled and so obviously naked beneath Rigg’s shirt, didn’t step back from the cops when Rigg turned to go into the bedroom. The two Cook County deputies and Olsen stayed put – the deputies grinning, Olsen remaining taciturn. Only the Winthrop County deputy frowned, when he was directed to leave the view to follow Rigg.
Rigg found socks, shoes, a clean shirt and the small digital recorder he carried everywhere, and came back to the living room in two minutes.
There were two police cars parked down in the parking lot, neither with bubble lights flashing. Olsen gestured for Rigg to get in the back of the Winthrop County car, and then got in the front beside his driver. They followed the Cook County car around the building and on to the street.
‘What fire?’ Rigg asked again, because he supposed he should.
‘Not without recording your statement,’ Olsen said.
The drive was short. They parked in back of a Cook County sheriff’s branch office and went inside. One of the Cook County uniforms pointed to a door and Olsen led Rigg inside. It contained a small laminate table pushed against one wall, and three plastic chairs. Rigg took one, Olsen another, and they were alone, except for whomever was watching behind the mirrored glass on the wall.
Olsen took a small digital recorder from his pocket, identified himself, Rigg, the date and time, and began. ‘Mr Milo Rigg has voluntarily agreed to be interviewed. Is that correct, Mr Rigg?’
Rigg took out his own digital recorder, switched it on and set it on the table. ‘What fire?’
‘Where were you last night?’ Olsen asked.
‘At my apartment, with a guest who will testify to that.’
‘Let me be more precise. Where were you last evening, in the early evening hours before ten o’clock?’
Rigg smiled at the small camera mounted on the ceiling and turned back to Olsen. ‘A muffled voice called, telling me to drive to McGarry’s estate and wait. I did. I parked so I could see the ground where you couldn’t find McGarry unassisted.’
‘No idea who called?’
‘The fire was at McGarry’s, right? A fine, destructive fire?’
‘You were seen at the property.’
‘I saw none of your officers driving by, as you said they would, nor did I see the private security Corky Feldott hired. Whoever buried Fernandez, if indeed he remains buried on McGarry’s estate, could have been working a bulldozer and your people would have missed the abduction of evidence.’
‘You’re not very observant. One of my deputies was pulled off, down the highway.’
‘Then he can attest to my being parked along the side road for forty minutes, and that I then left without doing anything.’
‘Just two outbuildings were torched,’ Olsen said.
‘Obviously not to destroy Richie Fernandez.’
Olsen nodded. ‘No corpse was found.’
‘Whoever killed Fernandez – think Lehman – wouldn’t need to burn buildings to destroy the corpse. He’d already know where Fernandez’s body was, there or somewhere else. There was another motive for last night, which was to get me spotted out there immediately before the fire was noticed – but you knew that, Sheriff.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, Rigg?’
‘How to do your job, to begin with. Don’t wait for the snow to melt. Find Fernandez’s body or satisfy yourself that he’s not there. If he’s not, be on the alert for a John Doe corpse to show up somewhere. And then find proof that Lehman killed him.’
‘You used to be hell-bent on getting us to dig for Fernandez at McGarry’s. Now you’re telling us he’s not there?’
‘McGarry’s emergence from the ground changed my thinking. He had to be silenced. He was put where Fernandez had been, but Fernandez could be more useful if he was discovered somewhere else. His DNA will match to something placed on Bobby Stemec’s foreign DNA in the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Fortunately, that won’t let Kevin Wilcox off the hook for the boys’ murders. There’s testimony that places Stemec, at least, at the stables, where he traded work for rides.’
‘So Lehman wasn’t your caller?’
‘It was someone else, someone with different motives.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m getting close,’ Rigg said.
‘Close to what?’
‘Traces.’ There was no doubt: the word was growing on him.
Olsen gave it up. He and his deputy drove Rigg home in silence. As Rigg got out, Olsen powered down his passenger window. ‘Keep an eye out,’ he said.
Rigg nodded. ‘I think the killings of the girls have stopped. They served their purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘I don’t know, but I am sure their murderer wants no more risk. He wants things tidied and done.’
‘That’s you, Rigg. He wants you tidied and done,’ Olsen said.
‘Not if there are traces,’ Rigg said, voicing what was growing stronger in his mind.
‘What are these traces you keep mentioning?’
‘Glet must have left traces of what he knew.’
Olsen signaled his deputy to pull away.
Two hours had passed. Aria was gone, but traces of her remained. She’d made his bed and tossed his old shirt in the hamper, but the shirt she’d worn so fetchingly that morning was carefully laid out on the bedspread, as if to signal that she expected to return soon.
He felt a flicker of joy, the first he’d felt since before Judith was killed. But then he felt guilty. Feeling joy was disloyalty.
The chant of an old Beatles song began playing in his head, something about life going on. Now it came mockingly, asking him to choose between memories of the past or hopes for the present. He pushed the song away.
He set water on the stove to boil and opened the cabinet for a cup. They’d bought a set of six, each in a different color, right after they married. It occurred to him now that he’d only ever used the yellow one and Judith had only ever used the green. The rest – the red, the orange, the blue and the white – had always been pushed against the back of the cabinet, unnecessary and unneeded, because they’d never had anyone over to their apartment. Always, they were each other’s best company.
Aria had tidied the cups. She’d pulled them all forward, the used among the never used, and aligned them neatly in a row with their handles pointed outward. He reached up, pushed the green one, Judith’s cup, to the back of the shelf where it could not be seen. The day was to be the first day of his exile from the Examiner, and so, perhaps, it should be a day of other new beginnings.
The kettle whistled. He reached past his usual
yellow cup and took down the orange one. New beginnings. He took the coffee to the love seat to consider again what he’d hinted to Feldott, Aria and now to Olsen. Surely there must be traces – notes or documents – of what had excited Glet. Almost certainly there’d been the Richmond Labs’ DNA confirmation of Wilcox as the boys’ murderer. It had made Glet confident that Wilcox was the boys’ killer. But if Glet had left any trace or proof of that, it had not yet surfaced.
And then Glet had brought in a soda pop can and a paper cup for later analysis. And that was what puzzled. Rigg had searched Glet’s house and his car, but found nothing, though that might have meant only that Lehman had found things and that they were now locked away. Traces of those might be impossible to find.
But nobody needed to know that.
He finished his coffee and went down to his car.
FORTY-ONE
He called the Pink before he got on the expressway.
‘Milo, I … I …’ Eleanor stammered.
He managed what he hoped was a reassuring laugh. The word of his exile was out, though he doubted Aria had tipped anyone that he’d been snagged for questioning that morning.
‘A mere pebble on the rocky road of life,’ he said, and asked to speak to Aria.
She picked up immediately. ‘Arson?’
‘Two of McGarry’s outbuildings were torched last night.’
She inhaled sharply. ‘Lehman, destroying evidence of Richie Fernandez?’
‘No. Even if Richie Fernandez is still buried at McGarry’s, Lehman would know exactly where and wouldn’t need to torch multiple buildings to destroy the body. Plus, he wouldn’t want to draw new attention to the site.’
‘You still believe Lehman took Fernandez away.’
‘To resurface later. His DNA can still be compared to the Stemec slide.’
‘Who set the fires?’
‘Somebody who panicked. I have no motive to torch anything. I got hauled in this morning only because Olsen wanted to know what I know.’
‘You’re sure you have no idea who called you?’
‘Only that it was the girls’ killer, desperate to divert attention.’
‘About what?’
‘Traces I’m uncovering,’ Rigg said. It was not yet a lie.
‘You keep saying “traces”. What traces?’
‘Just pass that on to Donovan,’ Rigg said, shamefully sure that she had to be used like everyone else. Everyone had to be played to get one person to believe. ‘Tell him I’m going to make Glet speak from the grave.’
‘He won’t publish you, because of the Curious Chicagoan photos.’
‘Someone else will. Tell him that, too.’
‘Damn it, Milo. What have you got?’
‘Not until it’s all exposed.’
‘Give it up, Milo, for your own safety,’ she said, her voice rising.
‘It’s almost over,’ he said, because, for the first time, he thought he knew just how to make that happen.
He drove to the Kellington Arms, not so much because he expected to find new witnesses to the Fernandez bust, but because he wanted to kill what was left of the afternoon without thinking anymore of what he planned to do.
A new desk man was dozing at the counter, two new denizens slept upright on the two lobby chairs. Rigg headed upstairs. Just Wally was long gone, likely to another of the flops in Chicago. Rigg peeked in his room anyway, but it was empty except for the stained mattress and box spring leaned against the wall, and whatever lived within them.
He worked the floors, spent the afternoon and the first part of the evening going up and down the halls, tapping gently on doors and asking those who answered if they knew Richie Fernandez. He struck out, door after door. In the vernacular of the neighborhood, nobody knew nothing.
He hadn’t eaten all day. He drove to the Rail-Vu.
‘Trouble?’ Blanchie asked, thirty minutes later. ‘You’ve been frowning at your laptop the whole time.’
‘Always trouble, Blanchie,’ he said. He’d combed the Internet for any fresh mention of the girls’ murders, but the cases had gone as cold as Fernandez. With Glet dead and Corky Feldott not yet started up, the case was in a dead zone.
She took away his untouched hamburger. There was always trouble enough to go around. He headed home.
Turning down the one-way street to come into the parking lot from behind, he caught movement on his top-floor landing. He killed his lights, pulled to the curb and leaned forward to see through the windshield. The new exterior light bulbs were too dim to illuminate much beyond creating faint, long shadows, but it was enough. One of the shadows outside his apartment door was moving.
He eased his car door open, got out and ran in a crouch to the parking lot and the car parked closest to the back of the central staircase.
Footsteps padded softly, coming down, and then they went silent. The shadow had gone through the walkway to the front and out to the sidewalk.
Rigg followed to the front and peeked out. A hunched figure was hurrying away. Rigg got to the sidewalk just as the shadow turned into the darkness of the next side street. He ran down the sidewalk, his footsteps muffled by the thin blanket of snow still covering the cement, and got to the next corner just as headlamps appeared from midway down the block. He ducked into the shadows of the building on the corner. The car came up, blew through the stop sign and drove east, toward the city. It was a dark car, a four-door Chevrolet Impala sedan. It had no markings on its doors, no extraneous trim on its side, but it was the sort of sedan that was used by Cook County officials.
Like a cop’s.
Traces. Someone might already have believed.
He went back to his building and up the stairs. His door was locked, but a cop would know how to pick a lock and then to remember to reset it.
The place looked as it always did, stripped of almost everything that reminded him of Judith. It would have been easy to search without leaving a trace – search for the traces Rigg had begun saying that Glet left behind. He’d told it to Feldott, who would have passed it on to Lehman and any number of other co-workers and cops. He’d told it to Sheriff Olsen, who could have passed it along, unknowingly, as well. He’d even told it to Aria. Any number of people now knew about the traces Rigg was supposedly on the verge of discovering. It was his hope. And now someone had come, risking exposure to find out what Rigg had found. That had been his hope, too.
He hurried through his apartment to be sure. His dresser, his socks, underwear and white shirts looked undisturbed. His suit and black tie hung neatly in their usual place – orphans, not used since his wife’s funeral.
The kitchen was as he’d left it. The four mugs that Aria had so neatly aligned remained as they’d been, up front, their handles in perfect symmetry. The green cup – Judith’s cup – was farther back, where he’d pushed it, out of sight. The orange cup he’d used that morning was where he’d left it on the counter.
It was the living room that had changed. The top two rows of file boxes were too neatly aligned, resting too precisely on top of the ones below. They’d been searched, for traces. Nothing had been found. That did not mean that someone would not come again, someone who knew how to beat information out of people.
And there was something else. His visitor had come out just as Rigg was approaching the parking lot. Such a close escape could have been lucky timing.
Or not.
His apartment was no longer safe. He threw clothes in a duffel, drove to a Walmart that was open all night, and sat in his car in the parking lot to think, and maybe to sleep.
FORTY-TWO
Carlotta’s first yellow card nagged during the night. That it listed the marks on all four girls was necessary to establish the credibility of the sender as their killer. But Anthony Henderson was from another time, another killer. His birthmark didn’t belong on that list, except to link the murders of the boys to the killings of the girls. The sender had wanted credit for both sets of murders, but the sender hadn’t known ab
out Wilcox when he delivered the first card to Carlotta.
Rigg could only think that pointed to Lehman and McGarry; McGarry had had access to both the boys and the girls in the morgue. They’d set off to frame Fernandez first for the boys, and likely then for the girls.
Unless it pointed to someone who set out to frame them.
He worked that theory on and off during the night but could make no sense of it.
He’d thought of other things that night, too – things he could make more sense of, things he could plan. By eight o’clock the next morning, Rigg was sure there was only one next step. He called Pancho Rozakis and then he drove into the city.
He knew the war zones south of the Congress Expressway from years of reporting. He knew about the eyes beneath the hoodies on the corners and the other eyes behind the drawn curtains in the houses that still remained. He knew that all those eyes would take him for law; stupid law to be coming so early. It couldn’t be helped. What he was seeking was gotten best in the dark, but that wasn’t one of his options. Things had accelerated; traces were feared. What he needed, he needed fast, without paperwork, identification – and without questions.
He bought it at a corner, a kid’s personal piece. A nine-millimeter Glock with two extra clips. The kid, no more than fifteen, but wiser to the ways of the neighborhood than Rigg could ever be, gave him a hard look. ‘Ever shoot one of these, man?’
‘Sure,’ Rigg said, but it had only been once, and that was for a story. It had scared him.
‘Don’t make no difference,’ the kid said. And that was the truth of the transaction, the way of so many such transactions in Chicago, the way so many bullets got fired so easily and so randomly, sometimes finding people merely laughing on an expressway, hundreds of yards away.
He called Greg Theodore before he walked across the street to the Dead House. ‘Glet was murdered,’ Rigg said.
‘Who did it?’
‘Not quite ready to say,’ Rigg said, like he knew.
‘But you know?’
‘Glet was chasing something huge.’
‘So he kept saying. Do you know what that was?’
‘Not quite ready to say about that, either,’ Rigg said.
The Black Cage Page 23
