The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  Four days later, a body was spotted caught in a dam along the Rock River, just a few miles north of McGarry’s estate. The cold had preserved him. He was about five foot six and dressed in stained, worn blue work pants and a brown plaid flannel shirt with a torn chest pocket. He was unshaven. His face was black and blue and contorted. He’d been beaten. He’d died screaming.

  Winthrop County’s medical examiner supervised the extraction. The man’s rigor had undoubtedly relaxed, but the cold kept him stiff. He was placed in a beige vinyl body bag and taken away in an ambulance.

  ‘We can only hope his DNA is in the database. If not, he might be Richie Doe, dead at the hands of persons unknown, for forever,’ Olsen had said when he called Rigg.

  ‘You’ll have an artist’s sketch.’

  ‘Of course,’ Olsen said. And so it went. He let Rigg tag along when, at Rigg’s insistence, he brought the sketch to the diner, though he told him to wait by the door.

  ‘Richie Fernandez,’ Gus the grill man said.

  ‘Richie Fernandez,’ Lucille agreed.

  Just Wally had moved out, of course, and no one else at the Kellington Arms admitted to knowing Richie Fernandez. The woman at Apex Screw Products wouldn’t look at Rigg as she swore to Olsen that she’d never seen the man in the sketch. Rocco Enrice had quit his apartment and stopped driving a cab.

  Two days later, the Winthrop County medical examiner issued a finding that, although the dead man’s DNA was not found in any government or ancestral databases, a sketch of him was tentatively identified as Richie Fernandez by the owners of a Chicago diner. He’d been submerged too long in the river to offer anything like foreign DNA to point to whoever had beaten him to death.

  Equally disappointing, the Winthrop County M.E. had previously issued a separate statement that no usable foreign DNA had been found on the body of Charles McGarry, the Cook County medical examiner who’d been found buried on his own estate.

  ‘And, no, although I tried,’ Till said, calling Rigg a couple of days after Fernandez was discovered.

  ‘No, what?’ Rigg asked, faking dumb.

  ‘No to Lehman’s DNA being on that soda pop can or Starbucks cup Glet brought to the Richmond lab.’

  ‘Now that you mention it …’ Rigg said, because it was expected.

  ‘You knew I’d check.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rigg said.

  Till chuckled. ‘No match to either. Glet’s samples belong to two other people.’

  Rigg then had to ask, ‘They’ve not been run through any other databases?’

  ‘No,’ Till said. ‘I have no authority to do so.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Rigg said, because it was quite all right.

  ‘What are you doing these days, Rigg, now that your paper’s gone down?’

  ‘Looking for work,’ Rigg lied. His apartment was paid up through the rest of February and there was still several months left of Judith’s insurance money. And that was all right for the time being.

  Lehman resigned, citing health issues, and said he was going to enjoy his county pension in Florida. No mention was made of prosecuting him for the murder of Richie Fernandez, since the only link between them was in the statements of a grill cook and his wife, saying only that Lehman had come around with McGarry seeking the whereabouts of Fernandez.

  Similarly, the state’s attorney for Winthrop County didn’t bother to announce that no evidence had been found to prosecute anyone in the bludgeoning death of Charles McGarry.

  As Glet had insisted, proximity continued to figure into the case against Kevin Wilcox for the murders of Bobby Stemec and John and Anthony Henderson. The Happy Times Stables where Wilcox worked was less than two miles from where the boys’ bodies were discovered. But it was the depositions of several of Stemec’s classmates saying they’d gone with him to the stables, and that he often brought friends there, that triggered Wilcox’s indictment for the boys’ murders. The state’s attorney dismissed rumors of previous claims by Sheriff’s Deputy Jerome Glet that DNA linked Wilcox to at least one of the boys, saying that Johnny Henderson’s foreign DNA sample was missing and that the remaining sample, that taken from Bobby Stemec, had been tested previously, but had not been matched to anyone. He stated that prosecution of Wilcox for the killings would be deferred until he was tried in federal court on the charges of unlawful gun sales.

  Without Lehman and Glet, the Cook County sheriff’s department went rudderless. The investigations into the murders of the Graves girls, Jennifer Ann Day and Tana Damm lapsed and slipped from public notice, trumped by the fresher horrific murders that occurred most every day in Chicago.

  The Acting Cook County medical examiner, Cornelius Feldott, had gotten the final word on Jerome Glet’s death, writing in the case file that the gunshot residue found on Glet’s sleeve and the position of the body clearly pointed to suicide. He noted, too, that a packet of yellow index cards, identical to those sent to Carlotta Henderson and the Day family, was found in Glet’s bungalow, but stopped short of concluding that the packet in any way pointed to Glet’s involvement in the girls’ killings.

  These were Feldott’s last recorded words. He’d vanished. Staffers from the medical examiner’s office found his condominium to be as if he’d just left it to go out. His closets were full, his official, dark county sedan was parked in its designated space. Speculation ran that he’d been killed, perhaps bludgeoned like his boss, Charles McGarry.

  Rigg had written none of it. The Examiner tumbled after Donovan failed to meet his balloon payment, and neither of the two remaining queens had called, requesting Rigg to freelance on the boys’ or the girls’ murders, or the mysterious deaths of Glet, McGarry or Richie Fernandez. The photos the Curious Chicagoan had run looked to have rendered him permanently toxic to what remained of journalism in Chicago.

  That was fine. He stayed in his apartment for the rest of February, venturing out only to take long walks in a wooded forest preserve, shop for groceries, eat occasionally at the Rail-Vu and, one time, to accompany Sheriff Olsen into the city to secure Gus and Lucille’s identification of Fernandez in the police sketch.

  He ventured out, too, to visit the campus of Northwestern University, where he spent parts of three days.

  On the last day of February, he took his mattress down to the dumpster and threw it on top of his boxes of files, the love seat and his kitchen table and chair. He put his few clothes and the yellow coffee cup he almost always used and the green one of Judith’s into his car and vacated his apartment to face, at last, the dunes that he’d fled on that horrible night.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Greg Theodore showed up on the second Wednesday of March. ‘I never figured you for having the patience of a fisherman,’ he yelled from the shore.

  Rigg waved, laid the bamboo pole into the rubber dinghy and lowered his hands so that Theodore couldn’t see him undo the sixty yards of weighted, marked line that he then jammed wet into the pocket of his parka. He knew this day could come if some reporter looked hard enough. And Greg Theodore was one of those that always looked hard enough.

  He struggled as always to row the unwieldy dinghy toward the shore. When he got close, he threw the rope to Theodore, who by then was bent over with laughter at the sight of Rigg thrashing to keep the bobbing dinghy in a straight line.

  ‘I never catch much, but I find the process calming,’ Rigg said, as Theodore pulled him on to the muck of the shore and tied the rope to a tree.

  ‘You don’t answer your phone and your voicemail is full.’

  ‘I’ll have to fix that,’ Rigg said, thinking to do no such thing. He’d put the phone into a drawer the instant he’d returned to the dunes and hadn’t brought it out since.

  Theodore pointed to the caboose sitting high and bright red through the trees. ‘Your mansion?’

  ‘I’ll make us coffee.’ Rigg led him up the railroad-tie stairs, because there was no alternative. Theodore had not come for an idle chat. He’d learned something that now neede
d to be deflected.

  ‘Compact, but extremely nifty,’ Theodore said, as he sat at the small banquette in the corner of the tiny galley kitchen.

  Rigg added grounds and water to the coffee maker. ‘The guy who dragged this thing up set it perfectly level on deep concrete piers. We fitted it with the oak cabinetry in here, the bath and the sitting area, and built the bunkbeds in the hall.’

  ‘A flower, even,’ Theodore said, pointing to the little white plastic daisy at the center of the table.

  ‘Judith’s,’ Rigg lied. He’d bought the thing at a gas station – not for its plastic flower, but for its fake green grass and red plastic pot – on his way back from the jeweler in Grand Rapids the week before.

  ‘Surprisingly roomy,’ Theodore went on, still looking around, taking his time.

  ‘It’s sometimes too big,’ Rigg said.

  ‘What happened to the guy that dragged it up here?’ Theodore asked.

  ‘He died – collapsed in a food store, two miles from here. Never got to enjoy the place much.’

  ‘And then you and Judith bought it.’

  And then she died, having never gotten to enjoy the place much either, but there was no need to give that words. Rigg filled two cups and brought them to the table. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, to spur things along.

  ‘A former colleague at the Trib teaches at Medill,’ Theodore said, naming Northwestern’s journalism school. ‘He’d heard you were interviewing professors at the college who knew Aria Gamble.’

  Rigg shrugged, as he’d planned. ‘The Examiner had shut down. She was my boss; I couldn’t reach her. I figured she’d connected with someone where she went to school.’

  ‘I found three professors you talked to. They said you also asked about Corky.’

  ‘He’s an alumnus as well. And he’d become huge news.’

  ‘And you were investigating because, in your heart, you’re still a reporter, no matter that you’d lost your trumpet even before the Examiner went down?’ Theodore’s eyes were goading.

  ‘I told you, I was looking for Aria—’

  ‘That’s crap, Rigg. You figured they disappeared together.’

  Rigg met Theodore’s eyes, struggling to not grab the plastic daisy he’d so stupidly left in the middle of the table and set it out of reach. ‘I admit I wondered if there was a connection.’

  ‘The most interesting professor I found had both Corky and Aria in his undergraduate twentieth-century history class,’ Theodore said. ‘He said they were driven, relentless and brilliant. They paired up for their term paper.’

  ‘Leopold and Loeb,’ Rigg said, because Theodore already knew.

  ‘Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Another brilliant pair, back in the 1920s. They killed a boy, Bobby Franks, just to see if they could get away with committing the perfect crime.’

  ‘Not so perfect,’ Rigg said. ‘They got caught.’

  ‘The professor told you that Corky and Aria were particularly interested in how those two young geniuses screwed up.’

  Rigg had known he’d have to give up something, if someone like Theodore came around. ‘I think Feldott killed Glet,’ he said.

  ‘Corky Feldott, boy wonder, darling of the CIB, a killer?’

  ‘I think he killed the girls, too, in one fast, vicious spurt at the end of December. It was a sick career move. I think he wanted to be seen riding in on a white horse to solve the cases.’

  Theodore leaned back, unsurprised. ‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ he said. ‘The two girls at the diner weren’t the Graves sisters, right?’

  Rigg shook his head. ‘They were just another couple of lost girls, runaways probably. I’m pretty sure the Graves sisters and Jennifer Ann Day and Tana Damm were all snatched off sidewalks near their homes. It wouldn’t have been hard to do. I saw dashboard flashers on Feldott’s county car. He could have pulled up, showed his badge, and ordered them to get in on some pretext or another.’

  ‘An ME’s badge, not a cop’s?’

  ‘What teenaged girl is going to inspect a badge? They complied. They got in.’

  ‘And were frozen to death,’ Theodore said, more to himself than to Rigg.

  ‘Or decapitated, to muddy things up,’ Rigg said. ‘Sick, sick bastard.’

  ‘All so he could burnish his reputation as CIB’s superstar sleuth?’

  ‘He was a sick young man in a sick, sick hurry to show himself as solving the cases.’

  ‘But to do that, he needed someone to pin the killings on. Enter Glet?’

  ‘I don’t think Feldott marked him as a patsy at first,’ Rigg said. ‘That came later, well after Glet approached Feldott for help in protecting the Stemec Henderson foreign DNA samples. Unbeknownst to anyone but ATF, Glet was working Kevin Wilcox as the boys’ killer. He needed to protect the Stemec Henderson foreign DNA from Lehman and McGarry.’

  ‘As you were inferring in your reporting of their scheme to frame Richie Fernandez for the girls’ and maybe the boys’ killings.’

  ‘Glet needed access to the specimen lab at the Dead House. That room has a thick keypad lock, the kind that can’t be picked. Someone had to let him in and so he approached Feldott, tipped him that he was afraid McGarry would switch Fernandez’s DNA in for Wilcox’s, and asked him to give him one of the boys’ slides.’

  ‘Why would Feldott do that?’

  ‘Because, once exposed, McGarry would be out of the picture and Feldott could take over the county medical officer’s job. Plus, Feldott could position himself as having helped to bust the whole enterprise. Both furthered his chief objective of catapulting his career, maybe to sheriff if Lehman was also knocked out of the picture, maybe beyond.’

  ‘What about chain of custody of the Henderson boy’s original foreign DNA?’

  ‘I’ll bet Feldott promised Glet he’d vouch for its security in being transferred to the Richmond lab.’

  ‘Fernandez wasn’t Glet’s fireworks,’ Theodore said.

  ‘Feldott was, and that led to Glet’s death. Glet got wise, somehow, to Feldott’s being behind the girls’ murders, and Feldott got wise to Glet getting wise. Maybe it was from a change in Glet’s attitude, maybe it was from something Glet let slip. Whatever it was, it presented Feldott with both a chance to eliminate a threat and an opportunity. Killing Glet would get rid of the threat of exposure and give Feldott someone he could make a patsy to frame for the girls’ murders.’

  ‘What tipped you to Feldott?’

  ‘Nothing fast and nothing for certain,’ Rigg said, reminding himself to be careful to not say too much. ‘The morning I discovered Glet’s body, I saw Feldott leave Glet’s bungalow with an evidence bag jammed very conspicuously in his coat pocket, just begging for me to question. Feldott took his time, acted appropriately reluctant, but finally he told me it was a packet of yellow index cards of the same type used to send a ransom note to the Day family and two elsewhere.’

  ‘What do you mean, “elsewhere”?’

  ‘Carlotta Henderson,’ Rigg said. ‘They were meant for me, to be photographed picking them up. I passed them on to Lehman.’

  ‘What did they contain besides Glet’s fingerprints pressed on by his dead hand?’

  ‘A listing of body identifiers on too many of the victims.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means one of the cards listed not only identifiers for three of the four girls, but also one for Anthony Henderson, and that took me too long to understand.’

  Theodore leaned back, puzzled.

  ‘Anthony’s birthmark was listed to point to the same killer for both the boys and the girls,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Or …?’ Theodore let the question dangle unfinished.

  ‘Or it pointed to someone who had access to the bodies of both the boys and the girls.’

  ‘Like someone who worked at the Dead House. Like Feldott,’ Theodore said.

  Rigg nodded. ‘It was stupid, including Anthony, but Feldott must have thought that he was invincible.�
�

  ‘Superior intelligence, like Leopold and Loeb,’ Theodore said.

  ‘Furthering that, he must have thought the gods of evil were smiling down on him when McGarry was found dead and Lehman was being whispered about as being the killer.’

  ‘With both of them gone, and Glet dead of a supposed suicide, the path was clear for the kid to become medical examiner and then, with CIB’s support, perhaps the interim sheriff.’ Theodore looked at Rigg. ‘Catapulted, just like you said.’

  ‘Feldott was – is – a clever fellow.’ Rigg looked away, hoping Theodore had missed it. But Theodore had not.

  ‘Was?’ Theodore asked. ‘Past tense?’

  ‘Slip of the tongue,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Gutsy kid, that’s for sure,’ Theodore said, reaching for the plastic daisy.

  Rigg got to it first, pulled it back to hold in both hands. ‘Gutsy killer, you mean.’

  Theodore nodded. ‘Aria Gamble’s admiring pieces fed Corky’s burgeoning rise …’ he said, leaving the suggestion for Rigg to pick up.

  ‘She’s rich enough to take a little vacation, Greg. Her pearls alone were worth a fortune, maybe as much as seventy-five thousand.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or she discovered his plan, confronted him and he killed her,’ Rigg said.

  ‘There’s a third possibility, Milo. She was in on it and now she’s running with him,’ he said. ‘Living on what they could get for her pearls.’

  Rigg said nothing. He’d ventured too much already.

  ‘It wasn’t just Glet that found out Corky’s plan, was it, Milo?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rigg asked in what he hoped was a steady voice.

  ‘You, Milo. You found him out.’

  ‘Not in time,’ Rigg lied. ‘I only guessed at most of it, and just recently. Up here, when I had time to think.’

  ‘Something set the two of them to running,’ Theodore said. ‘Glet was already dead, so he was no longer a threat. I’m guessing it was you who panicked them to leaving everything behind and taking off in her car. They’re together, but one thing’s bothering me.’