by Kathy Reichs
I dug a small zipper case from my purse and took a moment to admire my purchase. Compact. Ergonomic. A burglar’s best friend.
I set to work turning tumblers, listening, mostly going by feel. In less than two minutes, I was in.
The staircase had turns and landings and reflected a more prosperous era in the building’s past. The banisters and newels, beautifully carved, were now coated with layers of yellowed varnish. The tread runner was in the same grubby state as the foyer tile.
The second floor had only one unit. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again, waited, then repeated the process of picking the lock. Here it took roughly forty-five seconds.
I cracked the door and called out. No one answered.
J. Kerr’s apartment was totally silent. Still, I drew the Glock and did a fast sweep. Living room in front, two bedrooms down a long narrow hall, dining room and kitchen in back.
I peered out a kitchen window. Saw a small yard covered in concrete. Beyond the yard, an alley. Across the alley, garbage cans and the butt end of a row of buildings like the one I was in.
A lightning search of the cabinets and fridge told me little about the woman who’d stocked them. She bought overpriced organic everything. Liked yogurt, kale, and whole grain bread. Or at least she ate them. One drawer held a small plastic bottle of Brahmi–Gotu Kola capsules. I was clueless what that was. Beside the bottle was packaging that indicated the product had been bought online. I checked the delivery address. Using my phone, took a shot of the label.
I raced to the living room, then retraced my route, snagging details as I passed each room. The place looked like one of those extended-stay corporate executive deals. The furniture was boring, the art forgettable. Warehouse knickknacks here and there, artfully arranged and meant not to offend. Sensationally bland upholstery, bedding, and carpets, mostly in shades of tan and beige. Drapes in the living room, venetian blinds elsewhere, all closed but leaking a little morning light.
The bath was shared by both bedrooms. Like the kitchen, it revealed zip about J. Kerr. There was nothing girly or personal in the shower or under the sink. No makeup, nail polish, body lotion, or face cream. The shampoo, soaps, and other toiletries were all common pharmacy brands: deodorant, toothpaste, dental floss, razor, comb and brush, hair binders, tampons.
The bedrooms continued the theme of early blah. One book on the bedside table: A Treasury of English Sonnets. So Kerr had a lyrical soul. Or poetry came with the place and she wasn’t a reader.
A quick trip through the dresser yielded underwear, all white cotton, socks, all white cotton, and sweatshirts, plain gray, no witty sayings, sports logos, or college insignia. Three dark polyester blouses and three pairs of jeans hung in the closet. Beside them, still in their plastic sheaths, were a black skirt and two black sweaters. On the floor below, black boots, running shoes, and a pair of black flats. On the shelf above, a black wool scarf and the Sox cap. So much for lyrical.
The lit window I’d observed was in the back bedroom. Twin bed, nightstand, lamp, no book. Blinds.
On the wall opposite the bed was a black printer’s keyhole desk, probably Pottery Barn, one long drawer across the middle, three stacked on each side. On the desktop was a MacBook Air similar to my own.
Hell-o.
I checked my watch. I’d been in the apartment almost seven minutes. I’d promised myself thirty, max.
I hurried to the desk and began rifling drawers. Found the usual pens, tablets, envelopes, tape. The bottom drawer on the right was crammed with burner phones still in the packaging. Made sense. No landline in the apartment.
The bottom drawer on the left held a collection of mail. I flipped through. Mostly ads and flyers, crap addressed to “Occupant” at the Argyle address. I wondered why Kerr hadn’t tossed the lot. Remembered the heap on my sideboard, brought to the island from the post office but never sorted.
Then I discovered the real purpose of the stack. Camouflage. Seriously?
Hidden below the mail were two passports bound together with a rubber band. Both were American. Both showed a woman with auburn hair, wide-spaced brown eyes, and a nose much too large for her face. I guessed her age at early twenties. I’d never gotten a good look at Sox Cap, but I suspected I was viewing her now. I doubted she was the woman caught on the Bnos Aliza surveillance video.
The first passport had been issued to Jasmine Helena Kerr, birth date 12/22/92. Christmas baby. Bad timing. The other belonged to Jennifer Claire Latourneau, born 10/15/94. Using my phone, I snapped a pic of each photo page, then returned both to the drawer.
Nine minutes.
Nerves buzzing, I dropped into the chair and opened the laptop. A screen saver fired to life. A lioness gazing over the savanna with her cub. The little rectangle demanded a password. Of course it did.
I shut down and, holding the command and S keys, switched to single-user mode, entered a few commands, rebooted, and set up a new administrator account, inputting the minimal amount of info requested. After creating a username and password, I went to system preferences, reset and verified the password for the original administrator, logged off, then logged on using the new information. Presto! I was in.
Sixteen minutes.
I opened the documents folder. It held three files. One was a PDF—an onscreen manual for a printer. The second was titled Dolphins, the third KD. I chose KD.
The contents consisted of a list of email addresses. Most had suffixes indicating commercial providers. Dot-coms. I recognized Gmail, Yahoo, AOL. A few had suffixes indicating foreign countries.
Why store contact information in a document file? Some ill-conceived notion of online security? For easier printing or sharing? Seemed J. Kerr was less than a cybergenius. I considered sending the file to myself as an email, instead took a pic of the screen.
Dolphins contained the names and addresses of animal and nature charities. Humane Society of the United States. American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Greenpeace. Animals Asia. Alley Cat Allies. World Wildlife. African Wildlife Foundation. I closed the file, then went to Mail.
Nothing stored. Nothing in trash.
Nothing on Stella Bright.
Fingers clumsy, palms damp, I moved to the inbox. Four messages. All had landed within the past half hour.
Two emails were spam, one touting Belize as a tax haven, the other offering relief from erectile dysfunction. The other two were from senders calling themselves Trailblazer and Infidel. I opened the latter.
Godolphin Vintage Claret Beauty 05 05 06. FL1X: LM-inf /JC-GR/B5-S2+4
Obviously code. I checked for Kerr’s email address as the recipient: [email protected]. I entered it into the Notes app on my phone.
Using Safari, I found Kerr’s Gmail account. Another box requested yet another password. I right-clicked on the six dots, selected Inspect Element, double-clicked on the command line containing type = “password,” and changed password to text. Instead of dots I was now looking at the password. Sweet Jesus in a romper. She was using her birthday.
Seven emails. All received within the past twenty-four hours. The two spam ads and another from a dear friend in Christ.
I opened the message from Infidel and checked the sender. [email protected]. I keyed the address into Notes below Kerr’s.
Nineteen minutes, twenty seconds. I was sweating inside my jacket and wig.
I clicked on a tiny triangle to the right of the reply arrow, then chose the command Show Original from the drop-down menu.
A block of data appeared. At roughly midpoint was a line with the header Received. Embedded in the gibberish was a string of four numbers divided by periods, the sender’s IP address. I took a phone shot of the screen.
Twenty-three minutes.
I returned to Gmail.
Trailblazer’s message was succinct.
Confirmed.
I revealed the IP address of [email protected] and entered it below the others. Tried a pic. Fumbled. Got it.
; Twenty-six minutes.
The last two emails were from [email protected] and [email protected]. Both had sent the same one-word message as Trailblazer. I added both IP addresses to my list.
I poked around a few seconds longer. Photos. Calendar. iCloud. AirDrop. Found nothing. Clearly Kerr didn’t maximize the Mac’s potential. Or she stored all her files offline.
Twenty-eight minutes.
Out of time, I reversed all my changes, returning the Mac to the condition in which I’d found it. An expert hacker could ferret out my presence, but I doubted Kerr was that ferret. That hacker.
Thirty-four minutes.
A quick inspection of the apartment to see that all was pristine. To double-check for any indication of another occupant. For anything to suggest Stella Bright’s presence. Negative on both.
Thirty-six minutes after breaking in, I slipped out, returned to my courtyard, and threw up. As though on cue, the rain resumed.
An hour later Kerr came slouching up the block. Or Latourneau. Or whatever her real name was. Looking neither left nor right, she climbed the stairs and entered her building.
I was settling in for a long, soggy wait when my mobile buzzed.
“You want to see the video?”
“Detective Capps. Thank you for asking. My morning has been splendid.”
“This a bad time? Maybe there’s someone you need to shoot?”
“Give me the address.”
“Western Avenue, just north of Belmont. Can’t miss it. Place looks like Buckingham Palace.”
“On my way.”
“I’ll alert the concierge.”
I walked to Broadway and hailed a cab. I knew Opaline wouldn’t want me to keep C-squared waiting.
Capps’s description was dead-on. If the royals lived in a two-story brick box surrounded by pavement and billeting its own radio tower.
Most cop shops are basically the same inside. Some more so than others. The Area Three station was no exception. Dingy windows, scuffed floors, walls begging for fresh paint. The air was thick with the smell of cleaning products, wet clothing, and human discontent.
At noon, the lobby had only a light dusting of the usual characters. Two patrol officers were doing macho. A hooker in ass-baring shorts and neon makeup was protesting the injustice of her arrest. A geezer in coveralls and rubber boots was whining about a dead cat in his truck. A drunk, skin gray as curdled milk, was saying nothing at all.
I presented myself to a desk sergeant who appeared to be having an unrewarding shift. Her hair was bottle bronze, her eyes pointed at a copy of that morning’s Tribune. Her name was Varga.
“I’m Sunday Night,” I said, then bent the truth. “An investigator out of Charleston.”
“I’ll arrange a parade.”
“Roy Capps is expecting me.”
Varga checked a clipboard. “Violent crimes. Second floor, turn right, past youth division.” Gaze already back on the paper.
I climbed the stairs behind a scruffy, stubbled dude who had to be an undercover narc. Or a crackhead unable to grasp the subtleties of the stairwell signage: POLICE PERSONNEL ONLY.
I found my objective precisely as promised. I’d underestimated Varga. The woman was at the top of her game.
Like the lobby, the violent crimes squad room held no surprises. Blinds on the windows and tile on the floor. Desks holding case files, phones, mugs, and Starbucks cups. Some had personal mementos—a framed photo, a joke trophy, an NBA bobblehead.
The room was buzzing with people taking calls, drinking coffee, clicking keys at computer terminals. One corner was hosting a debate about bite mark evidence.
I asked for Capps and Clegg and was directed to a window at the back of the room. Through the glass, beyond the concrete and another featureless, flat-topped brick structure, I could see a fragment of greenery bordering water the color of bean soup.
Capps and Clegg had their desks pushed edge to edge, facing each other. Capps was at his. Clegg was not. Probably out hacking my bank account. Good luck, Bernie. My dough is offshore.
“Room with a view,” I said.
Capps was hunched forward, writing something. His shirt was avocado, his tie rust, a combo definitely not drawn from a Brooks Brothers playbook. A jacket hung from the back of his chair. It was brown herringbone and not a recent purchase. He looked up but didn’t reply.
“What body of water is that?” I nodded at the window.
“North branch of the Chicago River.”
“Nice spot.” Except for the overpass and spit-ugly buildings. I didn’t say that.
“Ever hear of Riverview?” Capps asked.
“No.”
“The Bobs?” As though I’d said I’d never heard of cheese.
I shook my head.
“Only the most famous roller coaster of its time. Back in the day, every kid in Chicago hit the Bobs for cheap feels and giggles.”
“You mention this because?”
“The park was razed in ’67 and the city built this.” Raising his arms to take in the room. “Ironic, eh?”
“How’s that?”
“The kids coming here now aren’t coming for laughs.”
Capps hooked a chair with one foot, dragged it toward his desk, and gestured me to it.
“Any word on our tattooed friend in the morgue?” I sat.
“Negative. Not in the system.”
That surprised me. “What about the tat?”
“Not in any database we checked. And Bernie floated it from here to Mars and back.”
“How about the monk?”
Capps just looked at me.
“The guy from last night.”
“John Scranton. Has a mama to prove it.”
“Where does he live?”
“Mama’s basement.”
“Where’s he work?”
“He’s in transition.”
“What was he doing at the Ritz?”
“Waiting for a friend when some lunatic jumped his ass.”
“Did you run his prints?”
“He’s not in the system, either.”
“The guy was packing.”
“He says the gun isn’t his.”
“I say it is.”
“The Beretta was in your room.”
“A hotel guest named Wryzniak saw him with it.”
“All Wryzniak saw was a couple fighting in the hall.”
“You believe Scranton’s story?”
“No.”
“You going to hold him?”
“There are reasons not to.”
I lifted a brow.
“We plan to kick him, then stay close. Hope he leads us to the lair. If there is a lair.”
“Is he sporting the double-J tat?”
“Nope. But he’s got psoriasis so bad he looks like he’s molting. Probably not into body art.”
Behind us a phone rang. A guy answered. His name was Lopez.
“Brief me on what I’ll see on this tape,” I said.
Capps laid down his pen. Leaned back in his chair.
“It’s monochrome. The detail’s lousy due to distance and angle. And the fact that the setup was installed when the Bobs was still rolling. It’s a VCR using time-lapse.”
That didn’t sound good. Most security systems now use hard drives. With a VCR on time-lapse, a tape can be programmed to run for as long as forty-eight hours. Slower recording speeds result in lower image quality. And loss due to quick turnover.
“Where was the camera?” I asked.
“Across the street and a little west of the school. Dov’s Bake Shop. Dov had two—one outside aimed at the parking lot, one inside, aimed at the register. Both were wired to a video recorder in a back room. The one inside was dead. The one outside caught the street and the east end of Bnos Aliza.”
“No cameras at the school or elsewhere on the block?”
“Nope.” Capps pulled a tablet from a drawer down and to his left, flipped a few pages, scanned his notes. “The relev
ant parts were recorded on April 17, the day of the bombing. The loop starts at four in the morning. Shows a lot of nothing, then kids arriving, leaving. Cars going by. People walking.
“The footage that’ll interest you begins at 4:16 P.M. Bowen, Stella, and Mary Gray Bright can be seen leaving the school with three other women. The women pause. Stella and Bowen walk west and disappear off frame.
“At 4:16 and 23 seconds, a dark-colored Subaru Forester can be seen traveling east to west on Devon. The plates are unreadable, either splattered with mud or intentionally covered. A woman and three men are inside. The blond guy you popped at the Ritz is driving. The woman is riding shotgun. The other two men are in back. The Forester passes the school and disappears.
“Mary Gray and two of the women walk off frame at 4:16 and 43 seconds. Debris is seen flying in from the west. Smoke. The woman who remained on the walk is thrown against the building.”
Capps tossed the tablet onto his blotter. Its landing sent a little puff of air my way.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. Seconds after the blast the camera goes black.”
Sounded like the tape would be another dead end. I’d read the file, found nothing in it that others had missed. I debated. Tell Capps about my outing to Foster Beach? About Jasmine Kerr?
Capps and Clegg would get a warrant to toss Kerr’s apartment. Kerr had passports. Contacts in other places. Enough burner phones to open a store. I didn’t want her to panic and bolt. Not yet. Not until I pried free what she knew about Stella.
Full truth. I couldn’t bear the burden of another death.
For some reason, Capps was actually talking to me. I decided to use that.
“Walk me through what happened,” I said.
Capps’s sharp little eyes crawled my face. Then, “A group of gutless bastards blew up a school.”
“I meant first response immediately after the bomb.”
“A billion people hit 911 on their cellphones. One woman reported a Subaru Forester speeding west on Devon. She thought she’d seen the same SUV cruising the area earlier in the week. She provided a fairly good description. Since the 911 calls came in so quickly, hope was the bombers were in the Forester and the Forester was still in the area. Units within a half mile were ordered to proceed to the scene. Units a half mile or more away were ordered to lock down a perimeter. Other than first responders, no vehicles or pedestrians were to get in or out. The goal was to find that Forester.”
