Lakeview Vendetta: A Gripping Vigilante Justice Thriller

by KJ Kalis

  “Shrieking...”

  Emily got up and walked over to the kitchen sink, glancing out the window into the backyard. There was a coating of yellow and orange leaves across her back lawn, the first ones having come down overnight. The sky was heavy and gray, though not dark enough to suggest rain.

  Chicago had a fall that resembled many others in the Midwest. The end of summer was usually dry, followed by rain and cooler temperatures that ushered in the changing of the leaves. For two or three weeks, depending on the temperatures and the rain, the trees would light up in colors that look like they could only be painted by God’s hand — lemon yellow, a burnt orange, a deep red -- followed by even cooler temperatures, more rain and hovering gray clouds that tended to last until January, where the cold, dry temperatures cleared the sky out to a crystal blue.

  After Emily was fired from the Chicago Police Department, she’d gone through a brief time when she thought about moving somewhere else, anywhere other than Chicago. It seemed like everywhere she went, memories came flooding back of her marriage, places she and Luca had gone when they were dating, cases she had worked. But after the dust had settled and her father-in-law’s attorneys had gotten her a sizable chunk of change for wrongful termination — she’d been set up to look like she’d been bribed — she decided to stay. Chicago was all she knew. It was her hometown. Her dad still lived on the other side of the city. She didn’t venture to her old neighborhood very much, just a couple of times a year, instead preferring to call him. He wasn’t much for visitors, anyway. Regardless, she loved Chicago.

  There were lots of people that didn’t like the change of seasons in the city. They complained it was too cold, or the spring was too wet, or the fall was too short. Emily liked it. It matched her moods, just like the gray clouds that had blanketed the sky over her house. She turned back towards Mike, drumming her fingers on the countertop, her middle finger picking up one droplet of water which she wiped on her leggings. “There’s just something about this case that left me feeling unsettled,” Sitting back down in the chair next to him, she said, “I’m having a hard time understanding why Angelica pushed me so hard on this one. It’s just a bad business deal.”

  “Is it? Who is the business partner again?”

  “Vince Olivas, I think Marlowe said. Or maybe I read it somewhere.”

  Mike didn’t speak for a few minutes, the humming of the refrigerator running and his fingers on the keyboard the only noise in the house. Before Mike looked up from his computer again, Miner wedged his way under the table, laying his head on Mike’s feet and his backside on Emily’s. Miner was a dog that liked to be included, even if he had to weasel his way in.

  After a couple of minutes of silence, Emily looked at Mike, “What are you thinking?”

  Mike sighed, “I’m not sure. What does sound right to me is that a whole lotta shrieking seems like an overreaction for a bad business deal.” He squinted at the screen, “There you are,” he said, as if he’d just found a treasure he had lost along the way.

  Data was the currency Mike worked in. How many other clients he had, Emily didn’t know. She didn’t want to. In fact, she didn’t know if he helped anyone else at all. What she did know is that Mike came from a tough upbringing and that he had found a home with highly technical and scientific people, the type that didn’t have great social skills, but had an amazing level of intellect. From what Emily could tell, they were all hackers of one sort or another. On one of their cases, one of Mike’s friends, a molecular geneticist working on her Ph.D. cracked the case for them. Mike had shown Emily a picture of Alice after the case was over. She was all green hair and glasses. Just Mike’s type, Emily thought at the time.

  “As usual, your gut is right on the money.” Mike turned his computer toward Emily, “Meet Vince Olivas. He’s a scumbag. Looking over his permit pulls through the city’s online portal, I can see he is named on a whole bunch of them. What’s more interesting is it seems that every project has a different partner.”

  Emily’s eyebrows furrowed, “That’s strange. You’d think if he found a comfortable relationship with a business partner, he’d want to keep it.”

  “My thinking exactly. Marlowe is just the last in a long line.” He kept typing on the keyboard, “There are permits pulled for the Lakeview office complex, I think.” Mike leaned closer to the screen and then leaned back a little, “Yeah, here they are. Looks like they got as far as pulling the electrical permits. There’s a company name in here. Give me a sec…”

  Emily’s chest tightened. In her years of working with people, whether as part of the Chicago Police Department or as part of her off-book work, she had noticed that her gut was rarely wrong. Marlowe’s reaction a few hours earlier had been way out of bounds for what a bad business deal might look like. Some tears, yes. Losing sleep, sure. But shrieking? No. That didn’t make any sense. “I didn’t tell you about one thing that happened at the park,” Emily said, glancing down at the floor where Miner was sleeping while Mike continued to tap away on his keyboard.

  “What’s that?”

  “My instincts weren’t the only ones that got riled up. Miner growled at her when she lunged at me and grabbed my coat.”

  “She grabbed your coat? She was lucky you didn’t shoot her!”

  “Marlowe was lucky. I left my gun in the car. Won’t make that mistake again.”

  Mike kept tapping at the keyboard. “It looks like Marlowe started a company called Lincoln Park Construction. If I go back a little further,” Mike paused, “it looks like the original business documents were filed by Marlowe. She was a single signer until a couple of years ago.”

  Emily frowned. “So, what you’re saying is Marlowe started her own company, built up her reputation, and then Vince was added as a partner later on.”

  Mike nodded, “Looks that way. I’d have to do a deeper dive to tell you for sure.”

  “Well, that explains something that Marlowe was yelling at me about. Apparently, all the money for the project is gone.”

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  “Marlowe said it was around twenty million. I guess she’s not only going to have to go into professional bankruptcy but personal. She said she got kicked out of her house and was sleeping on a friend’s couch.”

  Mike whistled, “That’s a lot of tamales to lose.” He leaned back, cocked his head to the side, and looked at Emily. “If we’re piecing this together, Marlowe fights her way up the construction management ladder, probably having to scrap and push a little harder than usual since she’s a girl, meets up with this Vince guy, who, based on his pictures, looks super slick, decides to form a business partnership with him, and then somehow, he walks out of with twenty million, which she is now on the hook for. Is that what we're thinking?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Emily got up and walked to the refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of water. She always got thirsty a couple of hours after her workouts with Clarence. Boxing was hard work. It seems like most things in her life were. At the moment, what was hard was trying to figure out why Marlowe freaked out.

  “You think that she just freaked out because of the amount of money? I know I wouldn’t be too happy if somebody left me holding the bag for twenty million.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s part of it. But I think there’s more. I still can’t put my finger on it, though…”

  8

  By the time Marlowe walked back to her car after the incident in the park, she was sure Emily and her growling dog were long gone. She couldn’t blame them. Losing control wasn’t the intent of the meeting. It was probably just lack of sleep and all the stress, she thought to herself. She had felt different lately, though. What it was, she couldn’t quite put her finger on, though after spending one sleepless night searching the Internet, she discovered that eighty percent of complaints that took people to the doctor were stress related. That she could understand. Losing twenty million dollars was definitely stressful, she thought.

  St
arting her car, Marlowe wasn’t sure where to go. The last thing she wanted to do was go back and sit in Kelsey’s apartment all day long. She knew she could go to the office. The rent on it hadn’t been paid, but she hadn’t been kicked out of it yet either.

  Instinctively, Marlowe headed for downtown, getting in a long line of traffic all headed for the shores of Lake Michigan. It was just about noon when most people who worked downtown were already stationed in their offices and cubicles for at least four hours. Not that the time of day made that big of a difference with the traffic. Chicago’s roads seem to be constantly cluttered with more cars and trucks than they were designed to handle. Combine that with the necessary road construction that happened every year after a harsh winter, it made for slow traveling. People in the city got used to it though, trading the convenience of a quick drive for all the amenities of a big city.

  Marlowe stayed on the freeway for almost half an hour, stepping on her brakes every ten feet or so. The traffic was brutal. She finally got off at the Fifty-Sixth street exit and doubled back towards downtown. There were enough one-way streets that it was a little easier to go past her destination and then work her way back than trying to go directly there than getting caught up going the wrong way. She made two quick right turns, one putting her on East Overlook Drive, and then another that put her on Lakeview. The office complex was off to the right, the white exterior sticking up in contrast to the steel gray buildings on either side. The white was something she had planned to keep in the design. She sighed, thinking about all the dreams she had for the building that would never come to pass now that the money was gone.

  Pulling up into the construction lot next to the building, Marlowe sat in her car for a minute, staring at the chain link fencing that surrounded the building. A moment later, she got out, jingling her keys. She still had the key for the padlock on her ring, although she was sure she’d have to give that up to the city or the insurance company, or the bank, pretty soon.

  At the gate, Marlowe slid the key into the slot, tipping the lock toward her so she could make it fit. With a pop and a rattle, the lock came open, the steel chain coming loose from the gate. She stood with her hand on the metal bar for a moment, staring at the top of the eight-foot-high cyclone fencing that ran around the perimeter of the building. Her foreman had installed a piece of plywood on the gate, attaching it with cable ties so they’d have a place to put their permits as they came in. On top of every other piece of paper that had been stapled to it, there was a neon yellow stop-work order. As she stared at it, Marlowe felt the tears well up inside of her again. So much had happened in the last year. She pulled the gate open, stepped inside and closed it behind her, the chain rattling, echoing off the front of the empty building.

  Memories of the first time she had visited the project with Vince flooded over her. It was a spring day, the cold wind still coming off of Lake Michigan and whipping around the base of the building. At the time, there were still a few tenants left in the building, mostly businesses that had been there for decades and those who were having trouble finding office space at the low rates the Lakeview offered before the rehab project. She and Vince had laughed and giggled in the elevator on the way up to the top floor. They spent the majority of the day working their way down, talking about plans for the building and options, what type of tenants they thought they could attract, and how much rent they could secure each month.

  “What do you think our asking price should be when we’re done with the project?” Marlowe remembered saying, staring out from the thirtieth floor at what was a nice view of the lake. “With this view, I’m sure that we can land a law firm or even a tech company up here, don’t you think?”

  Vince looked up, having finished making some notes on a pad he was carrying around with him. “I haven’t quite worked out all the numbers yet,” he said, joining her at the window. “But I’m thinking if our rehab budget is twenty million, and we bought it for ten then probably at least fifty, don’t you think? There’s a total of twenty-five in the account right now. Twenty-five million, I mean.”

  “You’re the numbers guy,” Marlowe said, staring back out at the lake. If those numbers worked out, she and Vince would net twenty million for their own company, ten for each of them. That was a lot of money on the line.

  The fall wind curled around the corner of the building as Marlowe pulled open the door to the lobby. There wasn’t much shelter from the fall weather even inside the abandoned building. Most of the windows had been taken out to be replaced. That hadn’t happened. The stop-work order occurred while they were waiting for their contractor to bring the delivery in and get the bulk of the building sealed up again. As Marlowe walked forward, she saw damp stains on the floor from where the rain had gotten inside of the building. Her mind ran forward, to all the damage that the building had sustained, being open to the elements for a year. If there was a way to save it, she wasn’t sure how…

  9

  Vince woke up with a headache. The meeting the night before with Adam Rossiter had gone well, maybe too well. The first drink had turned into quite a few more, bottles of wine followed by shots and beers. Rolling over in bed, Vince couldn’t quite remember how he’d gotten home or at what time.

  Vince sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face with the heels of his palms. He had a headache, but it was nothing that a couple of aspirin and a cup of coffee couldn’t fix. He blinked a couple of times, trying to remember where they’d left off in their negotiations and if there was anything he’d promised to take care of that needed to get done. Investors like Adam Rossiter didn’t like to wait.

  Standing up, Vince walked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside, the gray light of day irritating his eyes. He checked his cell phone. It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon already. He’d need that coffee sooner than he thought if he hoped to get anything done. Padding into the kitchen with bare feet, he started up a pot of strong Colombian roast, pulled a bottle of water and a bottle of Gatorade out of the refrigerator, and found a couple of aspirins. He swallowed them dry, following them with a long swig of water.

  Since things had blown up with Marlowe, he had moved all of his office equipment back to his apartment. It wasn’t much, just some files, a printer and his laptop. On a glass table he had set up in his family room, he’d staged his office. He went over and lifted the lid of his laptop, the screen lighting up. After typing in his password, he logged into his bank account information — the one for his new company. He had named it Olivas Land Trust Company. He peered at the screen, enjoying reading his name at the top of the account information. As he scanned the transactions, he could see each time he had scraped money away from the Lakeview office complex project. With a new investor, namely Adam Rossiter, and the funding behind him, he should have no problem restarting the project. From what he’d seen of the Rossiter’s and heard on the street, it seemed they had every inspector in the city in the palm of their hands. Getting the stop-work order off the wall at Lakeview shouldn’t take more than a few thousand dollars, he thought. He had that, and a lot more in the bank.

  For a moment, a wash of guilt tried to invade his thoughts. He pushed it away. Vince was sorry for Marlowe’s troubles, but she was in way over her head. He knew he had done her a favor. It wasn’t often that Vince made mistakes in his career but bringing Marlowe on to be the contractor for Lakeview had turned out to be a nightmare. She worried about everything, the quality of every piece of drywall, the position of every single electrical socket, the families of the people that worked for them and their subcontractors. He didn’t have time to deal with those details. Mostly, he didn’t have time to hear about them, and that’s all that Marlowe wanted to talk about.

  Scraping the money out of the loan account attached to the Lakeview project had started innocently enough. He had some incidentals he needed to cover — a dinner with a supplier who was giving him a favorable price on wiring for the building, and a gift for the plumbing company, who ha
d helped him get the permits pulled a little faster. When he saw the amount of money sitting in the account, it occurred to him that no one would be the wiser if he added a couple of extra thousand dollars onto the bill. He could prove the draw on the loan had been necessary. After all, he had to pay those bills. A week later, the same thing happened. There were more bills to be covered and it was much easier for Vince to just go into the account and transfer the money, plus a little extra, rather than talking to Marlowe about it. It was an aggravation fee for having to deal with her. She never really knew what was going on with the finance side of the project anyway. That was Vince’s responsibility. He handled the deal side, she handled the construction side. She’d done a decent job until she started whining. That was when he decided he needed to get her off the project.

  The idea had come late at night, about six months into the project. Vince was out with a couple of of his buddies, other dealmakers in the city. One of them, Paulie Nova had come into the bar with a big smile on his face, plopping his soft body down in a chair next to Vince, his tie loose. “What’s got you so happy tonight, Paulie?”

  “I just got rid of my business partner.” He grabbed one of the bottles of beer the waitress had set in the center of the table, “I’m single again, boys!”

  Later on that night, Vince and Paulie had been outside, each with a cigarette in their mouths. “So, what really happened with your business partner?” Vince asked as he stood on the street corner just outside the bar.

  Paulie shrugged, “I don’t know, man. Just got to the point when I couldn’t stand him anymore. I figured out the quickest way to dissolve the partnership was to bankrupt it. Lucky for me, all the paperwork is in my business partner’s name. He’s got a mess to clean up on his hands, but it’s not my problem.”