The Unspoken: An Ashe Cayne Novel

by Ian K. Smith

  “Who the hell was Carl Jung?”

  “Sigmund Freud’s sidekick.”

  “What the hell does he have to do with Gerrigan?”

  “Freud wrote about the Oedipus complex, where the boy has an unconscious sexual desire for his mother. Jung turned it around for the girl and her father and called it the Electra complex. Electra was the character from Greek mythology who with her brother plotted the murder of their mother and stepfather, because the two of them were behind the killing of their father, Agamemnon.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Burke said, crushing another chicken breast, then licking his fingers. “You really study this shit.”

  “Only when I’m not chasing the little white ball.” I took a sizable bite of a drumstick and felt my cholesterol level skyrocket instantaneously.

  “Well, I didn’t come all the way over here to talk Greek mythology and Freud,” Burke said. “We have the tower dumps from the phone company.”

  “How investigative of you,” I said.

  Burke finished off another piece of chicken, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, then pulled out a small pad from the pocket of his starched white shirt. He had notes from the call detail record. “CDR shows that there was activity from the girl’s phone in the Hyde Park area at eleven thirty-three that night. No calls were made or received, but she probably downloaded something or did something with the internet that put her on the tower.”

  “That’s strange,” I said. “Her last call was at eleven fifteen that night to a Dr. Bradford Weems. They talked for seven minutes.”

  “We saw that. A couple of our guys already talked to him. He checks out clean. They’ve had a lot of contact over art. He hasn’t heard from her since and doesn’t have any idea where she might be.”

  “So he says.”

  “You don’t believe him.”

  I brought him up to speed on Weems and his wife and my suspicions. I wasn’t exactly sure how they figured into all this, but my radar was blinking really fast.

  “Then there’s another call,” Burke said.

  “What call?”

  “Looks like seven days after she disappeared, there was a call placed from her phone to Chopper’s phone at nine thirty-four p.m. Lasted thirty-three seconds.”

  The logs Carolina had given me didn’t have that call, because they’d been pulled before this last call was made. This changed the entire picture.

  “What tower was she on?” I asked.

  “Hyde Park again.”

  I looked up at the board. This helped fill in the timeline. The call would mean Tinsley had talked to Chopper a couple of nights after he and I had met in my office. This was seven days after I had been hired and two days before his body was found in Englewood. The first question I had was why the call lasted only thirty-three seconds when they hadn’t talked to each other in so long? Wouldn’t there be a lot of catching up to do? Instead, there had been no more activity on her phone since that last call.

  “What are you thinking?” Burke said.

  I looked up at the timeline. “Hunter Morgan said Tinsley never came over that night, nor did she call to let her know that she wouldn’t make it. Chopper said she’d also told him she was going over to the Morgans’, but she never responded to his text later that night, and her phone was off when he called her twice the next day. So Tinsley didn’t go to the Morgans’, yet she was in Hyde Park. And she wasn’t communicating with her boyfriend. Then she just disappears. Did she leave? Did someone abduct her? Was she killed?”

  “We checked her rideshare accounts,” Burke said. “No trips on that day. Was she seeing someone else besides Chopper that he didn’t know about who lived in Hyde Park? We’ve already done a big canvass of Hyde Park. Two full days and got nothing. Not one person recognized her picture or her name.”

  We stared out my window over Grant Park and looked into the lake. It was impossible to make out the water, just one massive sheet of blackness. We had the perfect vantage point to see the beacon of the old Chicago Harbor Lighthouse, which stood east of Navy Pier and at the mouth of the Chicago River. I had fallen asleep many nights in that same position, grappling with the ups and downs of life or wrestling with the details of a case while watching that blinking light.

  “I’m trying to get into Tinsley’s head,” I said. I then told Burke about the secret twin pregnancy and the remains of the pregnancy test kit that I had found in the garbage can of her bathroom. “None of it is fitting together right now. I keep getting stuck at the same question. Why after all that time apart do they only speak for thirty-three seconds and never speak again?” I kept looking at the board. Maybe they had been together the entire time and Chopper had been lying to me. It would explain why the phone call was so short. There wasn’t much they needed to catch up on. Chopper hadn’t told me about the pregnancy, so maybe he was lying about not having seen or spoken to her. They could’ve been plotting something together.

  “Then Chopper’s body dump isn’t right,” I said. “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it was the work of an amateur. They didn’t plan it very well. They try to implicate the Warlords, but the tag on the body is wrong. Then they choose to enter an area fully wired with PODs and drop Chopper in a back alley, a place with little or no traffic at all. Something has to be on the cameras.”

  “We’ve already requested footage from OEMC,” Burke said. “I should have it on my desk first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll get you a copy as soon as I can.”

  25

  I WOKE UP THE next morning with a slight banging in my head and the feeling that a brick was sitting in the bottom of my gut with nowhere to go. This was why I had limited my encounters with Harold’s. It always tasted great going down, but once that part was over, it proceeded to destroy everything in its path on the way out. I put on a pair of sweatpants and headed for a run along the lake.

  The back entrance to my building gave me a more direct route to the running path. I stretched a little in the hallway before heading out into the brisk morning. As I crossed Ohio Street, I noticed a black Ford Taurus planted next to the fire hydrant at the end of the block. I didn’t turn to look at it; rather, I took in what I could with my peripheral vision. The front bumper didn’t have a tag, which was illegal in Illinois. The windows were tinted, but not so much that I couldn’t see the outlines of two bodies in the front seat. I kept on jogging slowly to see if the car would move. It didn’t.

  I decided to run north this morning for a shorter loop, an easy two and a half miles. I wasn’t the fastest of runners, but I was strong, and the chill in the air was a motivation to run faster. I ran to the walkway across from Navy Pier, then took a left down the Lakefront Trail, which curved along the edge of the water. Several runners were out, most of them in small packs, dressed in the latest fashions, trim and athletic looking, as if running and looking good was their full-time job.

  I found a woman in lavender tights who was extremely fit and had a long stride that bobbed her ponytail from side to side with each step. She was fast and smooth, so I fell in a comfortable distance behind her and matched her stride. The cool air felt good going down the back of my nose, and about half a mile in I could feel the first layer of sweat. My head cleared, my lungs expanded, and last night’s grease oozed out my pores.

  I could see Oak Street Beach not too far away. Almost midway into the run and the rhythm felt good. I didn’t think about the Tinsley Gerrigan case. I looked at the waves crashing to shore on my right and the runner galloping so elegantly in front of me. I was sad to see her go, but when I hit Oak Street, I turned around and headed back. More runners were on the path now, and I was glad I had set out early enough, because sometimes running the North Side was like trying to elbow your way up to a crowded bar. I looked down at my watch. My splits were better than I expected. It had been two weeks since I last ran. My first mile was a hair under seven minutes. This was supposed to be an easy, cleansing run, but the internal competitiveness kicked in, and I went all out
. My lungs began to burn, and my muscles screamed from all the lactic acid buildup. I pushed my way through it, focused on each step. I hit a dead sprint the last fifty yards to Navy Pier and stopped my watch as soon as I crossed my starting point. My second mile was 6:51. Not my fastest, but a good number to post.

  I walked back along Illinois a block south of Ohio Street. I wanted to see if the Ford Taurus was still there. It was. I was about forty yards away, but I could see through the front windshield. Two men, both with sunglasses. It looked like they were wearing suits. I pulled out my cell phone and called Mechanic.

  “You busy?” I said.

  “Depends who wants to know,” he replied.

  “Yours truly.”

  “I’m free as a bird.”

  “How far are you away from my place?”

  “I’m at the gym.”

  “I might have some company outside my building. Two guys in a black Ford Taurus. There’s no plate on the front of the car. They’re parked at the southwest corner of Ohio and McClurg.”

  “Copy.”

  “I’m gonna run up and take a shower, then head south. If they follow me, fall behind.”

  I jumped into the shower and changed into something loose in the event our company got frisky. I pulled the Porsche out slowly to give them time to make me, then turned onto McClurg and hung a sharp left on Illinois on my way to Lake Shore Drive. By the time I climbed up the entrance ramp, I could see the Ford Taurus a few cars back, and a couple of cars behind them I could see Mechanic’s black Viper.

  My cell phone buzzed.

  “I have the plate,” Mechanic said.

  “Good,” I said. “Text it to me. I’m gonna test their V-6 a little.”

  The light at Monroe turned green. I floored the pedal, then upshifted into second gear, then third, quickly getting above sixty. The other lights turned green in sequence, and the chase was on. Passed Buckingham Fountain, a blur by the Field Museum, then Soldier Field, with a quick beep in honor of the Bears. I was up to about eighty, and the Taurus had climbed up with me. Mechanic’s Viper was probably still just warming up in first gear.

  I turned up the ramp heading to the expressway. They followed as inconspicuously as they could. I jumped on 90/94 West, bobbing and weaving through the light traffic. They kept their distance but weren’t giving up any ground either. I jumped into the right lane, which led to an exit heading to the western suburbs. They joined me, as did Mechanic. Just when the lane was about to funnel up another ramp, I downshifted, sliced left in front of an eighteen-wheeler picking up speed, and returned to the expressway heading west. They were blocked by a line of trucks and had to keep going in the other direction. I slowed and watched as they headed up the exit ramp. Mechanic stayed behind them. I took the Ohio Street exit and headed over to Wells Street to grab a quick bite at Yolk.

  After I had gotten settled in a booth near the window, the waitress brought over a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a cup of honey-and-cinnamon tea without me asking for it. She asked if I’d be having the usual, to which I nodded. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my cousin’s number. Gordon Cayne picked up on the third ring.

  “You busy right now?” I asked.

  “Just looking through some financials,” he said. “You need something?”

  Gordon was my uncle’s youngest son, a recent Princeton graduate and a star lacrosse player. He was working for one of those big firms in New York and making more money in a month than I’d made in half a year as a rookie cop.

  “I need some social media help,” I said.

  “It’s about time you joined the rest of the world, Ashe,” he said.

  “I’m not that interested in what someone ate for dinner last night or seeing their kids dance with the dog.”

  “There’s a lot more to look at than that,” Gordon laughed. “What help do you need?”

  “I’m trying to locate someone’s friends.”

  “This one of your cases?”

  I gave him a quick rundown of the Tinsley Gerrigan case. “I want to find out more about her friends,” I said. “I went to her Instagram page, but it’s set to private. Then I checked Facebook, but I couldn’t find her.”

  Gordon laughed. “I thought you said she was twenty-five, not sixty-five.”

  “She is.”

  “No one under the age of thirty uses Facebook,” he said. “I deleted my account years ago. Let me call you back from a landline so I can search on my phone easier.”

  We hung up, and he called me right back. “I don’t want to request to follow her on Instagram, because I don’t want her to be able to see my profile,” I said. “But you could follow her, and if she accepts your request, you could search her page for me.”

  “That is if she accepts me,” Gordon said. “But if she’s missing and not active on her page, it won’t matter, because she won’t respond to my request. But don’t worry; there’s a new hack around the privacy feature.”

  “How?”

  “Every other week a developer comes up with a new tool that can go behind the privacy block. They don’t usually last for more than a few days before the IG techs learn about it and patch the hole. Give me a sec.”

  I could hear him typing on his keyboard. Then he said, “I’m in.”

  “That fast?”

  “This new tool is amazing.”

  “What can you see?”

  “Everything. She’s fine as shit. There’s a selfie of her on the water that’s killer.”

  “Do you see any pictures with her friends?”

  “She doesn’t post a lot. Most of her posts are pictures of art.”

  “She’s a painter.”

  “Some of this is pretty good. She has a lot of pictures of her dog. Hold on. Here’s one of her and another girl. Short hair, athletic.”

  “Does it say her name?”

  “Tinsley tagged her in a post: @rainbowgirl2015. I can see her page now. She has lots of pictures with Tinsley. She’s only posted a few hundred times, but it looks like a quarter of them are with Tinsley. Her name is Hunter. She doesn’t mention her last name.”

  “Morgan. They’re best friends.”

  “Lots of pictures of her at the Bulls games,” Gordon said. “She’s sitting courtside in all of them.”

  “Not surprised,” I said. “Her family has money. Go back to Tinsley’s page. Do you see her with any other friends?”

  “There’s a couple of shots from three years ago where she’s with a group, but she didn’t write their names, and she didn’t tag them. Wait. Here’s one with her and some guy. He’s got his hands around her waist, and they look like they’re about to kiss, or they just finished.”

  “Must be her boyfriend, Chopper.”

  “Never would think a guy who looks like he was born in Brooks Brothers would be named Chopper.”

  “Is the guy black?”

  “No, it’s a white guy. His handle is @morpheusinthesky. Tall, short dark hair, wide shoulders. Looks like he would row crew in college.”

  “Can you see his page and get his name?”

  “I can see his page but not his real name. He only has fifteen posts. They’re all motivational quotes and outdoors shots with mountains and lakes.”

  “I want you to send him a message. Say something like, ‘Need your help with Tinsley Gerrigan. Please reach back to me. URGENT!’”

  “That’s easy enough,” Gordon said. “But what do I do if he responds?”

  “Call me right away. No matter what time it is.”

  26

  IT WASN’T EVEN NOON yet, and it felt like an entire day had gone by. That was how it worked with investigations. Some days it was a complete drought, not even a single thread to tug, then other days clues fell from the sky in buckets. Today the skies had graciously opened, and I had intentions of taking complete advantage of it.

  Mechanic called me after I had gotten into the office. He’d followed the Ford Taurus west on the Kennedy Expressway and dropped th
em when they reached the Junction, the point at which I-94 split toward the North Shore / Milwaukee or veered to the left heading to O’Hare and beyond. I texted the license plate number to Carolina.

  I was standing at my window looking at the runners snaking their way through Grant Park when there was an urgent knock on my door. I opened it to find two plainclothes cops holding a thin envelope. “From Commander Burke,” one of them said before handing it to me.

  “Tell him the next round of golf is on me,” I said.

  They quickly turned and left with puzzled looks.

  I opened the envelope and pulled out the DVD, then slipped it into my computer’s drive. The techs had taken footage from six cameras and displayed it all at the same time in six individual boxes that popped up on my screen. A time code ran at the bottom of each box. These new cameras were much better than when I was on the force. Most of the film we watched was either too grainy or too dark and contributed little to our investigations. These videos, however, were in high definition, and the clarity was so good you could see the pimples on the faces of passing motorists.

  It took me a couple of hours to go through all the video as I checked it against the running timeline. The ME had said that Chopper had been dead between forty and forty-eight hours before we had gotten there, based on the lack of digestion products in his small intestines, the last time he was known to have eaten, and the degree of skin discoloration. I slowed the film to line up eight hours before the ME’s estimate. If my theory was correct, I needed to focus on the two cameras on Sixty-Ninth Street. One had been positioned two blocks east of South Wallace near Paul Robeson High School, while the other was just one block west. As I expected, very few cars turned out of South Wallace. A tow truck exited late in the morning. A white cargo van exited a few hours later, then no car or person exited for the next eight hours.

  The next day, three vehicles exited South Wallace. A rusted pickup truck with a heap of metal and fixtures in the bed exited and turned east on Sixty-Ninth Street at 9:17 a.m. A minivan driven by an old woman exited and turned west at 11:05 a.m. The last car to leave was an ’89 four-door Chevrolet Caprice Classic sitting on enormous twenty-six-inch rims and polished chrome that reflected the streetlights like mirrors. It turned west on Sixty-Ninth Street at 11:25 p.m. I played it back again. The windows were completely black, and even the front windshield had been tinted. It drove at a normal speed, waited for the traffic on Sixty-Ninth Street to clear, then turned west. There was a clean shot of the license plate, and I wrote it down. This timing would fit the ME report within a couple of hours of the time of death.