The left-leaning Chicago Tribune wasn’t shy about throwing out descriptors like heavy-handed, draconian, or even fascist. In some of the city’s more radical black churches, the epithet of Uncle Tom was bandied around. Particularly controversial was Watkins’s well-known disdain for diversity quotas, which he viewed as condescending and counterproductive.
To Chief Watkins himself, the opinion of others was just background noise. He had one job to do: protect the city. And if he did this to the best of his ability, as quaint a notion as it might seem, he could sleep well at night.
Even among his detractors, who detested his methods, he engendered near-universal respect.
Except from one man who hated him with a passion. And who just happened to be sitting across the desk from him.
In Czarcik’s mind, Chief Watkins’s greatest attributes were also his greatest liabilities. Going by the book wasn’t a virtue, it was a surefire prescription for getting officers killed. All the man’s awards and accolades, which Czarcik found incredibly tacky anyway, did little to console a grieving widow who had just lost her husband because of the department’s cumbersome rules of engagement. Watkins may have never breached protocol, but Czarcik, for his part, had never killed a completely innocent man. And more importantly, he never had to utter the words, “I could have done more.”
Chief Watkins didn’t care for Czarcik either, having worked with him many times throughout his career, both when Czarcik was with Chicago PD and in his new role with the BJE. In his eyes, the detective was a maverick, loose cannon, and dinosaur. He had done his best to purge these kinds of officers from his own department and wished he could have done the same at the BJE.
Furthermore, he hated the entire idea of the Bureau of Judicial Enforcement. Chicago was supposed to have the country’s most finely tuned police force. That it was required to sometimes work with, and rely on, some quasi-independent state agency infuriated him. If the city thought it needed assistance, it should simply train its own officers better.
Because of this mutual antipathy, Czarcik was thoroughly caught off guard when Watkins, after a painfully long period of reflection, agreed to his unorthodox idea.
“But I’m telling you one thing,” Chief Watkins warned. He had stopped pulling at his mustache and now jabbed his finger in the air in Czarcik’s direction. “If this doesn’t work, I let everyone know—everyone—that this was entirely a BJE operation. The city just offered tactical support.”
Czarcik smiled. He took the mangled, half-eaten cigar he had been chewing on and tossed it into Watkins’s wastebasket, and showed himself out of the office.
Daniel couldn’t believe it. This was too ironic. Or too coincidental. He wasn’t sure which. The words were often used interchangeably but incorrectly. And English, unlike the hard sciences, and despite his predilection for poetry, was never his strong suit.
He was sure, however, that fate had fucked him yet again.
Daniel had been on his way to rural Indiana. There, in the quaint unincorporated town of Bridgeport, was Miriam Manor.
It billed itself as a boarding school where troubled girls could find spiritual peace. In reality, the manor was a house of horrors.
For over forty years, Reverend Seamus Bradley and his obese wife, Dorothy, along with their brood of grown children and pathologically devoted staff ladies, had abused the girls in their care. The endless beatings, psychological manipulation and humiliation, and alternate bouts of starvation and force-feeding were just the appetizers.
For the main course, a walk-in closet. Former residents recounted identical stories of the rusty gynecological table, the restraints, and the visits from a country “doctor” in greasy overalls.
Inside Daniel’s trunk was a secret compartment called a trap, typically used by drug runners and weapons dealers. Traps could be as simple as empty space behind a false panel, with enough room to store a kilo or two, or elaborate feats of engineering that rivaled a high-tech panic room.
Daniel’s was somewhere in the middle. He had paid a Latino teenager at some sketchy body shop on the West Side $5,000 to create a false bottom in the trunk. If Daniel held down the defroster and seat warmer while tuning his radio to AM 1000, the bottom would pop open to reveal a fireproof box.
Inside was a 9 mm pistol fitted with a suppressor, a brand new scaling knife, and a pint-sized plastic container of avtur—otherwise known as jet fuel—which burned a lot hotter than ordinary gasoline.
Daniel’s plan was straightforward, if overly ambitious. He would enter Miriam Manor around three in the morning. Everybody would be asleep. He would shoot all the Bradley children. He would shoot the staff ladies. Then he would deal with Reverend Bradley and his wife. He had special plans for them.
Unfortunately, these plans would have to wait, as currently Daniel was in the throes of the worst headache of his life. He had never had a migraine, and although he knew sufferers claimed it to be the most painful condition imaginable, he had to believe this was worse. Luckily, he managed to navigate off the highway and found a Best Western less than a mile from the exit.
Once in his room, Daniel took out his small black medicine bag. His hands trembled from the pain as he filled a syringe with 40 mg of Palladone and injected it directly into his temple. The relief was instantaneous. He melted into the cheap mattress. The needle rolled off his fingers onto the carpet as his arm hung limply off the bed. Like an angel. Or an addict. And then he slept.
When he woke up six hours later, the pain was gone. Although he had taken enough narcotics to down a small horse, he felt surprisingly refreshed.
Daniel grabbed the remote and turned on the TV out of habit. He wanted a hot shower and a huge plate of pancakes slathered in syrup with a side of crispy bacon.
But what he saw on WGIU—“your source for breaking news and weather”—made him forget everything.
By all appearances, it was a routine press conference. An ordinary-looking official, identified onscreen as Detective Paul Czarcik, Illinois Bureau of Judicial Enforcement, was standing at the podium. At the top left corner of the screen were two mug shots, a man and a woman, identified as “Victims.” Daniel recognized them as something else and, under less pressing circumstances, would have found humor in this characterization.
The photos were of Luis and Marisol Fernandez.
Opposite them, on the other side of this Czarcik character, was a photo of a man whom Daniel didn’t recognize. He looked to be in his midthirties, unkempt and disheveled, with a long nappy beard. Daniel was grateful the television wasn’t high def; he could almost see the lice crawling around in the man’s forest of hair. His eyes were crazy, like the junkies in those Faces of Death videos from the seventies, right before they committed suicide by swan diving from a rooftop, the result of, as an earnest narrator intoned, PCP addiction.
His name was Fenton Oakes, and he was identified as a suspect.
You poor disgusting, unlucky, pathetic innocent man, Daniel thought.
On the television, Detective Paul Czarcik adjusted the microphone. The vultures in the press corps below him buzzed with arms extended. They reminded Daniel of the old Frankenstein movies that used to run on Saturday afternoons, but instead of shovels and pitchforks, this angry mob brandished pens, notepads, and mini digital recorders.
“One at a time, one at a time,” Czarcik chastised. He obviously had nothing but contempt for the horde, and although he seemed to be a thoroughly unlikeable person, Daniel couldn’t help but identify with him. “I’ll take some questions, but let me preface this by saying that although we’re confident that Mr. Fenton Oakes is responsible for the deaths of Luis and Marisol Fernandez, at this point he’s still a suspect and as such deserves and will receive due process. If Mr. Oakes is ultimately convicted, it will be by a jury of his peers, not in the court of public opinion.”
Daniel felt light-headed. Untethered. He hadn’t been knocked on his ass by a hangover since graduate school, but he was immediately reminded of the
sensation. He pressed on his temples to stem the humming in his ears and waited for the physical manifestations of anxiety to leave him.
On the TV, the questions to Detective Czarcik came fast and furious, from the mundane to the ridiculous.
Did Mr. Oakes have any connection to the victims? What was the evidence that led to his arrest? Can you rule out terrorism? Where is Fenton Oakes from? Does he have a criminal record? Have you searched Mr. Oakes’s home? Is this a crime of passion? Where does he get his news from? Were the victims sexually assaulted?
Daniel didn’t hear a single one. The words were all one big sonic blur. An unintelligible wall of sound.
And none of it mattered. How this incompetent detective had managed to arrest the wrong man was irrelevant. But he had. Somehow he had.
Daniel had been exceedingly careful, or so he thought. Never had he put more planning and preparation into an endeavor. He had studied and memorized the easiest and most difficult surfaces—from glass to human corneas—from which investigators could pull fingerprints. He had researched the best types of gloves to not only avoid leaving prints but to also avoid trapping sweat, skin flakes, and any other material that contained usable DNA.
He had read voraciously about serial killers, pressing on even when their unspeakable deeds and aberrant desires made him physically ill. He understood which crimes would be associated with which psychopathology and made sure to arrange the crime scenes accordingly.
He knew how to dispose of a body and even how to preserve it, at least temporarily, if need be.
He had learned how to hotwire a car, pick a lock, and trace a phone call—with help from the internet, all far easier than anticipated.
He had taken self-taught crash courses in forensics, pathology, anatomy, pharmacology, and less-savory sciences, passing with flying colors.
He had taken every precaution against underestimating his adversaries. His one mistake was overestimating them.
These imbeciles hadn’t just failed to catch him, they had arrested the wrong man. An innocent man. As much as Daniel tried to convince himself that the poor bastard on his screen—this Fenton Oakes with his wild hair and wilder eyes—must be guilty of something, down deep he knew this rationalization was a poor attempt to assuage his guilt.
After all, the idea was to speak for those who could not speak for themselves.
Although the idea had been percolating for a while, Daniel remembered exactly when the method for choosing his targets had crystallized. He had been in the waiting room at one of his weekly appointments, waiting to hear which of his lobes was now in the crosshairs, when he picked up the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax and began flipping through it, bringing back happy memories of his childhood. He thought about the book and what it meant. And Daniel knew in that moment, he would speak for those with no tongues. With no voice. No hope.
Back at the press conference, Czarcik was sparring with a reporter. She had hard, birdlike features and was dressed in a severe pantsuit. “I think that’s a little premature, Judy,” he replied to one of her inquiries. “That’s completely up to the DA. But”—he looked directly into the camera. There was something about his eyes that unsettled Daniel. Hinting at something he didn’t quite understand—“it’s just unfortunate we no longer have the death penalty. After all, we can’t have monsters like this in our city.”
You have no idea what monsters are out there, Daniel thought before turning off the TV, bathing the room in darkness.
ELEVEN
One week had passed since Detective Paul Czarcik had convinced his boss, Eldon Parseghian, who had then persuaded Chicago Police Chief Eldridge Watkins, to allow him to take Jake Schaeffer, a young IT technician, and fit him with a wig and fake beard, along with a little mascara to give him that hollow-eyed junkie look, and then take a few snapshots.
Voilà! Fenton Oakes.
Czarcik had had to ply Schaeffer with a few shots of Jägermeister to get him into the spirit of things. Undercover work wasn’t really the kid’s bag. But once the liquor started flowing, and Czarcik assured him that even his mother wouldn’t recognize him, the kid finally gave in.
Chief Watkins had his own reasons for agreeing to such a harebrained idea. It wasn’t going to be long before some enterprising reporter discovered that Fenton Oakes was nothing more than a figment of their collective imagination. Once that happened, the ax would fall. And Watkins was going to make damn sure it fell directly on the neck of Czarcik and, by extension, the entire BJE.
Czarcik wasn’t naive. He knew that Watkins detested him and everything he stood for. He had been given just enough rope with which to hang himself, but he was also supremely confident in his own abilities. His plan would work.
Czarcik had promised to have his man within a week—two at the most. Now, as the days passed, his confidence was waning.
Originally, he had been all but certain that this ruse would draw out the killer. Even with only two crime scenes to analyze, he believed his profile was sound. Their killer had targeted Judge Robertson and the Fernandezes only after hearing about their cases in the media. The primary unifying feature was that all three murder victims had abused a vulnerable dependent in their care.
If, as Czarcik eventually surmised, the killer viewed himself as some sort of avenging angel, he would be unable to stand idly by as an innocent man was charged. How far would he go, however, to right this wrong? And would it be enough to give Czarcik a glimpse, or even a clue, into his real identity?
There was also the possibility that the killer hadn’t seen or heard about the elaborate press conference staged for his benefit. Czarcik found this unlikely. A man—and Czarcik was positive that it was a man—who had been so careful about avoiding detection, for whom notoriety was inconsequential, would be constantly scouring the media for updates on the crimes. Not for arrogance, but for preservation. The fox had to remain ahead of the hounds.
Following an extralong workout, Czarcik stopped in at McGillvey’s Pub, a local watering hole where he could drink without being disturbed. He knocked back a double rye before heading over to the Sunfish Motel for his eight o’clock appointment. This had been his daily routine for the past few days as he considered the possibility that maybe the trail had simply gone cold.
There were still things to do. He could interview all the usual suspects—meaning the Fernandezes’ remaining family members and tangential business associates—but knew such gestures would be futile. Only the killer himself could help Czarcik now. While he waited, at least he had his vices.
The escort introduced herself as Bertha, as unappealing a name as there was for a prostitute. Even though there was no sex involved, Czarcik was a traditionalist and preferred the easy, sleazy Candys, Ashleys, Brittanys, and Nikkis. Bertha sounded like somebody’s great-aunt.
Bertha was pretty enough, with a smile that turned up at one corner in a way that reminded him of Drew Barrymore. She wasn’t much of a conversationalist, however, and spent most of the hour educating Czarcik on the benefits of cupping therapy, a type of Chinese medicinal quackery embraced equally by the very famous and very gullible.
After she was gone, Czarcik turned on the TV. The Sunfish was more upscale than his usual love nests, renting rooms only by the day and not the hour. Since he had already paid and was in no condition to drive, he contemplated staying the night. About a gram of coke was left, along with some really good mezcal that he wanted to savor. He’d watch a movie, maybe take a nap, and then see how he felt.
Although the Sunfish boasted of having cable in all its rooms, the establishment offered only the most basic package and included none of the movie channels. Even so, it was impossible for Czarcik to grow bored. As someone who went through most of his adolescence with a single black-and-white television in the house, he was constantly amazed at the sheer number of shows available. One was about a grizzled family of duck hunters who were inexplicably millionaires. Another featured an angry Brit with terrible acne scars who either ran a restauran
t or visited restaurants—Czarcik wasn’t sure which—and screamed at staff and patrons alike. And his favorite followed a collector who traveled the country trying to track down and purchase vintage Big Ten memorabilia. That half hour flew by in five minutes.
After some halfhearted channel surfing, he landed on TNT, which was airing Body Heat. He loved the movie, which reminded him of the old film noirs he used to watch as a kid on the family’s thirteen-channel television set. Films like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, In a Lonely Place, and Out of the Past. Films with beautiful women, jaded men, and deadly secrets. Always secrets.
He had come in on the action just as William Hurt and Kathleen Turner were ravishing each other for the first time and was asleep long before Hurt even realized he was being double-crossed.
Czarcik awoke barely half an hour later. His back hurt, and his mouth was like cotton. But his buzz was gone, and he felt good enough to drive home.
He arrived back at his condo at one thirty in the morning. He glanced at the glowing numbers of his digital clock, contemplated some good Scotch to take the edge off, decided against it, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
The dream was surreal, enhanced by the chemicals still being metabolized by his body.
A white sand beach unfurled in front of him like a giant ribbon. The sea was calm, lapping at his feet as he strolled along. But as the tide drew back, into the vast ocean, it left behind hundreds of bloody mollusks on the shoreline. When Czarcik kneeled down to inspect them, they turned into hairy arachnids, sprouting nonaquatic appendages and scurrying across the sand. He opened his mouth to scream, but it filled with salt water, and even in the dream, he didn’t understand why the sight of unnatural but harmless creatures should fill him with dread. As his sleeping brain tried to process the images, he felt something pulling him out of his slumber, prodding him back to reality.
Rain Will Come Page 8
