“Because it was the right thing to do,” she replied.
And lied.
Chloe was a fine actress, thought Czarcik. Eminently believable. She had no tell, the kind that damns a poker player or nervous criminal. But the moment the words left her mouth, Czarcik could not have been more certain. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was lying. He wasn’t sure how he knew. That would come later when he had time to play their conversation over and over again in his mind. But he was equally certain that if he pushed, if he probed for any weakness or inconsistency, she would pick up on it—if only unconsciously—and become much harder to read.
For now, he had to play along. “Of course” was the safest response.
“So . . . what do we do now?” Chloe asked.
Czarcik shifted in the booth, stretching his aching muscles, suddenly reminded of how long they had been sitting there. “Well, I’d like some time to review those files of yours. I assume that’s OK?” She nodded. “And then, well, I’ll attempt to do what we both want done.”
“And what’s that?”
“Find your husband.”
As if it were a sign that it was time, for now, to conclude their meeting, the door to the restaurant swung open. Two large and very drunk Eastern Europeans made a beeline for the bar, conducting that inebriated dance where one lost his balance only to be rescued at the last minute by the other, after which the roles would reverse.
“I’d like to be involved as much as possible, Detective. After all, if it weren’t for me, the trail would be cold.”
Such presumption would normally have bothered Czarcik, as would Chloe’s use of colloquialisms she had probably gleaned from too many Dick Wolf procedurals. He could have easily told her that allowing a civilian too much access to an active investigation was completely against department protocol, which, of course, it was.
But there was something not entirely unappealing about having to see Chloe Langdon again.
It’s because of the lie, he told himself. Why did she lie about contacting me?
“I’ll keep you apprised,” Czarcik assured her. “After all, nobody knows him as well as you do.”
They exchanged contact information, and she thanked him for the wine. After a few more awkward goodbye formalities, Chloe took his arm firmly.
“There’s one more thing you should know about my husband, Detective Czarcik. When he begins something, he always finishes it.”
“Glad to hear that. Because so do I.”
SEVENTEEN
Driving home from Dnieper, he called Corrine Fumagalli at home. She answered on the third ring.
“Corrine. It’s Paul Czarcik.”
“When I said I’d miss you, I didn’t mean so soon.”
“Very funny.” He could hear her chewing. “Were you eating dinner?”
“Nah, Slim Jim. And playing Punic Wars: Hannibal’s Revenge.”
“What’s that?”
“MMOG. Massively multiplayer—ah, forget it. You’re too old.” Chomp, chomp. “Why you calling me at home?”
“I need a favor.”
“That much I figured.”
“I need any information you have on a Daniel Langdon.” He spelled it.
“Got it. Call you in the morning.” He could hear soft music and the sounds of electronic warfare in the background. She had gone back to playing.
“No chance you’re going back to the office tonight?”
She laughed. “No chance.” He was about to hang up. “Especially since I’m not even sure you still work for the bureau.”
“Then call it a personal favor.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Czarcik hung up, searched through the contacts on his phone, and dialed another number.
“This is Detective Paul Czarcik of the Illinois Bureau of Judicial Enforcement . . . Yes, that’s right . . . I need to see you right away. Where are you? . . . Ten minutes.”
King Kong and Godzilla—Kong on his left, ’Zilla on his right—ushered him through the back door of the Italian restaurant.
The restaurant was closed, but Sal Cicci sat alone at a table in the back, dressed in an expensive suit and drinking a glass of red wine. If he had been roused from bed, he certainly didn’t show it.
Czarcik’s escorts walked him halfway through the restaurant. Cicci motioned to the empty chair across from him and poured Czarcik a glass of wine.
“Want some friendly business advice?” Czarcik asked, slipping into the chair. “You want to look like a legitimate real estate player”—he jerked his thumb at Cicci’s muscle—“lose Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Potential investors don’t like to feel like they’re walking into a scene from The Godfather.”
Cicci wasn’t pleased. “You ask me here, when I should be at home, spending time with my family, and then you give me a hard time about my employees?”
“Take it easy, Sal. I’m just kidding.”
“Well, I’m not in the mood for it. You guys are getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of me for nothing.”
“Nothing? I wouldn’t call it nothing that the state’s attorney hasn’t had the time to take a closer look at your business practices.”
Cicci took a long swig and poured himself some more wine. “You motherfuckers keep taking your pound of flesh. So tell me, what the hell do you want?”
Czarcik looked over at the two bodyguards, then back to Cicci, who dismissed them with a flick of his hand. Once they were gone, he asked, “Does the name Daniel Langdon ring a bell?”
“Don’t think so. Should it?”
“Probably not.” He took another sip of wine. “This is excellent, Sal. I’m usually not much of a wine drinker. What is it?”
“A 2008 Brunello di Montalcino,” Cicci said impatiently. “Look, can we finish up here? I want to get home.”
“If somebody was moving nearly a quarter million in cash through the city—in what, I don’t know. Guns, drugs, whatever. Would you know about it?”
“Cicci Industries is a diversified portfolio of—”
“Cut the shit, Sal,” Czarcik yelled, pounding his fist on the table. Cicci grabbed the stem of his glass before it could topple over. His two employees returned to the room but Cicci held up a hand, stopping them in their tracks.
To Czarcik, he said, “I would know about it.”
“This Daniel Langdon. I don’t think he’s anybody you should or will know. But I want you to remember the name. You hear it, among any of your . . . businesses, you give me a call.”
Cicci nodded, and Czarcik stood up. He finished his wine, then reached across and polished off Cicci’s glass. “Oh, what the hell.” He grabbed the wine bottle from the table and took it with him to the door. “Damn fine wine,” he said before leaving the restaurant.
He could feel Cicci’s eyes on the back of his head, and knew that the mobster would have loved to put a bullet there.
His BlackBerry vibrated the moment he got back into the Crown Vic.
“Czarcik.”
It was Corrine. “I forgot to ask. How official do you want this?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, I can get you background from the IRS, DMV, IAFIS, sex offender registry, department of corrections, or do you want me to go . . . deeper.”
“What I’d really like is a snapshot of their financial health.”
“Whose? You told me the name of one guy, Langdon.”
“He and his wife. Her name is Chloe Langdon.”
“How’s bank statements and a comprehensive list of all their accounts?”
“You can do that?”
Corrine laughed. “Please. Banks—the big ones, with FDIC insurance—are as easy to hack as the utilities.”
“Good girl.”
“Don’t call me that, prick.”
He sat motionless. A subject in a lab experiment. Or a newfangled yoga pose.
Czarcik was at his desk, in his home office, hands in front of him, palms down.
Spread out in
a semicircle—like large hands of blackjack—were the six folders given to him by Chloe Langdon, the contents of each removed and piled haphazardly on top. To his left, an ashtray. In one of the notches on the rim sat a cigarette, its ash nearly the length of the cigarette itself.
His eyes moved across the surface of his desk. Back and forth. He was seeing the folders, but he was thinking about Chloe. She had been forthcoming with him. Sincere. At least for the most part. And yet she remained inscrutable.
He had spent hours interviewing her, looking into those eyes, and yet he felt it was her husband on whom he had a better handle. A husband whom he had only met in the dead of night behind a dime-store mask.
Chloe had given him the folders in no discernible order. And there was no way to tell whether her husband, Daniel, had organized them by any criteria other than sheer randomness.
So Czarcik was forced to bring some structure to the proceedings. He knew that Daniel was responsible for the murders in at least two of the cases. And he knew that the Judge Robertson murder was first. There was no question about this. So he placed a paper tent, with a #1 written in permanent black marker, on top of this folder.
Number two was the Fernandez murders.
The next four were in no particular order—at least not yet. Number three, at the moment, was a pedophile priest in Tennessee accused of raping more than fifty boys, making him one of the country’s most prolific serial rapists.
Number four was Miriam Manor. Number five was a trucker from Minnesota with a little drinking problem. And number six was a private reform school that sounded more like a North Korean reeducation camp.
Czarcik then printed out a map of the United States. He took a Sharpie and drew circles around the locations of all the crimes detailed in the folders: Dallas; Chicago; Duluth, Minnesota; Tennessee; rural Indiana; and the Everglades.
From Dallas, the scene of Judge Robertson’s murder, he drew a line directly to Chicago, mostly following I-35, where the Fernandezes had been killed.
He leaned back in his chair and allowed his eyes to roam over the map. If Daniel was being logical, if time was of the essence, and if he was not actively trying to evade the authorities—all of which Czarcik assumed to be true—from Chicago he would have either gone to Minnesota or Indiana.
By going to Indiana first, he would have then had to backtrack to reach Minnesota, and then double back through Indiana in order to reach Tennessee and finally Florida.
But if he first went to Minnesota from Chicago, he basically had a straight shot through Indiana, Tennessee, and then Florida.
Of course, he could do something completely illogical, like traveling from Chicago down to Florida, then back up through Tennessee, over to Indiana, and across the Upper Midwest to Minnesota. But that route seemed the longest and least likely.
He made an educated guess that Daniel’s third stop was Duluth. He put a #3 on the folder of the drunk driver. Then he reordered the other folders. So #4 went on Miriam Manor in Indiana, #5 on Tennessee, and #6 on the warm, wet Everglades in Florida.
Occam’s razor . . .
On the map, beginning in Dallas, Czarcik drew one continuous line that connected all the cities in numerical order. Upon close inspection, it looked like a misshapen, upside-down V.
Pleased with his progress, Czarcik lit another cigarette and poured himself a couple of fingers of Cutty, neat.
He was far too wired to even think about sleep and still baffled by some aspects of his theory. If Daniel had in fact followed the assumed route, why hadn’t he yet reached Minnesota? And if he had, why was he waiting to claim another victim?
A quick Google search revealed that the trucker named in the accident had not yet been killed, at least not in a way violent enough to warrant inclusion in the local papers. All the entries with the trucker’s name that the search engine pulled up were articles from the accident and subsequent trial.
After accessing the Minnesota secretary of state’s database—perfectly legal for all BJE employees—Czarcik quickly found the address for Edgar Barnes. With a little luck, and a little nose candy to help him power through, he could be there by morning.
By midnight, Czarcik had the Crown Vic stocked with all the necessary supplies: a carton of cigarettes, a few expensive cigars, and a small baggie of the good stuff.
The Chicago expressways were uncharacteristically deserted, and Czarcik pushed the Crown Vic into Wisconsin in less than an hour. The rolling pastures of the Dairy State soon gave way to towering limestone cliffs, which, on the night of this full moon, threw long, irregular shadows across the road. Czarcik savored the taste of his twenty-dollar Romeo y Julieta and watched as the tendrils of smoke danced around the car’s interior before slipping out the cracked window. He passed silo after silo, giants in the night, guarding barren fields from cosmic invasion. It wasn’t until he crossed over the Black River that he felt the need for a little chemical pick-me-up.
Dawn greeted him at the border of the Gopher State, a sad, purplish morning.
He gassed up at the next rest stop, stretched his legs, took a leak, and bought a bag of salted peanuts, which he finished before returning to the car.
Czarcik was hoping to reach the home of Edgar Barnes before the trucker left for work. He wasn’t confident that he could obtain the information he wanted with a phone call. Without looking the man in the eye, Czarcik feared he would be dismissed as an overanxious cop or, worse, a crank.
Barnes lived in a small development called River Run on the outskirts of Duluth. Zoning regulations seemed to require the body of a rusty automobile to be prominently displayed on cinder blocks on the front lawn of every home. The houses were all built on solid ground, but their cheap siding and plastic outdoor furniture recalled late-century trailer park.
The welcoming committee was an old man with a single gray tooth, sitting in a lawn chair on the side of the dirt road leading into the development. A dog, his elder in canine years, slept at his feet, opening one eye as cars passed by. The animal was waiting for its owner to die. Czarcik remembered a story he once heard about a hospital cat who could predict imminent death and would sit on the edge of patients’ beds when the grim reaper was near. He thought this dog might have the same ability.
Barnes’s house was indistinct from that of his neighbors. It was surrounded by a metal fence with a “Beware of Dog” sign hanging from a screw. The gate was open, swinging in the breeze, with no sign of the animal.
Czarcik parked in front of the house, on the street, leaving the driveway unoccupied in case Barnes just happened to be returning from a long haul. He flicked his cigarette into the damp grass from the car’s open window, slipped his gun into the back of his jeans, and got out of the car.
The steps leading up to the house were fairly well maintained for the area, meaning they only squeaked loudly instead of collapsing into a pile of termite-infested wood. Behind a filthy screen door was the main door to the house with equally filthy windows. Decals from various unions going back decades were affixed to the panes. Czarcik pulled the screen door open; the well-rusted hinges screeched. He rapped on one of the windows, not too hard, afraid he might dislodge the glass.
When no one answered after a few seconds, Czarcik moved his face close to the glass, making sure not to touch it, lest he contract some communicable disease. He squinted into the gloom. The living room—or what he presumed was the living room from the presence of a dilapidated couch and TV—was empty. He knocked again, fully anticipating the same result.
Still no one came to the door, so Czarcik descended the steps and walked around to the back of the house. He saw a concrete patio with jagged fault lines, the result of endless Minnesota winters, from which an abundance of weeds had sprouted. A cobweb-covered Weber grill, its ash catch overflowing, recalled barbeques long forgotten. Children’s toys from the seventies were strewn across what was left of the backyard’s brown grass. The Barnes family didn’t seem to be much for entertaining.
Czar
cik took in the white-trash ambiance before returning to the front door, knocking a little harder this time. He thought he heard a slight rustling from within, but it very well could have been his imagination or simply the wind blowing through the cracked glass of the outdoor porch light. Inside the metal housing, piled to the top, was a mound of moth parts. The beacon that precipitated their demise had burned out long ago.
The screen door was cracked open far enough for Czarcik to touch the main door without causing any undue noise. He grasped the doorknob with both hands to minimize the sound and turned it, hardly surprised to find it open. The savory stench of human odor comingled with rotten food slapped him in the face as he stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him.
Rods of diffused sunlight sliced through the moth-eaten curtains. Weirdly illuminated dust hung in the air as if suspended in a solution. Czarcik’s stomach rolled at the thought of breathing in this mixture of insect parts and dandruff. The smell of stale cigarette smoke, which hung over the room, was a welcome relief.
A day-old TV dinner lay on the coffee table in front of the couch. The now-shriveled chicken hung over the aluminum partition, resting on the adjacent congealed gravy. The final item, the mashed potatoes, looked as hard as concrete.
The living room was separated from the kitchen by a chest-high wall that went halfway across the room. From his position by the door, Czarcik could see through the kitchen window into the backyard, where a few mangy squirrels now played tag atop the Weber.
A pile of magazines lay at the foot of the couch, as if the reader was too lazy to simply place them on the table. Czarcik made a bet with himself. Among the periodicals, he would find at least one tabloid newspaper, one lowbrow home and garden magazine, and one devoted to outdoor pursuits. He bent down and leafed through the stack. Guns & Ammo, Field & Stream, National Enquirer, US Weekly, and an issue of Redbook from last year. People, like crimes, were so predictable. It was amazing how the different strata of society hewed so closely to their stereotypes. Did the Barneses actually enjoy these pursuits, he wondered. Or did they think this was what they were supposed to read, what they were supposed to have, how they were expected to live. Like fucking animals.
Rain Will Come Page 14
