Laura’s concern for me didn’t last long.
Once she knew I was fine, the conversation turned back to Claire, and more specifically, the person that gave Claire’s killer the gun. I lied and told her that I may have a fresh lead, but I’m sure she didn’t believe me.
The case had kept me awake for years, driving me almost insane with insomnia. I had already looked down every avenue, searched through every clue, gone through the case a thousand times. I hadn’t missed anything; I was sure of that.
But Laura was a dying woman who wanted justice for her deceased daughter—I understood her need for closure. I accepted long ago that I would never have closure, that the nightmares would continue to haunt me until the day I died.
If my time was coming to a close, would I feel the same as Laura? Most likely.
Inevitably, I blamed myself for everything. It seemed to be the only way to avoid the torment of knowing that someone out there may have been responsible for Claire’s death, and hadn’t paid the price for it.
I also blamed myself for what happened to Alfie Rose on the sidewalk.
I’d arranged to meet Alfie and had reluctantly agreed to his request for it to be at his favorite watering hole: British themed pub, The Sir Robert Benjamin, opposite Armitage ‘L’ station in Lincoln Park.
I’d tried to talk him out of it, for us to meet at his penthouse, but he was adamant. He said he was going stir-crazy inside, that he needed fresh air, needed to taste some freedom in case it was his last; and, that he was going for a drink whether I met him or not.
Maybe it had been a bluff. Maybe I should have refused him point blank.
But he was a big guy and I wasn’t his babysitter. However, if he died, I knew I’d be carrying an extra load of guilt to add to the one already hanging heavy around my neck from Claire’s death.
It was touch and go, but after a hard-fought battle Alfie made it to the hospital, just.
Four major surgeries passed, and he was taken off the critical list. A painful week dripped by.
Then, at the start of week two, he finally woke up.
My relief was palpable.
The media had a field day. Alfie’s story was running on the front page of every major newspaper, leading every major television bulletin, and was trending on social media. His supporters became even louder, and his opponents even louder still.
The debate quickly became less about Alfie, less about Brian Gates, and more about left versus right. By the time Alfie woke up, his story was lost in a verbal assault of barbs, insults, and lightly veiled threats between opposing groups.
How it even came to this, I still don’t understand. How could someone believe their own ideas so much that they’re willing to get into a confrontation with strangers over them?
Long ago, I accepted that some people had different ideas than me. However, if they disagreed too aggressively, they met my fist.
To me, that seemed fair.
The investigation was met with numerous dead ends—no extra video surveillance footage around the dressing room that Gates used, no additional social media posts, and no further witnesses came forward. I had been trying to keep a low profile, out of the way of Alfie’s defense team, but that was becoming harder to do as the case grew and grew.
My contacts on the street knew nothing, my police contacts wouldn’t talk about the case, and my contacts in the television industry all thought Alfie did it. Casey worked hard on any missing internet links, anything that could be tied to that night, but she also came to nothing.
We weren’t the only ones working for him—the defense team that Alfie hired seemed solid, if unspectacular.
They fronted the media as Alfie’s spokespersons, answering any and all questions. It seemed to me like they were enjoying the spotlight a little too much, but every interview was free advertising for their law firm, I suppose.
In every interview they conducted, they were clearly positioning themselves for Alfie to roll over on a deal.
Which had me thinking—did he hire me because he was guilty?
I had no answer to that question. How could I? An innocent person who didn’t want to go to prison and a guilty person who didn’t want to go to prison would most likely be acting the same way in this situation. The only conclusion that I could come to was that he hired me because he hated the thought of spending time behind bars.
The more I saw of the kid, the more videos I viewed online, the more I liked him. He was fresh, energetic, and had an attractive energy around him. His positivity practically jumped right out of the screen.
If he was innocent, it would break my heart to see him go behind bars.
He didn’t deserve that; no innocent person did.
It was unlike me to get emotionally involved in a case but somehow this one was different.
When I finally got to see him in the hospital, he could barely speak, the brace holding his shattered jaw together made sure of that. He had two fractures in his jaw, some missing teeth, and three broken ribs. His nose looked slightly off center, there was bruising down his neck and arms, and both his eyes were still black. He had the best care that money could buy, the best room in the ward, but even that didn’t seem to ease the anguish in his eyes.
Pain is pain, no matter how expensive your doctors are.
He said a few words, and I told him quietly that the case was progressing. I wanted to sell him false hope, give him something positive to look forward to, but it seemed irresponsible, no matter how much it would lighten his mood in that moment.
He looked to me as a symbol of hope anyway, a last chance to get out of this mess.
As I stared at him, all stitches, tubes, drips and monitors, something took me by surprise: the horror of what happened to Claire came flooding back. I didn’t last long in the hospital after that. I ran outside, searched for the closest bar, and tried to drown those thoughts away.
Those thoughts had been suppressed for many years, and I didn’t want to confront them. Not then, not ever.
Over the next few days, every time I thought about Alfie in the hospital, images flashed before me of what I knew must have transpired in that classroom. I tried not to think of her, to concentrate on work, but it was useless. She was there more often than I could ever admit.
I tried to conjure up the good times, the precious bliss we’d shared together so as to banish the darkness, but try as I might, it was always the horror that rose to the surface.
To be haunted by the person you love is a tragedy.
I hated those thoughts.
And I hated myself for thinking them.
All that remained was her memory and even that I had tainted.
I suppressed her as best I could and tried to focus on the investigation; on Alfie.
And that’s when I realized, the two were becoming meshed in my mind, inextricably linked. I was no longer just fighting for Alfie; whether I liked it or not, I was now also fighting for the memory of Claire.
And if I fought for Claire, then all hell would come with me.
Chapter 9
Sometimes the smallest clue can reveal a giant hidden truth: something out of sync, unusual, unlikely, improbable, or maybe just plain curious; something tiny that raises a simple question that becomes the beginning of a thread, which, if followed, leads to a revelation at its end, palatable or otherwise.
It began with a tiny detail of a photograph taken on a long weekend in the fall.
Claire and I had been staying with her brother, Ben, his wife Nicky, and their four-year-old daughter Alana, at a vacation cabin in the Manistee National Forest on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan. I enjoyed going up there, it had good fishing, camping, and hunting. It was a nice place to unwind in the great outdoors and enjoy what life is all about. They’d rented the place as a celebration; Ben had just scored a long sought after promotion in the Chicago Police Department and Nicky announced her second pregnancy.
A great time was had by all and after we got home, Ben
and Nicky sent us a couple of photographs of the trip as mementos. Onto the fridge went a photo of us sharing a meal together on the final evening and, as typically happens, soon after it was forgotten about.
It was only when it slipped from under the fridge magnet and drifted down onto the floor a month later that I looked at it, or, more accurately, saw it, for the first time. Sure, I would have glanced at it in a cursory, oh, that’s nice, kind of way, but as I picked it up from the kitchen tiles something registered that I had previously missed.
It was all in the eyes.
There in Alana’s right eye was a tiny glowing dot of gold.
Taken by itself it might have been an anomaly, a quirk of the flash or light, so I dug around for some other photos of her. And there it was again. And again. Always in her right eye. Although invisible in person, there it was in all the photos.
“You need to get Alana’s eye checked out,” I told Nicky on the phone, explaining that the strange golden glow could be an indication of a tumor.
She was shocked and worried and took Alana straight to the pediatrician. He couldn’t detect anything but recommended she immediately take her to a specialist for a second opinion. It was then they discovered that Alana was practically blind in her right eye; that the reflective golden dot was the result of a mass of white in her eye caused by Coats’ Disease, a condition that, if left untreated, could necessitate the entire eye’s removal.
Alana was lucky, it was caught early and after four operations she was given the all clear. Ben and Nicky made such a big song and dance about me having saved their little girl’s eye, that they were eternally in my debt and that I was to let them know if ever there was anything they could do for me.
To be honest, it was all a bit embarrassing.
I had done nothing that anyone else wouldn’t do under the circumstances, and I never thought I’d be asking for that favor. But with Alfie in such a precarious position, and time ticking, I decided to hit Ben up for assistance. Not only was he a Chicago cop but, as luck would have it, had worked closely for several years with Alfie’s arresting officer. I needed some inside info; specifically, who else apart from Alfie had been considered for Brian Gates’ murder? It was a tricky ask, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Alfie’s predicament was about as desperate as they got and getting worse by the day.
I’d not seen or spoken to Ben or Nicky since Claire’s funeral. They’d written to me several times and tried calling but I’d shut them out.
It wasn’t personal.
I needed to be alone, to deal with the pain in my way, on my terms, not anybody else’s. The letters had long since ceased and they probably resented my lack of contact. Seeing people who knew and loved Claire was likely to rip off the mental and emotional scar, opening up the wound again. I’d built up my mental armor in the years since Claire’s murder, and, in truth, I dreaded taking it off.
But I was committed now.
As I drove towards their place, on the fringes of Wolf Lake, about 45 minutes from the city, I mulled over what I was going to say, while my ever enthusiastic golden retriever, Winston, barked and panted away in the passenger seat next to me, his eyes darting left and right, randomly jumping from one source of interest to another.
The two of us had become inseparable since Claire’s murder, me and this comically silly dog. Claire had got him from a shelter for abused animals.
I’d initially been against the idea of getting a dog, we didn’t have the space, he would be an unwanted commitment, and anyway I wasn’t a dog person.
Or so I thought.
It hardly seemed that way now. Winston had pretty much won me over the day he trotted in through our door, and I loved him to pieces. Our favorite thing was to hit the trails together, heading up and over hills, through forests, along the shore, anywhere outside the city. We did it whenever we got the chance, which had been less and less of late thanks to a deluge of work, but when we did it was bliss. We’d work each other out hard and by the end we’d both be spent, but it always felt like I’d unloaded a pile of mental baggage on the trail.
Ben was on his day off, spending it fishing on the lake. I’d called ahead of time and spoken to Nicky. It was an awkward call, but she told me where to find him.
She sounded reluctant and mentioned Ben had recently lost his partner in the line of duty: he was shot in the head in a gangbanger shootout in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Nicky said he’d taken it hard and was spending more and more time alone.
I found him staring at the tip of his rod as if in a trance, watching it bob up and down on the surface of the water, practically oblivious to everything else, as if the world beyond that rod tip ceased to exist.
It was windy today, but too much so to be a benefit; a bit of chop on the water’s surface is a fisherman’s friend, it reduces visibility underwater, so flaws in your bait are concealed, to an extent, from the fish; and waves along the shore stir up the bottom so the bigger fish get out and about to feed on those lower down the food chain.
Today it was practically blowing a gale.
Ben would be lucky to catch anything, but I knew that it wasn’t really fish he was after but head space and solitude, however fleeting.
“Ben!” I exclaimed, doing my best to sound upbeat. “Are they biting?”
“Jack,” he said, half smiling half letting out a sigh. “Nicky mentioned you’d be coming down.”
“How are things?”
“Things are good. You?”
“Good.”
We were both lying—and least about the things that really mattered—and what’s more, we both knew as much. But neither of us were wear your heart on your sleeve kind of guys, so we carried on the charade, it was standard operating procedure for the likes of us to put up a stoic front. And I make no apology for it.
“Sorry if I seem a bit down,” said Ben. “Some guy stole my anti-depressants yesterday. I'm upset, but I hope he’s happy.”
We both laughed as the joke demanded, but it was clearly forced.
“Did you hear about the new restaurant on the moon?” It was traditional that we traded bad jokes, so I came prepared with my worst. “Great food. No atmosphere.”
He laughed, genuinely, more than the joke deserved.
“What do you call an Italian guy with a rubber toe?” He started laughing again. “Roberto.”
I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. It was a release of nervous pressure, a way to let the tension out.
So commenced a protracted round of small talk, centered around fishing: the tides and the wind conditions, his new rod, the type of bait he was using. I knew he didn’t want to discuss what had happened to his partner and he knew I didn’t want to discuss Claire, so why even bother? We both respected that and carried on in this way, with occasional breaks to play fight with Winston, for about 15 minutes, when Ben finally broke the deadlock.
“But you didn’t come down here to talk to me about fishing, did you Jack?”
“No. I did not.”
“So why are you here, why now?”
“I need to ask a favor.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at me in a way that begged the question: and that favor is?
“I’ve taken on a case, one that you’ll be familiar with, and one that I don’t have the luxury of time to solve—the murder of Brian Gates.”
“You’re working for Alfie Rose?” He shook his head incredulously. “And you think he’s innocent, do you? Come on, get real, Jack! All the evidence points to this guy. He lost control, got angry after Gates bullied him, and he snapped. Hit him a few times. In my line of work, you see it all the time. You can’t really think he’s innocent. No way.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” I replied.
I was stretching the truth.
I was open minded as to what really happened that night. Sure, I thought Alfie was probably innocent, but at the same time I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that he’d done it or
had a hand in it, only this seemed much less likely to me. There was nuance to my position, as an investigator there had to be, but nuance wasn’t going to get results with Ben. If he thought I was convinced of Alfie’s innocence, then he’d be far more likely to help, so I made my opinion sound cast iron.
“There’s nothing I can give you,” he said. “I wasn’t involved in the case. And even if I was, you know I can’t divulge information about ongoing police work. You know how it works. I can’t go sniffing around because my, well, I suppose ex-brother-in-law…”
He paused for a moment, and so did I.
Ex-brother-in-law?
I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose he was right. There was nothing tying us together anymore. I hadn’t seen them in years, I hadn’t even talked to them, and we had no blood relations.
“Sorry, Jack. That’s not how I meant it.” He turned back to his rod tip with a pained expression.
“The kid’s innocent, Ben.” I wasn’t going to push the notion of family any further, I’d had enough of that sort of talk recently. “Justice isn’t served by the wrong guy going down for murder, less so if he’s killed inside, which you know is a real probability. He’ll be dead within a year.”
He looked unmoved, but I continued regardless.
“Do you remember telling me once that it was the pursuit of justice that first led you to join the force? Things might have gotten blurred over the years but that’s what I’m after too, only we’re approaching it from different angles. If you’re right and Alfie Rose is guilty then no amount of chicanery from me will help him. But I want the full picture. I want to know who else was a suspect, and why?”
“It wasn’t my case, Jack.”
“I know; it was Detective O’Reilly’s. It’s hardly a secret that you guys are close, real close—best man at your wedding; I was there too, remember? Look, I know how it is, you would have discussed it, probably over a couple of beers, right?”
“I’m not in a position to say.”
“I need this favor, Ben. And as much as it pains me to say it, you owe me one.”
Gates of Power Page 6
