53

The next morning Marta and I met at Wired Café. The usual Euro techno music wafted from the speakers and the espresso machine hissed like part of the percussion. We spotted Detective Lund at a grungy table in the corner away from the windows. Today his gray suit was full of wrinkles. His eyes closed as he drank from a demitasse cup. Beside him, Hempel was two-fisting a huge cup of coffee. He’d loosened his tie and draped his sports jacket over the chair behind him. They looked as if they’d forgotten what sleep was.

Marta dumped her big purse and battered briefcase on the neighboring table. She pulled out a notepad and a Bic and yelled, “Can we order some coffee?”

Lund gave us a tired grin. “Well, we certainly know when Marta’s arrived.”

We sat down opposite the two detectives. The waitress appeared
and we ordered. Her foreign-sounding English prompted a smile from Hempel. “Love that accent,” he said, his rasp almost charming.

After the waitress left, Lund said, “So, William, you’re a famous photographer again.”

He was referring to the tornado of media coverage. I was almost as famous as Harvey Dean Kogan. We were a serial killer and his son who shared the same hobby—photographing cut-up bodies.

“It’ll blow over,” Hempel said. “The press can’t remember anything for longer than a day.”

Until they remembered it again in a week or a month or thirty-one years later.

Marta studied him. “How many days since you stopped smoking?”

Hempel grinned and his overgrown eyebrows shot up to the edge of his buzz cut. “I’m trying not to count.” He reached into his shirt and brandished a pack of gum. “Now I’m addicted to sugar.” He tapped out a piece and popped it into his mouth.

“Do you know what the worst profession is if you’re giving up smoking?” Lund asked.

“Any profession at all,” Marta said.

Lund shrugged. Her wrong answer was better than his punch line.

Now I knew why Hempel constantly chomped on gum. Maybe his smoking had scraped away his voice.

“You said you had news,” Marta said.

Lund smiled benignly and drank from the demitasse. He set it down gently on the saucer.

“Come on, Kevin,” Marta said. “If I have to drag it out of you I’ll muss up your hair. Spill it before you burst.”

He took another long sip. “Based on what William has put together, we pulled in a favor from some Chicago cops. They went through Kogan’s murders and all the victims’ kids lives. Couldn’t find anything, so they looked at other murders. All the Chicago women over the past forty-five years. Solved and unsolved. It’s a pretty big list, but when you look just at the victims who might have abused their kids—”

“It’s still a pretty big list,” Hempel said.

Lund reached into a folder. With a flourish, he slapped down a photo on the table in front of Marta and me. “This one happens to be unsolved. Alice White. Arrested for prostitution more than forty years ago. She was also hooked on heroin.”

The vacant-eyed woman was a blonde with roots showing. I recognized her purple butterfly-shaped barrette. The blonde victim in the soybean field wore the same clip. Kogan had also mentioned it. But maybe that kind of hair fastener was popular at the time.

“Is she the mother of the boy on the train?” I asked.

Lund pulled out a copy of Harvey Dean Kogan’s photograph of the child on the Chicago Elevated train. The mother’s face was too blurred to tell if it was the same woman. But he said, “The FBI is ninety percent certain that Alice White is both the woman on the train and the one in the soybean field.”

Marta’s wedding ring clanked on the table. “Ninety percent means they aren’t sure. That’s some tech afraid to say what he really thinks.”

“Now you sound like a prosecutor again.” Lund smiled at her. “But we’ve got more. She had a son, and Protective Services made a visit. It happened so long ago our amigos were willing to unseal the kid’s file.”

Marta raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes you guys are almost
impressive.”

“That’s as close as our Marta gets to a compliment,” Lund said. He reached into the same folder and pulled out a picture of a young boy with brown eyes and dark hair. He put it next to the one of the child staring out of the Elevated train.

The same boy.

“But Les Filson was blond and blue-eyed,” I said.

Hempel beetled his eyebrows at me as if it were obvious. “I thought you bankers knew all about hair dye and contact lenses.”

It was possible. But it was so elaborate. As if Les Filson had known, even when visiting Kogan a decade before, that he’d someday be a suspect.

“Your hunch was on the money,” Hempel said. “A child of a victim. A victim we hadn’t identified.”

I’d begun to like all the scratches and burs in his words. There was something real about his voice.

“Assuming that Kogan really was the one who murdered her,” Marta said.

Lund ignored her qualifier. “Does the boy look like anyone you know?” he asked me.

In the photo, he was so young. It was impossible to tell.

“Here’s a bit of trivia,” Hempel said. “Alice White disappeared a month before Harvey Dean Kogan murdered Bonnie Sendaro, his first known victim.”

For thirty-one years, I’d believed my father killed thirteen women. The very number linked him to the devil. But if that head in the soybean field did belong to Alice White, that meant he’d actually killed fourteen victims. He’d been nineteen years old at the time. His technique for the photo of the boy and the woman on the Elevated train seemed too advanced for someone that age—all those shades of gray, the in-focus and out-of-focus expressions and layering. And he’d referenced the famous Robert Frank picture.

How had he been able to preserve Alice White’s head all that time? It seemed impossible. But perhaps before disposing of the body, he’d taken a picture of her severed head. Years later, he could have double-exposed that image with the one of Polly and me in the soybean field.

Marta tapped her teeth with the end of the Bic. “You still haven’t convinced me he did this one. Where are the photographs and letters to the newspapers?”

Hempel chewed on his gum and considered the dregs of his coffee. “Kogan was barely a man. He must not have come up with his MO yet.”

“A prodigy discovering his technique,” Lund said.

“Jesus, Kevin,” Marta said. “I think you’ve been doing this too long.”

If it was true about Alice White, that meant that my father had photographed the killer before I was even born. As if he knew that the boy would someday grow up to copy him. That kind of twisted foresight seemed too perfect. Credible or not, the story made me shudder.

“The boy’s name was Ronny White,” Lund said. “He must have changed it after he got out of foster care. Probably wanted to forget all about his mother and his childhood.”

Marta frowned at him. “Don’t tell me that Protective Services lost track of him.”

Lund winced.

“So no one knows who he is or where he is,” I said.

“We’re looking,” Lund said.

Marta said, “You almost made my day, Kevin. Almost.”

The waitress returned with lattes for Marta and me and espressos for Lund and Hempel. The gum still in his mouth, Hempel chugged the last of his tankard of coffee and took a sip of the espresso.

“You’re very thirsty,” the waitress said.

Hempel beamed a smile at her. He chomped on his gum.

“Ben, we’re over here,” Marta said.

Hempel said something and the waitress nodded. Her smile lit up her eyes. He was speaking German. Fluently. Every time I met Hempel I discovered another layer. As I listened to them, his scratchy voice seemed to complement the sounds of the language.

When the waitress left, Marta said, “Can we get back to business, or do you want to get her phone number?”

“Come on, you have to take a laugh break once in a while,” Hempel said. “Otherwise this shit will drive you nuts.”

“You’d better laugh now,” Lund said. “The worst is yet to come.” He nodded at Hempel.

Hempel’s smile vanished. He dug his hand in the sports jacket on his chair and found a green spiral notebook. His bitten-off nails leafed through the pages until he found the one he wanted.

“Like Kevin said, this addict, Alice White, was a working girl. And this young son she had? She was selling him out for drugs. Seven years old.”

My mouth fell open. “You mean—?”

“Yeah,” Hempel said, chewing. “Everything you can imagine.”

I’d seen the picture of that boy staring from the Elevated train for more than twenty years, but I’d never known why his eyes looked so bereft. I thought again of Garth. I shivered.

Hempel glanced up from the green notebook. “Know anyone who might have had that done to him?”

I shook my head. It was the kind of secret people wouldn’t talk about. But that child’s suffering aligned with something my father had said. “Kogan claimed that the child is some kind of father of the man. That’s what made me think about the victims’ children.”

“More crazy stuff just to throw you off,” Lund said. He sipped his espresso and smacked his lips. “This is excellent. Glad you introduced us to this place, William.”

“Wordsworth,” Hempel said. “‘The child is the father of the man.’ But it’s from a poem about joy and piety.”

All three of us drew back.

“I had no idea,” Marta said.

Hempel raised his meaty hands. He shook his head as if our surprise was ridiculous. “I went to college too.”

“Poetry?” Lund said.

Hempel’s face reddened. He chewed his gum a little harder.

A window opened on Harvey Dean Kogan that I’d never expected. Among all the books he’d read at Stateville, the one with Words­worth’s poem had spoken to him. As if he’d yearned for a deeper meaning, an explanation for what he’d become. Or a justification for what he’d done.

“This ‘mother’”—Hempel put his fingers in quotes around the word—“just disappeared. No body, nada. Only an abandoned kid in an apartment in Chicago. Someone heard him crying and turned him in to Protective Services. He said he had a mother but no family. Or maybe no one wanted him.”

Lund said, “See, William, not all your father’s murders were bad.”

I couldn’t find a single hint of sarcasm in that lined face. The story gelled with my father’s soybean picture: a terrible mother—like his own mother—lurking below his happy children.

“No one suspected her case was tied to the Preying Hands’ murder?” Marta asked.

“We’re the first,” Hempel said.

“Maybe the FBI will give you a commendation,” Marta said.

“Good one, Marta,” Lund said.

We drank our coffee and studied our cups. Hempel spit his gum into his napkin and popped in another piece. Each of us must have been considering Ronny White’s sad life.

Finally, Lund said, “We do have one other thing.” He pulled a Xerox out of the pocket of his suit. It was a prison visitation form with a scrawl so angular it looked like an EKG. The signature belonged to Les Filson, or Ronny White. From when he’d visited Harvey Dean Kogan ten years before.

“Pretty distinctive handwriting,” Lund said to me.

I shook my head. I didn’t recognize it.

Hempel said, “Don’t forget he kills in threes.”

“We’d better prepare ourselves for another murder,” Marta said.

I thought of the head and the sex doll with Jill’s necklace on our bed. The picture of a child’s grave in Frieda’s room. The killer was aiming at my family.