I called Amanda after I got home and went to sit by the river.
‘So, how’s your day?’ I asked, watching the sun sparkle on the four empty windshield-washer fluid jugs snagged on the riverbank in front of me. For some reason, someone had tied them loosely together with very thick twine.
‘Much calmer than yours, I think. I’m getting phone calls from my fellow tycoons, asking if I know what’s going on with Tim.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I was shocked. And I’m going to stay publicly shocked until your name gets identified with the whole mess. Then I’ll say that this was obviously not a political dirty trick because you’re not a political hack, and because not even a neophyte would be loony enough to stage a body search the day before an election.’
‘Thanks, I think.’
‘You’re welcome, I think.’
‘Wade will tar you once the press links us.’
‘No, he won’t. I’m too rich and I’m too friendly with the others on his Committee of Twenty-Four. If the Wades are asked about my being married to you once, they’ll simply cluck and murmur and say none of this is my fault. As for the press calling, one particularly disgusting creature already has, that jerk from the Argus-Observer.’
‘Keller,’ I said. Rarely troubling to get the facts of a story, he’d trashed me years earlier when I’d been played in the fake evidence scheme. ‘Details to follow,’ was his signature tag line, though his columns rarely carried any factual follow-ups.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Details to follow,’ she said.
I laughed a little, and she hung up.
I got up, pulled the tangle of washer jugs from the river and threw them in the back of the Jeep. I had to take such stuff to a recycling center across the city line in Chicago because the lizards that ran Rivertown didn’t encourage the recycling of anything beyond parts stripped from newer cars.
News of the search at Wade’s estate spread fast on the Internet. Timothy Wade was well-respected and a potentially superb future presidential candidate. Most of the reports accepted the lead that Wade offered up in his video – that the search was a clumsy political dirty trick and that one particular Cook County sheriff’s deputy, a Sergeant Bohler, had been manipulated and played for a chump.
I wasn’t mentioned anywhere, nor was Amanda. That would change the next morning, when Keller’s column in the Argus-Observer came out. He’d report Amanda’s link to Wade’s campaign, my presence at the search site, and remind his readers that she and I were once married. Details to follow.
And from there, I would be oozed, much like the molten Peeps beneath my microwave door, into the news. Other reporters didn’t like Keller’s ethics but they respected the man’s nose for stink. They’d look past his innuendo and study the video recorded at the search. More than one of them would recognize me and remember my past involvement in the phony evidence scheme. And they’d recall that, as Keller said, I was once married to Amanda. Because of her new prominence in Chicago’s business circles, they’d summon up what was old and stupid about me, and infer, reservedly, about what might be new and stupid about me. The story would be dropped into the business news like spoiled meat. Amanda’s board of directors would go ballistic.
Amanda knew that. She’d simply been talking brave.
I keyed up the satellite photos again. Looking down at the sides of the Wade house and the long slope in back, searching it seemed ludicrous now. Too many trees had dropped too many leaves. Too many years had hardened the ground. And Timothy and Theresa Wade had always been too smart. Even as kids, they’d never have chanced burying Halvorson on their own land, just as now, as adults, they’d never risk planting John Shea there. If they’d even killed him at all.
And now the Wades, those smarties, had gotten me, Bohler, the press, and the whole Cook County Sheriff’s Department to shut down any further investigation of the Wades’ complicity in Marilyn Paul’s murder. No cop would ever again risk a career-ending embarrassment of investigating the Wades.
I moved the cursor to the woods across from the Wade estate, trying again to imagine why Jenny and Jimbo had been attacked there. Nine sheriff’s cops, including Bohler, had just combed the Wade estate. They’d found nothing troublesome at all, nothing that could have been caught by the surveillance cameras placed across the street.
Across the street.
The property across the road wasn’t big, perhaps six acres spanning the same width as the Wade estate. The woods were surrounded on three sides by houses built on half-acre plots. The undeveloped woods had to be worth millions.
I clicked over to the Cook County Assessor’s website. It showed that the property had been purchased in 1924 by an entity called 100 Partners. I did an Internet search on the name and came up with nothing. Whoever those hundred partners were, their heirs had been sitting on a small real estate fortune for almost a century.
I then looked to see what the assessor showed about the Wade estate. It had been owned by Timothy Wade and Theresa Wade since the deaths of their parents. Before that, ownership of the land and house had followed the expected progression, inherited down the generations by children from parents, going back to when the whiskey runner, Samuel Wade, Sr bought the land in 1924, the same year that the 100 Partners acquired the property across the street.
Both parcels had been purchased in the same year. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, for the whole plat could have been subdivided for development and offered for sale for the first time that year.
Not sure of anything at all, except the need perhaps to apologize once again, I called Bohler’s cell phone. ‘I think the Wades might own the small woods across the street from their house.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘How far-reaching is your warrant?’
‘It allows a search of all land and buildings owned or controlled by Timothy or Theresa Wade in Winnetka.’
‘Check the ownership of that land across the street. You might find the Wades own it under a dummy name. Send your team back to Winnetka.’
‘I’m meeting with my boss tomorrow morning, remember? By noon I’ll be writing parking tickets with Officer Gibbs.’
‘Blow off the meeting with your boss. Don’t give him the chance to bust you down before you can search that ground.’
‘Screw this,’ she said, sounding almost hysterical.
‘That land across from Wade’s estate is worth a fortune yet it remains undeveloped. It was purchased by something called the One Hundred Partners the same year Wade’s great grandfather bought his own land. I’ll bet anything the Wades own that land.’
‘Those purchase dates are probably just coincidence.’
‘I’m going to check it out anyway.’
‘Stay the hell away from that land, Elstrom,’ she said, sounding frantic now. ‘You’re going to make things ten times worse for me.’ She hung up.
I called Jenny. She picked up right away. ‘All set to fly?’ I asked.
‘I’m not leaving without regret,’ she said.
‘And ghosts?’
‘I’ll probably be bringing two now,’ she said with a small chuckle. Meaning, I supposed, that I’d become her newest ghost.
‘Where exactly did you get assaulted?’
‘I told you, already. Across the street from Wade’s house.’
‘I need to know exactly.’ I asked her to go to the same satellite website we’d used before.
‘See that cluster of three trees, sort of in the middle, the largest one being off to the right?’ she asked after a moment.
‘About fifty feet in from the road?’
‘That’s where Jimbo was standing. He’d mounted the second camera in that cluster because it gives an excellent sight of Wade’s front door.’
‘And an excellent sight from the guard shack, in reverse.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘How far were you from Jimbo?’
‘About five yards farther south.’ Then, ‘What exactly are you up to?’
‘I’ll tell you after dusk,’ I said.
‘I’ll be gone after dusk.’
‘You might hate me if you are.’
‘I could never …’ Then, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ll call you after dusk.’