78: Clair spotted the flashing red and blue lights as they came down Ashland Avenue. She pointed out the windshield. “Over there.”
“I see it,” Nash replied, turning into the Walmart parking lot.
They followed the signs around the side of the long building to the loading docks at the back. As they rounded the corner, they came upon two patrol cars with a barricade set between them blocking the road. The officer on the left picked up the side of the barricade and ushered them through, replacing it behind them. Nash pulled up between one of the CSI vans and an ambulance. Both paramedics were standing at the back of the vehicle smoking cigarettes, little for them to do here but wait.
“Do you smell gas?” Clair asked.
“That’s just Connie,” Nash explained. “When she’s in Park, the smell comes up from somewhere underneath. I need to get her checked out.”
“This car is a death trap, you know that, right?”
“Don’t knock my baby while she’s down. She’ll fix up nice. Isn’t that right, Connie girl?” He reached up and ran his hand over the dashboard, then blew a kiss in that direction.
“Bishop’s got nothing on you. You’re one crazy fuck.” Clair climbed out of the car into the cold air and slammed the door behind her, her hands deep in her pockets. Nash followed, nearly slipping on a patch of ice.
A gray Toyota Tundra pickup truck with a water tank hitched to the back was parked on the ramp leading up to the loading dock. CSI surrounded the truck with large halogen floodlights. The perimeter was roped off with bright yellow tape. At least half a dozen uniformed patrol officers stood around the site, keeping the growing crowd at bay. They were mostly Walmart employees—the store was open twenty-four hours. They must have called in friends, though, because a few of the onlookers weren’t in uniform, and a car approached from the opposite side of the parking lot, heading directly toward the lights and crowd. Clair knew, once word got out, it wouldn’t take long for this crowd to double or triple in size. It would be even worse once the press arrived.
Clair counted three CSI investigators. All stood inside the parameter awaiting orders.
Lieutenant Belkin saw them and approached from the crowd, shuffling over. He wore a puffy navy coat with his badge affixed to the outer lapel and CHICAGO METRO stamped across the back in large white block letters. “We sealed off the scene as soon as we got here.” He pointed at a semi idling about fifty feet away. “That truck arrived a few minutes before eight and called inside—the pickup was already on the ramp, blocking his path. The warehouse supervisor came out, saw someone inside the truck, went to tell them to move, then backed off and called 911 when he realized . . . well, you’ll see. He touched the door frame. We took his prints for eliminations, also took a cast of his shoe to rule out his prints around the vehicle. There’s a second set in the snow, but they’re pretty muddled from this weather. CSI got casts of those. Probably your unsub. They circle the vehicle a few times. Might get something. The supervisor’s name is Willis Cortese, and we’re holding him inside the building. You can talk to him, but I don’t think he’s got much else to offer.”
Nash pointed at the security camera above the loading dock. “Any footage?”
Belkin shook his head. “There are three cameras back here. Someone knocked them out last Tuesday. Maintenance hasn’t had a chance to replace them yet.”
“Knocked them out how? They’re mounted pretty high up.”
“Cut the video line and bashed the cameras with something good and heavy. They don’t know exactly, but the cameras are a mangled mess. Whoever did it had a good handle on the cameras’ capabilities. They came in out of the viewing angle. According to Security, the feed is live, then goes black, no shot of the person or persons who did it. I’ve got one of my guys looking over the hardware and footage in case they missed something.”
Nash gave Clair a quick glance. They were both thinking the same thing—Bishop.
Belkin pointed a thumb back at the truck. “That’s a fucking mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Show us,” Clair said.
Belkin nodded and turned back toward the truck. He ducked under the yellow tape and held it up for Clair and Nash. He approached the driver’s side door. The window was open. “Best we can tell, your unsub took the hose from the water tank and emptied the contents into the cab, close to five hundred gallons. It would have taken some time. Twenty, thirty minutes, maybe longer. When I got here, the temperature was seven degrees, with a wind-chill of negative two. The CSI folks are still trying to figure it out, but they said whoever did it would have had to spray for a few minutes, then pause for five to ten, then spray again. They said this was done in layers. Even at temps this cold, to do something like this, they had to build it. If they emptied the tank in one shot, it wouldn’t look like this. This took patience and one large set of brass balls, particularly out in the open like this.”
Clair tried really hard to listen to Lieutenant Belkin as he explained what they were looking at. He went on with additional details about the thickness of the ice, the consistency. She heard Nash ask if it was salt water. She heard Belkin explain that it was not. Salt water wouldn’t freeze at this temperature. She heard all this while her brain tried to wrap around what she was looking at.
Inside the cab of the truck was a person. That person was wearing a seat belt and had both hands on the steering wheel. Gaze fixed forward, locked on some nonexistent object off in the distance.
The body was encased in rough ice, thick and crusted all around—thin around the face and head, thick at the seat and floor.
The face stared ahead in a frozen dead gaze.
It was a boy. A teenage boy.