Saturday 3:48 P.M.
Fenwick settled his ever expanding bulk into the driver’s seat of their unmarked police department wreck. He ran his hand over his still-thinning blond hair, and struggled to get the extended-length seat belt around his gut. Today they were lucky as they needed neither the heat nor the air-conditioning in the car. They drove with the windows down and let the calm spring air replace the normal interior reek of vomit, piss, and blood. No matter how often the back seats of the department issued cars were vacuumed, sprayed, and scrubbed, the noxious odors never really came out.
They took Harrison Street over to Halsted then drove through Greek Town up to North Avenue, turned left to Sheffield, made a right, and took another left on Willow. The street dead-ended at a junkyard that bordered the river. Fifty feet to their right they saw a patrol car. They pulled up behind it. There was only one other vehicle. It was parked at the dead-end.
This was another part of the city on its way up and down. A few super trendy restaurants and art galleries had encroached on the shuttered and dingy warehouses a few blocks away. On this street all the store fronts here to the river were empty. A long abandoned rail line ran down the middle of the street.
Between the river with its struggling bits of greenery and the dead-end, was a junkyard. The chain link fence facing the street had razor wire at the top. Brick walls lined the two sides. The gate was open. Inside Turner saw twelve-foot piles: one of gravel, another of metallic junk, and a third with twisted metal rods.
A tall, skinny beat cop, Mike Sanchez, emerged from the patrol car ahead of them. His uniform pants fit tightly on his lanky frame, his bulletproof vest barely bulged out his shirt front, and his regulation hat was pulled low almost to the top of his mirrored sunglasses. The hat had two rows of Sillitoe Tartan blue and white checkered bands.
Turner and Fenwick had worked with Sanchez before. He was an efficient, no-nonsense beat cop, who had the unfortunate habit of finding Fenwick’s comments funny.
Sanchez said, “The call came in about half an hour ago. We contacted the owner, he got here and opened up. We confirmed the dead body and called it in.”
“How’d you know he was a bishop?”
He pointed to the dark gray Mercedes at the end of the street. “See that car?”
The detectives nodded.
“It was here when we got here. Nobody was inside. It wasn’t the caller’s. We did a little assuming, and it was unlocked, so we looked inside. Stuff in the glove compartment had the name of Bishop Timothy Kappel.”
“Nobody noticed a car sitting here?” Fenwick asked.
“Wasn’t reported,” Sanchez said. “The owner of the junkyard is Darryl Dalrymple. He’s…” A short squat man emerged from the opened gate. He rushed up to the detectives. “I got taken away from my family. My kid’s got a sports thing tonight. How long is this going to take?”
Turner responded, “In a murder investigation, things take as long as they take.”
Dalrymple gasped. “Murder! The beat cops didn’t say nothing about no murder, just that I had to open the place up so they could look around. I don’t know nothin’ about no murder.”
Dalrymple subsided from belligerence to compliance as he gave them not an iota of useful information. He’d gone to work the day before, locked up, went home. He had no awareness of any activity outside the perimeter of his property. Turner didn’t get any indication of evasion or dissembling in his answers. When the detectives were done with their questions, the junkyard owner stumbled off.
Fenwick gave a sour look to the man’s retreating back and said, “I’m not sure I like him.”
Turner said, “If we arrested all the people you don’t like, we’d have to bring in all the Cubs’ losing pitchers for the past one hundred years.”
Fenwick grumbled. “Well, probably not the dead ones.” He sighed. “Unpleasant people make the best fodder for suspect lists, but he doesn’t strike me as our killer.”
While Turner agreed with that assessment, he said, “We’ll have Sanchez and the beat cops check with all the other employees and keep him on the suspect list.”
“We keep everyone on our suspect lists.” Fenwick turned to Sanchez. “Who’s our corpse catcher?”
“Some guy in a row boat who was going by on the river. Says he was fishing.”
“In Chicago? On the river?” Fenwick asked.
Sanchez said, “You gotta ask him.” He pointed to the patrol car. Sanchez’s partner, Alex Deveneaux, got out of the front passenger side and opened the back door of the patrol car. An athletic man in his mid-twenties emerged. He must have been six-feet-five and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. His logo-less gray sweatshirt with torn-off sleeves and his tight, black basketball shorts revealed rippling muscles.
As Deveneaux and the witness walked over, Sanchez said, “I notified the ME’s office. I told them to bring extra lights. Even though it’s still daylight, it’s kind of gloomy and hidden in there. We’ll get started with the preliminaries on the neighbors as well.” He glanced around at the vacant buildings. “Not a lot of neighbors on this one, but we’ll check.”
Turner liked working with competent cops who didn’t have to be told exactly what to do at each stage.
They thanked them. Sanchez and Deveneaux left to set up crime scene tape, make sure the area was secure, and begin their canvass. So far no curious onlookers had appeared.
The witness was Don Miezina. For all his musculature, Miezina’s hands shook. He spoke in a baritone voice that trembled.
The detectives stood in the middle of the quiet street to talk to him.
Miezina wiped his hand across his eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.”
Turner said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Mr. Miezina? What were you doing on the river?”
“Fishing. I told the beat cops that.”
Turner trusted Sanchez completely, but he always verified everything. He needed to hear the witness tell his story and then confirm later that it was exactly what he’d said to Sanchez.
Turner gave the usual bland assurance. “Thanks, if you go over everything, it’ll help us reconstruct what happened.”
“I guess. This is so weird. I’ve only ever seen dead people in funeral homes.”
“What kind of fishing can you do on the Chicago River?” Fenwick asked.
“I fish for bass. I start up around Ashland Avenue. You can go east all the way to the locks on the other side of Lake Shore Drive.”
“The noise of the city doesn’t scare the fish?” Fenwick asked.
Turner knew neither he nor Fenwick gave much of a rat’s ass about the fish at this moment, but if it helped the witness feel a bit more normal, he was willing to listen.
“I’ve never asked.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to bother them. Nah, you find little corners where there isn’t much current. The bass like to hang around in places like that waiting for food to come to them.”
“Do you eat them?” Fenwick asked.
“Nah. I release what I catch. I figure if they can survive being in this water, who am I to deny them a full fish life?”
Turner wanted to say to Fenwick, “He sounds kind of like you.” Instead, he asked, “So what happened today?”
“Well, I exercise as well as fish. I row quite a ways and then do a little fishing. It’s fun to watch the noise and hurry on the bridges overhead while I’m in the quiet down below.” He drew a deep breath. “So I got to this point just north of Goose Island, and I saw something odd on this bank.” He waved his arm toward the river. “It seemed out of place, you know. Kind of a flash of light and pink. I figured maybe it was just a bit of shiny trash some fool had tossed away. I got closer and I saw it was somebody’s glasses on the ground. The sun was reflecting off part of a lens that wasn’t smashed. By that time I could figure out what the pink was.” He gulped and shuddered. “It was someone. I called out. He didn’t answer. I got up to the shore, but he didn’t move. I saw a lot of blood. I got scared. I used my cell phone to call the police.”
“Did you go up to the body?”
“No. The 9-1-1 person said to stay where I was so I could direct the police to my location. I rowed a little away. I didn’t want to be too near to…that.”
“Did you see anyone, anything suspicious?” Fenwick asked.
“No, for a Saturday afternoon in May, it was pretty quiet. Most of the boats that would be going out to the lake would’ve gone by in the morning.”
They thanked him and asked him to wait. Deveneaux would take charge of him, get his information.
Fenwick let out one of his gargantuan sighs. “Once we establish the time of death, we’re going to have to find out which boats passed through here. All of the people on them will have to be interviewed.”
“And if there were sight-seeing boats that go up this far.”
Fenwick added a grumble to another sigh.
While they’d been talking to the witness, the Crime Scene vehicles had arrived. Sanchez came up to the detectives as they neared the stand of vegetation along the riverbank. “I checked on the computer in the car.”
The more modern police cars came with electronic devices which connected to various criminal data bases, so technically they were computers, but they only connected to those data bases and not to anything else.
Sanchez was continuing, “Our witness has no record, no wants or warrants.”
He led them to the edge of the trees and brush that stood along the river. “They’re about twenty feet in and slightly to the left of the path. Follow the stench and the flies.”
The detectives pulled on gloves and donned booties to avoid contaminating the crime scene and any footprints that might have led to or from it. As they walked in, they kept their eyes on the ground and the vegetation along the path.
Fenwick said, “At times like this I want signs along the road, like those old Burma-Shave signs.”
“I vaguely remember them.”
“I want them to say the killer is Fred or whoever.”
“Good luck with that.”
Fenwick asked, “How’d they get through the fence, and why here?”
“Check your Burma-Shave sign. Maybe that will tell you.”
Sanchez’s hints for corpse-finding were quite correct. They smelled it before they saw the Crime Scene tape.
“Been here for a while,” Fenwick said.
The fully clothed body lay on the ground. He wore black pants, a black shirt with a Roman collar, and an unzipped black, nylon, moto jacket. The pants were stained and torn at the knees, the shirt partially untucked. Turner got a view of bloody skin through the rents in the knees of the pants. Bits of cloth protruded from his mouth.
The corpse’s glasses were broken. A vast dark smear had gathered on the dirt and mushed-down weeds on the right side of his head. Your normal wounds to the exterior of the head caused extensive bleeding. Blood, bones, and brains oozed or extruded from that side of the head. Flies feasted. His eyes were closed.
Fenwick stated the obvious. “That much blood next to the head, he must have died here. With that head wound, gotta be a heavy weapon. Do bishops die violently?”
Turner shrugged. “This one sure did.”
In their regulation blue notebooks, they made sketches of the placement of the body and of the surrounding area. Yes, the crime scene people would have pictures and video of the scene. That didn’t stop Turner and Fenwick from keeping a written record of their own, filled with details and impressions. They wanted their own memories, thoughts, and observations. After noting numerous details that may or may not have been crime related, they backed off to wait for the Medical Examiner to finish.
They walked up to a fire pit, which was fifteen feet from the body. Fenwick held his hand a few inches above blackened ashes. “I don’t feel any heat. Probably not lit last night.”
“We’ll get the Crime Scene people to check.”