Evidence and motive can be hard to come by, which is why I found myself hiking up onto a highway overpass at three-thirty in the morning. Jack O’Donnell had insisted we meet at the same Beacon job site I’d visited a week earlier, only this time the site was wrapped in darkness. I took out a nightscope and scanned the construction area. The place looked deserted. The scope was equipped with a thermal-imaging lens that told me all of the engines in the cars and trucks were cold. I slipped the scope back in my pocket and stared down at the Ike. The highway uncoiled like a jeweled serpent, stretching west toward the flatlands of Schaumberg and back into the heart of the city. A semi thumped past in a rush of wind and rubber. I walked back across the overpass, got in my car, and drove three exits east. Jack O’Donnell’s blue SUV was waiting.
O’Donnell eased through the labyrinth of construction cones and pulled up to a fence emblazoned with a Hi-Top Construction logo. “If anyone asks what we’re doing here, you let me talk.”
“Fine.”
He pulled a thermos of coffee from under his seat. “You want some?”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” O’Donnell poured himself a cup and sipped. Outside, sodium lamps were mounted on thick poles strung along the perimeter of the work site. The lamps threw chunks of hard white light on concrete dividers and silent lumps of machinery. Beyond that, the darkness was absolute.
“The first crew’s scheduled to get here at five,” O’Donnell said. “We’ll be long gone by then.” He was still a young man, in his early forties, with a small square head, anxious hairline, and quick, angled features. He flicked a hand at the world beyond his windshield and sighed. “Want to tell me why you care about this stuff?”
“It might tie into a case I’m working.”
“What sort of case?”
“I got hired by a guy…”
“What guy?”
“Actually I don’t even know if it is a guy. Might be a woman.”
“You’re a private investigator and you don’t know who hired you?”
I described the e-mail I’d gotten, followed by the adrenaline shot to my bank account. O’Donnell whistled. Low and smart. “Sounds like my kind of client. Why does he want you to find Perry?”
“No idea.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you think I can help?”
“Tell me about Beacon Limited.”
“The roads of Illinois are paved in red and white.”
“Excuse me?”
“Those are the colors Beacon uses for all its subsidiaries. Red and white.” O’Donnell cranked open the driver’s-side door and flicked on a flashlight. “Come on. Let’s take a walk.”
The entrance to the site had a gate that was latched, but not locked. O’Donnell didn’t seem surprised and eased it open. The highway curved gently to the left. I could see the reporter’s breath in the predawn cold and hear the scrape of his boots in the gravel. We walked for about a hundred yards and stopped.
“Six years ago, this road got a face-lift,” O’Donnell said.
“I remember. Edens, Kennedy. They all got face-lifts.”
“Let’s stick with the Ike.”
“Fine.”
“You know how a road’s built?”
I shook my head.
“The old highway had twelve inches of gravel, called a sub-base, covered over by four inches of asphalt and ten inches of concrete. That’s twenty-six inches deep. Not enough for today’s traffic. Beacon’s people proposed laying in a new surface—twenty-four inches of sub-base, six inches of asphalt, and fourteen of concrete. That’s forty-four inches, as thick and sturdy as any piece of highway ever built in this state. Great, right?”
I nodded.
“Then why are we six years in and it’s falling apart? This way.”
We cut between two dividers and walked past a couple of dump trucks. They were painted in violent shades of red and black and had EAGLE CEMENT, another Beacon subsidiary, printed across their doors in white block letters.
“The Eisenhower project began in 2006,” O’Donnell said. “Ray’s first year in the mansion. Finished up in the winter of 2008. Beacon initially estimated the cost at eight hundred million dollars. The final price tag was closer to one-point-four billion. Springfield kicked, but Perry rammed it through the legislature anyway. Here, take a look at this.”
O’Donnell set his flashlight on the ground and squatted beside a gray tarp that covered a hundred yards of road. He removed a couple of pegs and peeled back the covering. Two parallel cracks, each about five feet long and a couple of inches wide, ran side by side down the middle of the road. O’Donnell peeled back the tarp a little farther. The cracks cobwebbed into smaller fractures and split off in a dozen different directions.
“Beacon claims this is nothing,” O’Donnell said. “Just surface cracks that are easily patched.”
“And is it?”
O’Donnell pulled a steel tape measure from his vest and slid it into one of the main fissures. “This one runs almost ten inches deep. Halfway to the sub-base. It’s a major flaw and an indication the road’s falling apart.” O’Donnell snapped his tape measure shut. “As we speak, Beacon has seven different ‘patching operations’ they’re doing on the Ike.” O’Donnell stood and looked back behind us. “It’s gonna be getting light soon. Let’s get back to the car.”
We didn’t say a word on the walk back. O’Donnell climbed behind the wheel. I got in the passenger’s side. For the first time I noticed a child’s booster seat locked into the seat behind me. We drove back to my car, parked on a dead-end street bellied up next to the highway. O’Donnell took out a laptop and fired it up.
“What’s your e-mail?”
I gave it to him.
“I’m sending you information on three crashes that happened on the Ike. Six fatalities, total. Including three kids.” O’Donnell turned around the laptop so I could see a picture of a ten-year-old girl in her school uniform.
“I visited two of the accident sites myself,” O’Donnell said. “They’d already patched up most of the road, but I was able to get a look at the damage underneath.”
“And?”
“I saw the same cracks you saw tonight. A road essentially coming apart at the seams.”
“And you think it caused these crashes?”
“Clean driving records. No evidence of drugs or drinking. No bad weather. I can’t prove it, but, yes, I’m convinced it was the road that killed them.”
I scrolled through a list of the articles. Then I returned to the picture of the kid. “You’re going to send this stuff to me?”
“I already did.”
“How about evidence? Did you take any photos of the accident sites when you visited them?”
“I shot some videotape, but it won’t help.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not conclusive. Not even close.”
“Can I see the tapes?”
O’Donnell glanced out the window at the heavy chain-link fence that separated us from the expressway. “Let’s wait on that.”
“Fine. So, how did they do it?”
“Do what?”
“Cheat the system? Spend a billion dollars and build a substandard highway without anyone catching on?”
“It’s not as hard as you think. In this case, they probably did a couple of things. First, there are the state’s weigh scales. Trucks filled with cement would be weighed as they left Beacon plants in the morning. The state would then be billed for raw materials based on those readings.”
“Beacon messed with the scales?”
“Most likely they rigged the computers that recorded the weights. Five tons of material get recorded as six, and the state gets overbilled. Every single day. Every single truck. Adds up pretty quick.”
“What else?”
“They cheat on their mix. A contractor has certain specs he’s supposed to follow in creating asphalt and concrete mixes. If they skimp on the recipe, throw in a little more sand, too much water, the mix gets compromised. And the contractor saves money.”
“How much money?”
O’Donnell chuckled. “On a project like this? The final price tag to the state was roughly one-point-four billion. Based on the quality of work I’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if Beacon skimmed fifteen, twenty percent of that.”
“That’s almost three hundred million dollars.”
“And that’s just the Ike.”
“Why haven’t you written a story on any of this?”
O’Donnell jerked his head toward the child’s seat in the back. “My youngest was three years old last month. You think she deserves a dad? ’Cuz I do.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“I first got onto Beacon when I was with the Trib. My editor killed every investigative piece I ever pitched. One night he took me out for a drink. Said he wanted to talk about my work. So we had our drink. Actually, a few drinks. Then he pulled out an envelope. Inside was a picture of my oldest. Six, seven years old at the time. She was holding the hand of a man and smiling. The man was cut off at the shoulders so I couldn’t see his face.” O’Donnell’s voice was even, but there were the faintest tracings of pink in his face and a froth of spittle at the corner of his mouth. “I grabbed my boss by the throat and was about to put my fist through his teeth. Job be damned. He pulls out a second photo. His kid. Same age as mine. Same guy holding her hand. My boss told me we wouldn’t run anything on Beacon. Now or ever. Not if we loved our kids. I agreed. We had another drink and never talked about it again.” O’Donnell pulled the thermos out from under his seat and unscrewed the cap. “You sure you don’t want some?”
I nodded and he poured us each a cup of coffee. I took a sip. It was hot and strong.
“Why are you here, Jack?”
“You’re supposed to be a hard man. And you don’t have any family. I figured maybe you could do something about it.”
“Who owns Beacon?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“Can you give me anything else?”
“I’ve already given you too much.”
“How about the tapes you made of the roads?”
“I’ll think about that.”
I took out one of my business cards and stuck it on the dash. “Thanks, Jack.”
“Good luck. And don’t call me again.”
I climbed out of O’Donnell’s SUV and watched him drive away. Then I got in my car and headed back to the job site. I figured I still had some time and wanted to get another look under that tarp. So I got out and picked my way across the work zone. There was a fresh wind at my back, and the first fingers of sunlight brushed the highway in delicate shades of blush. I found the section O’Donnell had led me to and walked a bit farther. Then I crouched down and peeled back the thick canvas. The cracks here were wider and deeper. I took out a small flashlight I’d brought with me and positioned it so it lit up one of the largest fault lines. I was about to snap a photo with my phone when I heard the hard crunch of gravel behind me. I reached for my gun and looked back. Just in time to see the dark shape of a shovel dropping out of a sky frosted in pink.