wednesday, may 5—lincoln prairie
Detective Marti MacAlister waded through the water that had overflowed the banks of the Des Plaines River. Just a few days ago she would have been able to drive down this street to get to Gurnee Mills or Six Flags Great America. Now this road and all nearby roads were flooded and closed to traffic and the river hadn’t crested yet. Cloud cover made the sky look like a solid gray mass. The air was dense with moisture. Soon it would rain again. Not the usual thunderstorms, just a drenching deluge that would last for several hours and raise the water level even higher.
She had borrowed a pair of boots from a fireman on standby. They were a little too big and she was surprised by how heavy they were. She made her way to the railing at the side of the road, where a bridge allowed the river to flow beneath the street. Standing there, she looked north. The placid, slow-moving Des Plaines had become a swift-moving stream rushing toward her and spreading east and west as it overflowed its banks. Water covered what had been a grassy floodplain and slapped at the lower branches of a stand of burr oak.
Less than half a mile away sailors from the nearby naval base, local residents, and other volunteers were filling sandbags. The locals seemed to have become accustomed to the occasional flooding, but this was the worst it had been in fifteen years. The curious, or perhaps those with homes too far away to be threatened, stood alone, arms folded, or in groups of three or four chatting and gesturing toward the houses that were in danger. Marti couldn’t hear what anyone was saying.
Her husband, Ben Walker, a fireman paramedic, was in the water wearing a wet suit, working to free the body that had become trapped in the thick branches of an uprooted tree. Ben’s partner, Allan, waited alongside in a small boat. Evidence technicians were in a second boat, taking pictures. Two techs wearing diving suits were in the river looking for anything that might have belonged to the victim or provide information as to who she was or how she died. Just beyond the water’s edge, uniformed officers kept onlookers away.
Water swirled as Marti’s partner, Matthew “Vik” Jessenovik, came over and stood beside her. He was wearing hip waders.
“I see you came prepared,” she said.
He was four inches taller than her five feet ten and looked down at her as he spoke. “These belonged to my old man.”
“Took you long enough to get here.” Usually, when they were called at home, he was the first to arrive. “Sleep in this morning?”
“I took Mildred to the Sunrise for breakfast.”
Marti smiled. Vik’s wife had multiple sclerosis. Eating out could only mean she was feeling good.
Vik nodded toward the recovery team and the forensic techs. “Just what we need,” he said. “Another body.”
“Things have been slow,” Marti reminded him. They had been working on cold cases for over a month and Lieutenant Gail Nicholson insisted that they work on the three cases least likely to be solved. Neither of them liked the lieutenant, nor did she pretend to like them. They were here as members of the Northern Illinois Regional Task Force, which was under Frank Winan’s command. This would take precedence over the Lincoln Prairie cold cases.
“Male or female?” Vik asked. “Or do we know?”
“Woman.”
“Do we know anything else?”
“Not yet.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me. Anything that did go in with her is probably miles downstream by now. Just our luck that tree snagged her or she would be, too.”
“Is that a complaint?”
Vik considered that. “Nah. Thanks to whoever it is or whoever did it, we should be able to tell Nicholson to shove it for at least a few days. Who found her?”
Marti pointed toward two boys. Neither looked older than twelve. The younger boy had short blond hair. He was wrapped in a blanket. A woman, also blond, was at his side. They were standing in a grassy area that wasn’t underwater. The woman was rubbing his hair with a towel.
The boy who looked to be the older of the two had a mullet cut, short on top with the long hair in the back pulled into a ponytail. He and a man, who also had a mullet, were almost close enough to the water’s edge to wade in. The man refused to move back when one of the uniforms suggested it. He kept leaning down to speak to the boy and jabbed the boy’s shoulder with the heel of his hand whenever he caught the boy looking away from the felled tree, where Ben was working to free the body.
“The blond was going for a Huckleberry Finn ride in an inner tube,” Marti explained. “The one with the ponytail was on one of those inflatable rafts. It capsized, he swam for the tree, saw the body, and almost drowned getting away.”
“Stupid, both of them,” Vik said. “We could be fishing them out.” Despite the gruffness in his voice, Marti knew how he felt when kids witnessed a homicide or found a body. “Not too many vultures out today,” he added, nodding toward a lone reporter who was scanning the scene with a video camera. A bag with a tape recorder was slung over his shoulder.
Marti was keeping an eye on him, too. When he had enough film he’d begin interviewing for voice-overs. Once he identified her and Vik as homicide cops he’d be all over them. Otherwise there was just one local newspaper photographer with a camera and telephoto lens.
“The governor’s not flying in by helicopter until tomorrow to check out the flood damage,” Marti reminded him.
“And meanwhile, what’s one more body?” Vik grumbled. “A live politician, now that’s news.”
Marti wasn’t sure how long Ben had been in the water when he signaled Allan to bring the boat closer. She knew he was tired. They had stayed up late last night, more interested in each other than in sleep as vanilla-scented candles burned down and flickered out. As the boat moved in, someone in the small crowd gave a loud, nervous laugh. Someone else gave an equally loud shush. Marti turned to look at the two boys. The blond boy’s mother shielded him from what was going on. The other boy was shivering, but did not look away.
“Macho,” Vik muttered. “That kid’s seen more than most adults out here.”
By the time the boat reached the edge of the river, the body was covered with a blue plastic tarp. Two firemen brought a stretcher and carried the body to where a gurney waited on dry ground. They transferred the body and wheeled the victim to the ambulance. Marti and Vik did their best to avoid the onlookers as they made their way to where Ben stood, still dripping water. The three of them entered the ambulance. Ben pulled back the tarp, exposing her face. The woman’s skin was the color of pecans. There wasn’t much damage to her face. Her eyes were open and a startling shade of brown at least two shades lighter than her skin. Her hair was permed. The hair on the left side was pulled behind her ear and secured with an ornate barrette. It had come loose on the right side and a black mesh hairnet clung to wet strands. Marti guessed her age as mid-thirties.
Ben lifted the tarp to give them a look at the body. The trench coat the woman wore had been lavender. Now it was covered with silt and mud. It was belted and buttoned, but Marti could see that the woman had on a soggy, pink angora sweater. There was no obvious body trauma. Marti looked at Ben.
“Back of the head,” he said. “There’s a lot of damage to the skull.”
“Enough to kill her?” Marti asked.
“It could have.”
“Maybe she was knocked against something while she was in the water,” Vik commented. “The river is moving pretty fast.”
“That’ll have to wait for the autopsy,” Ben said. “But she took a hell of a blow, maybe more than one.” He turned the woman’s head to one side. “See where the skull is caved in.” Bone fragments were tangled in her hair.
Marti looked up to see the reporter from the News-Times standing a few feet from the ambulance taking pictures. She motioned him away. “Now that they’ve got digital cameras,” she said, “there’s no telling how long he was standing there or how many shots he got.”
“You can’t hear the film advance or the shutter close anymore,” Vik complained.
“I wouldn’t worry too much just yet,” Ben said. “The way the News-Times is not reporting local news these days you’ll probably have to get the Chicago Tribune to read about a body being found in the Des Plaines River in Gurnee.” He pulled off vinyl gloves. “It’s just another day, another body to them anyway. Why can’t we get to that level of indifference?”
Marti shrugged, preoccupied with who the woman was and how she got here, and wondering who would have to be notified of her death.
As Marti approached the blond boy, she could see that he was crying.
“What’s your name, son?” Vik asked.
“Tyler.” He sniffled.
“Are you his mother, ma’am?” he asked the woman.
She nodded.
“We’ll need to talk with him as soon as possible.”
“You’re not taking him to the police station?”
“Of course not,” Vik scoffed. “Just give us your address and we’ll be there within the next half hour.”
They lived about half a block away.
As they turned toward the duo with the mullet cuts and ponytails, Vik said, “Tyler will remember most of what he saw. We could run into a problem with this boy’s father telling him what to tell us and what to keep his mouth shut about.”
“Why?” Marti asked. “These kids didn’t do anything that bad.”
“This one did. He got scared. These macho types don’t do that.”
Water squished beneath their feet as they approached.
“Yeah, so what do you two want?” the big guy asked. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. Softball-sized biceps stretched the sleeves of a T-shirt with the legend “Bikers love Bitches” on the front. The boy’s chin jutted out as his father spoke.
“Where do you live?” Marti asked. He was not a typical Gurnee resident.
“What’s it to you?”
“Is this your son?” Marti countered. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with a wiseass.
“You thinking about taking him in?”
Marti looked at the boy, then stared at his dad. “If that’s what you want.”
The man glowered at her, then said, “Lake Forest.”
Marti waited.
Before she could count to three he added, “We’re spending a couple of days with the relatives so the wife can go shopping at the mall.” Muscles tightened as he folded his arms. “My boy don’t usually hang with no wimps. Wasn’t for that one over there,” he nodded toward Tyler, “thinking he saw a snake in the water and freaking out, none of this would have happened.”
That was not how the boys had explained things to the first uniform on the scene, but Marti didn’t see any point in calling him on it.
“What’s your name?” she asked the boy.
“Cecil Slocum Jr.,” the man answered. “C. J. for short.” He spoke with such pride that Marti expected him to say, “chip off the old block,” but he didn’t.
“Cecil Slocum Jr.,” Marti repeated.
Vik coughed. Marti knew he was stifling a laugh.
She looked at the boy. “Hi, C. J.”
He swallowed hard, but didn’t answer until his father hit his shoulder with the heel of his hand. Then he said, “Yeah.”
Marti spoke to his father.
“If you’ll give us your family’s address we’ll meet you there as soon as we can.”
“What, no handcuffs?” Dad looked disappointed. “And just so you know,” he added, “I’m assuming that the lady in the water fell in somewhere and drowned, but just in case it was something else, C. J. here is real good with a twelve-gauge. We go hunting most every weekend in the fall.”
Marti didn’t respond although that undoubtedly meant Dad was good with a gun, too. She would make a note of it. She watched as father and son turned and walked away with identical swaggers.
As Marti and Vik walked toward their vehicles, they agreed that they would talk with Tyler first. His version of what happened seemed most likely to be accurate.
Tyler and his family lived in a Victorian in one of the few older parts of town. Unlike the newer subdivisions—what Marti’s mother liked to call cookie-cutter houses because they were all variations of the same floor plan—these houses had what realtors liked to call character.
Marti and Vik followed Tyler’s mother into the sunroom. It was like entering a garden. Hanging planters with philoden- drons and Boston ferns, daffodils blooming in clay pots. They sat at a table with a Scrabble game set up. Tyler and his father were drinking cocoa. Usually, Marti and Vik would have declined, but today they sat with the family and accepted steaming mugs of hot, sweet chocolate. It wasn’t that cold outside, but it was damp, and when the wind kicked in it had a bite to it.
“C. J. saw her first,” Tyler said, without being asked. “He started yelling and hollering and I tried to get over to where he was ’cause I thought he was stuck in the tree or drowning maybe.” He held the cup near his face but didn’t drink. Marti waited.
“He made me promise not to tell anyone he was scared, but he was. Real scared. More scared than me. I thought she might still be alive at first, but the way her face was down in the water there was no way she could breathe. And she wasn’t moving, except for when the water pushed her. Otherwise I would have tried to help her get out.” He put the cup down, looked from Vik to Marti, and added, “I learned how to do CPR in Boy Scouts. I would have helped her if I could.”
Marti let Vik ask him a few more questions about the approximate time and what the weather and the river had been like.
“Cold,” the boy said, and shivered. “I never remember seeing the river that high. The grass made it look kind of like the Everglades, but it was more like white-water rafting once we went in. C. J. hadn’t ever done any rafting. He’s never even been in a canoe. I told him he should use the inner tube, but he had to have the raft, and he couldn’t wear a life jacket—that was for little kids.”
“Who was out there when you went in?” Vik asked.
“Nobody but the people just around that curve in the road filling sandbags. That’s why we went in so early. So nobody would see us and tell.”
“Were there any cars parked nearby?”
Tyler shook his head.
“Did you see anyone anywhere near the banks of the river or maybe on the bridge?”
The boy hesitated. “There wasn’t anyone close by. Once we got in, I could feel the current moving real fast. I wanted to get out, but C. J. headed right for the middle. I told him we needed to keep to the edge, but he didn’t listen. So mostly I was watching him and trying to get him to come back where it was safer. Then he fell off the raft and was yelling to me to come help him.”
“Tyler took seventh place in the four-hundred-meter freestyle at the Junior Olympics,” his mother explained, and added, “Nationals.”
“Ma,” Tyler said as if he was embarrassed, but then he gave Marti a quick, shy smile. “The current took C. J. to that tree. He started yelling that he was stuck, and then he really panicked and started screaming, ’Rats! Rats!’ If anyone had heard him, they sure would have come. I swam over to help him. I was real scared he’d drown.”
Marti was impressed because Tyler took responsibility for what he did and didn’t blame it on C. J. She knew from experience with her own two twelve-year-old boys that even smart kids could do things they shouldn’t because of a taunt, or a dare, or sometimes just male bravado.
By the time Marti and Vik drove two blocks to talk with C. J., the houses had gone from turn-of-the-century clapboard with gables and porches to sprawling brick and aluminum-sided ranches built in the fifties and sixties. Green shutters framed the windows where C. J. was visiting. Most of the tulips that grew on each side of the walk had been trampled. A customized Harley- Davidson was parked in the driveway. It was pink, with lots of chrome. Marti could hear the children’s voices before she reached the front door. She wasn’t sure if they were arguing or playing, but they were loud.
As soon as she rang the bell a woman yelled, “Just quiet down! Right now! Do you hear me?” There was no noticeable change. “Did you hear what I said?” the woman called as she opened the door, then, “You’re not the police, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vik told her.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Cecil said you might want to talk with C. J., but you’re not even in uniform and there’s only two of you. Do you have one of those big sticks?”
Vik shook his head.
“A whistle maybe? Do you have anything that will get their attention? Cecil’s boys are real hellions.” She looked over their shoulder. “You don’t even have a real police car. I bet you can’t even lock them in the backseat. Can you do anything to get them to shut up for a few minutes? I can’t hear myself think. Not that I’ve got any time to think with them here.” The woman was about four feet eleven and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her hair looked like she had combed it with a rake and then stuck her linger in a light socket. She ran her fingers through it as she spoke.
“Give that to me now!” a boy yelled. That was followed by a girl crying, “No! No-o-o-o-o! M-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m-y, Jimmy’s going to hit me.”
The woman shook her head. She looked close to tears. “You might as well come in,” she said as she opened the door wider.
It sounded like the yelling was coming from the basement. There was a crash, a moment of silence, then a loud thump followed by an even louder argument.
“You’re not the boss of me,” the woman muttered. “They win the lottery and think they own the world. Why don’t I just see if I can get C. J. to come up here.” She left Marti and Vik standing just inside the door. Marti looked at her watch and waited fifty- three seconds. The woman and the children were all yelling now. She motioned to Vik to walk ahead of her. Halfway down the stairs, Vik bellowed, “Police. Freeze or you’re all under arrest!”
Three boys stood stock-still. They all had mullet cuts and ponytails. One little girl about four rushed over to the woman and wrapped her arms around her denim-clad legs. The other girl, maybe seven or eight, stared at the boys, mouth open. In the sudden silence a cat meowed.
“Did you lock Whiskers in the liquor cabinet again?” the woman asked and rushed over to release a calico kitten.
“Sit!” Vik ordered. “Now! All of you! Go over to that couch and sit down.” When they hesitated, he added, “Forthwith!” Everyone obeyed.
“Where’s Mr. Slocum?” he asked.
“Where do you think? Over at a bar on Forty-one, same as always, tossing down a few cold ones with his biker buddies.”
Vik looked at C. J. for a moment, walked over to him, and said with unexpected gentleness, “Come on upstairs, son. We need to talk for a few minutes.” He glared at the other children for what seemed like a full minute, then said in a low but menacing tone, “The rest of you will remain seated. You will not argue. You will not scream. You will not wrestle. You will not whisper loud enough for me to hear you upstairs. And after I leave, if you start in again your . . ."—he turned to the woman.
“Aunt Daisy.”
“Your aunt Daisy will give me a call and I will return.” He looked at each of the boys in turn. “Maybe you’d like to spend the next couple of days in a locked ward or a room with bars on the window.”
As Marti followed him upstairs, she whispered, “Forthwith?”
He put his finger to his lips and pointed at C. J., who was walking ahead of them.
Upstairs, isolated from his brothers and without his father, C.J. became a scared little boy.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said.
“What makes you think someone killed her?” Vik asked.
“My dad said so, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t do nothing but find her.” He hung his head. “And I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Why don’t you just tell us what happened.”
Looking up, C. J. said, “That Tyler. He’s such a baby. And all this water. Everywhere, like an ocean. School’s closed. Streets are barricaded. Nothing like this happens where we live. And it’s so boring when we have to come here. Girls.” He gave Aunt Daisy a look that was more disgust than annoyance. “If I everhave a sister ... So why not go sailing? Of course nobody had a boat. I could handle a boat. And Tyler—he gets in the water and he’s all scared. ’Don’t go in the middle.’ ’Stay near the edge.’ ’You’ll drown.’ ’There might be water moccasins.’ He’s a wimpy little kid, just like Dad says. Water moccasins.” His voice sounded scornful, but he looked at Vik. “Are there? Water moccasins?”
Vik shook his head.
“Yeah. Right. Like Dad said, Tyler’s a wimp. I mean what’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to have fun.” His chin went up as if he was daring someone to disagree.
“Anyway, I’m out in the water having a good time; the wimp is near the edge being a baby as usual. Then he yells, ’What’s that?’ I steer the raft over to find out what he’s talking about. Then this stuff is touching my arms. Hair, just hair. I thought it was a dead rat or something until I saw the barrette. Then I knew it wasn’t nothing but a dead body. I mean, like, a body, big deal. So I tell Tyler and of course he gets real crazy, screaming and yelling. Swimming over so he can hide behind me like it’ll come to life and grab him. Then he panics like a little kid. If it wasn’t for me he would have drowned.”
Vik asked him a few questions, confirmed that he hadn’t seen anyone either, no cars, nothing of interest.
“I mean, would I have gone out there if anyone else was there?” C. J. asked. “What’s the fun if you’re going to get caught?”
“Did you see anyone farther away? Down the street maybe. Any emergency vehicles?”
“Man, there wasn’t nobody out there but me and Tyler. Nobody on the street. Nobody nowhere. Just those dumb guys way down by the church filling bags with sand. Like that’s gonna stop that much water.”
“Did you check to make sure nobody was nearby before you went for a swim?”
“Nah. But Tyler did. I figured as long as there weren’t any cops around nobody was going to mess with us. Besides, I don’t even live here. Who’s to say I can’t go out on the river and have a little fun? Man, I just wanted to get a little action. It is so boring here. Like having Great America up the street is such a big deal. You know how many times I’ve been on those roller coasters?”
Neither Marti nor Vik mentioned anything about C. J. going hunting with his father and firing weapons. As they left, they looked into the den and saw Aunt Daisy lying on a couch with a damp cloth on her forehead. The house was still quiet.
Outside Marti asked again, “Forthwith?” “Yeah. That always worked for Mildred. I don’t think Krista and Michael knew what she meant.”
Forthwith. Based on the reaction Vik got from those kids, she was going to have to remember that.