Conklin and I sat side by side at the old desk in the war room, staring into a computer screen that was, in effect, a window into an interrogation room at the Chicago PD Violent Crimes Division.
We got our first look at Detective Sergeant Stanley Richards. He was fortyish, of average height and weight, a restless, hands-in-his-pockets, coin-jingling man with a five-o’clock shadow at ten in the morning.
He took his hands out of his chinos and dropped into a seat at the table approximately twenty-one hundred miles away from our desk in the war room. Sitting beside him was his partner, Detective Suzanne Waltz. She was wearing a man-tailored white shirt, a navy-blue blazer a lot like mine, and a hint of a smile, an expression I would have loved to wear myself. She looked calm, relaxed, and unreadable.
The suspect, Jacob Stoll, sat opposite from the detectives and had sprawled across both chairs on his side and folded his arms over the table. His body language was saying that he owned the table, the room, the story he was about to tell.
My hope that Stoll was Leonard Barkley by another name evaporated. Unlike Barkley, who was a Fidel Castro look-alike, Stoll had a fleshy face. He looked to be six foot two to Barkley’s five foot nine, and he had a wide, toothy grin, perhaps prompting Detective Waltz’s Mona Lisa smile.
He said to her, “You’re a really good-looking woman, Detective, you know that?”
Waltz said nicely to Stoll, “Jacob? Okay if I call you Jacob? Mind taking a look at this?”
She held up her phone so that Stoll could see a photo. Richards had forwarded it to us, and I recognized the shot of the recently deceased man. According to the police report and the dead man’s bloodstained shirt, he had taken a bullet through his heart. According to Richards, he’d also had a boatload of heroin in his backpack.
Stoll said, “May I?” Without waiting for an answer, he took the phone from Waltz and gave the screen a good long look. Then he handed it back.
“I don’t recognize him, at least not from that angle. I can’t swear he wasn’t one of the three thousand enlisted men I trained or served with. But this I know: when you check my rifle, you’ll see it hasn’t been fired. You checked my hands for GSR, so you know I haven’t fired a weapon. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” said Richards. “Where were you at six thirty this morning?”
“Is that when that guy in the park bought it?”
“Where were you, Lieutenant Stoll?”
“I was at the South Blue Island Avenue bus depot having coffee and joking around with three other drivers and my supervisor, Jesse Kruse. We cleaned the buses, and I started my route at seven. Picked up thirty-six little kids and took them all to school. Drove nowhere near the Riverwalk. I got more eyewitnesses to my whereabouts than you got time in a week to interview.
“And now I have a question for you,” said Stoll. “Are we done? If not, I’m through talking without a lawyer. If so, I’ll take my gun and go about my business.”
Richards said, “Remember when I read you your rights?”
“I remember. But this is ridiculous. You didn’t arrest me. I thought you just wanted me to tell you what I saw from the bridge.”
The confident body language was gone. Stoll was getting exercised. It wasn’t going to do him any good. My partner and I looked at each other, brought our eyes back to the screen as Richards said, “Stoll. You’re a person of interest in a homicide. We’re holding you in custody until we check out your alibi, and if you’ve been honest with us, we’re gonna clear you. Understand? We have to do that, if it takes a week, or longer.”
Richards continued, “Furthermore, now that you said you want a lawyer, we have to stop talking to you.”
“Fuck that. I waive my rights.”
“Good thinking,” Richards said almost kindly. He pushed a pad of paper and a pen across the table.
“After you sign the waiver, we’re gonna need names of all the people who can vouch for your whereabouts during the hours before we brought you in.”