It was four o’clock when Rigg got to Elm Grove, a blue-collar suburb two towns west of Chicago. The Examiner’s branch office was in a windowless concrete tower above a windowless ten-lane bowling alley, which was itself above a bank on the ground floor, which did have windows but rarely any customers. The building was made of concrete, poured gray in the late 1920s but darkened almost black over the next ninety years by diesel soot from the bus yard next door. Rent for the walk-up, third-floor tower space – formerly a beauty salon until the elevator blew its bearings and was deemed too expensive to fix – was cheap.
The Pink’s entire staff, such as it was, was in the preposterously pink-walled and pink-floored newsroom. There were two other reporters, both part-time, kindly women past retirement age who kept track of bridge scores, weddings and the like; the receptionist who doubled as the copy editor for the terse paragraphs jammed online and in print between advertisements, also elderly; and the supplement’s relentlessly smiling advertising salesman, dressed as always in a conflict of plaids – and they were all huddled in front of the old television. The discovery at Devil’s Creek was being broadcast on the early evening news.
Harold Benten was not quite among them. The supplement’s editor, 140 emaciated pounds of leathered skin, limp white hair and rheumy eyes, sat in his usual cloud of cigarette smoke behind the filmy glass wall that separated him from his small staff. As always, his office thrummed. Once a place for shampooing and toxic hair dying, the room now pulsed from an exhaust fan laboring irregularly on worn bearings, now to rid the air of Benten’s carcinogenic cigarette smoke. Nothing could be done about the two black, curved sinks plumbed into his side wall, but Benten had moved the leaned-back red vinyl shampoo chairs to the front of his battered, black metal desk to serve as guest seating. Money had not been spent to enliven the Examiner’s satellite operation.
Benten raised a nicotine-yellowed finger to motion Rigg into his fog.
For once, the editor’s desk was barren of anything except the cigarette smoldering in the huge, overflowing yellow ashtray that sat atop a burn-pocked linoleum desk pad advertising a heating-oil company. Like Benten himself, the desk pad was a throwback to the time when most people needed heating oil, desk pads and newspapers. Benten’s empty desktop signaled he’d lost his appetite for work, likely sitting, smoking and staring at nothing since word came that the Graves girls had been found cast off a bridge. He carried the demons of the unsolved Stemec Henderson murders, too.
‘Dumped nude, like the boys?’ Benten asked, not pretending to wonder why Rigg had showed up for work on a Monday, a day early, or where he’d been.
‘In a ravine next to a dribble called Devil’s Creek, if you can believe the name.’ Rigg sat on the front edge of one of the red shampoo chairs, careful not to set the tired chairback into an almost inescapable full recline.
‘Younger across the head of the older, forming a cross?’ Benten spoke in a tense staccato, clipping his words as if each one cost him a dollar he didn’t have.
‘Like it was somehow satanic?’ Rigg shook his head. ‘I think they just got pitched that way.’
Benten lit a Camel, oblivious to the smoke curling from the one already burning in the ashtray. ‘Trauma?’
‘Glet said there were no obvious signs,’ Rigg said.
‘Glet? What the hell? Glet was there?’
‘It’s Lehman’s jurisdiction, and Glet’s his most senior man.’
‘Glet’s a pig. Not only was he front and center on the Stemec Henderson botch, he’s got that assault pay-off.’
Rather than risk trial, Cook County had paid out 900,000 dollars to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d claimed Glet sexually assaulted her during questioning for drug possession.
‘Alleged assault,’ Rigg said. The girl’s family had dropped the matter once they’d received the payout.
‘Glet’s a pig,’ Benten said again. ‘He shouldn’t have been there.’
‘Besides Glet, the other same clowns were there, too, except for McGarry. He sent the new kid, Feldott.’
‘CIB,’ Benten said, of Feldott’s mentors. The Citizens’ Investigation Bureau, a supposedly advisory-only group, had been formed by the city’s elite following the sharp increase in street violence two years before.
‘A miracle child, if the pieces in our own paper are to be believed,’ Rigg said.
‘Luther Donovan,’ Benten said. The Examiner’s owner and publisher was a man most solicitous of the moneyed elite, especially those that had formed the CIB.
‘Glet’s scared we’ll use our Graves coverage to remind people of the Stemec Henderson fiasco,’ Rigg said.
‘Then we should make the link,’ Benten said, a sly smile crossing the deep creases of his face.
‘We?’ Rigg had been bereft of a byline for months. And hard news, especially crime, was for Rigg’s old haunt downtown, the Bastion, not for the Pink.
‘You were noticed.’
‘I saw Wolfe, too,’ Rigg said. Though he’d stayed back from the news herd at the bridge, turf insecurities sharpened the antennae of every reporter. Wolfe, a nervous, twitchy little man, had become the Bastion’s chief crime reporter when Rigg got banished to the Pink. ‘He called?’
‘Afraid for his job, unlike you.’
‘I already lost my job.’ Working three days a week at the Pink without a byline was not real reporting.
‘Then why were you by that bridge?’
‘I was just watching.’
Benten waved the lie away. ‘If it’s the same killer …’
Rigg nodded. ‘A perverse part of me is hoping it’s the same killer,’ he said, ‘if it forces another look at Stemec Henderson. But I made sure to tell Glet I was off crime. Car dealership openings, PTA meetings, new sewers – that’s me now.’
‘And he said …?’
‘That I’d always be the conscience of the unavenged.’
‘You wore the robes; you were the judge last time. Unsatisfied, forever demanding.’
‘They messed it. Lehman, Glet, the other deputies, local cops, forest-preserve security, even the state’s attorney – they all messed it. And us, the queens, we messed it by egging them on for progress they didn’t know how to make, forcing them to chase leads they knew would never pan out. Covering ass got more important than looking for truth.’
‘And you? You messed it?’ Benten said.
‘Me most of all, and I’m still messing it.’
‘Still searching your wall of files?’
Rigg nodded. He’d told Benten long ago about his twenty-six boxes of notes on the Stemec Henderson investigation. He pored over them during every one of the three nights he spent in his suburban apartment every week, looking for some clue he’d missed.
‘You still talk to her?’ Benten asked.
‘Who?’ Rigg asked. He talked to two. One was dead. One was alive, wishing she were dead.
‘Carlotta Henderson, damn it.’
‘You mean the mother of two of the dead boys and the widow of the man that keeled over at the Dead House?’ Rigg said, suddenly furious. The woman hadn’t only lost her kids. She’d lost her husband, and then she’d gotten trashed in the press.
‘Easy, easy,’ Benten said. ‘I wasn’t referring to …’ He let the thought trail away. Carlotta Henderson had become scandalous along with Rigg.
‘She doesn’t call much anymore,’ Rigg said. Not much meant no more than two or three times a week, but only on the landline in his apartment. He’d refused to give Carlotta his cell phone number because he didn’t want her to get at him in the dunes. The dunes were Judith’s place.
‘I just meant it would be natural to stay in touch,’ Benten went on, probing a little more now. He’d been known as a newsman with a renowned sniffer before he got old and booted to the Pink.
‘Carlotta’s never given up hoping for good leads,’ Rigg said. She’d begun getting crank stuff – false leads, rants, judgments of those who spoke directly to God – beginning the day after her husband collapsed over the body of one of his two murdered sons. She began calling Rigg to report all of them, usually in the middle of the night, when she was most vulnerable. And he listened, every time, for by then he was vulnerable, too, trapped by his nightmares of a black cage that kept him from touching the arms of the woman who’d been shot beside him.
Benten cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps you could write a short piece?’
‘To poke a stick in the Bastion? Crime is for downtown, not for us at the Pink.’
‘Something to let them know we’ve still got game.’
‘Even under your byline, they’ll suspect it’s me, and that will stop it from getting past any copy editor downtown.’
‘All is chaos at the Bastion, fearing more lay-offs,’ Benten said, getting up to put on his topcoat, and forgetting for once to make a comic show of dropping his brown fedora at what he always took for a jaunty angle, but which only made his head look like it was on crooked. Today he just tugged the hat on like a helmet. ‘Around a thousand words, recap and update, digestible for the limited attention spans of our website readers,’ he said. ‘No need to research.’
He walked out fast then, maybe because he was in a hurry to get a space in a bar. The gin mills would be crowded that day.
Rigg stubbed out both of the Camels Benten had left burning in the ashtray and went out to the desk jammed against the back wall. It was tiny and it was red and it was all that was available for a part-time reporter.
The television coverage had ended. The two lady reporters and the advertising peddler were gone. Only Eleanor, the copy editor, remained, to tend to Rigg.
He pushed aside the clutter of notes on the middle-school expansion he still hadn’t written up, sat down and opened his laptop.
A hand touched his shoulder from behind, making him jump. He hadn’t heard her get up. ‘Not like before, Milo,’ Eleanor said softly, meaning he should not get caught in the teeth of the old gears.
He nodded without turning around. Not like before? Two more children had been found. Disappeared after going to the movies, like before. Naked, like before. Lying atop one another, jumbled like pick-up sticks, like before. Left just a few feet off a road, like before. In Cook County, to suffer its incompetent sheriff’s jurisdiction, like before.
His fingers began to tremble above the keyboard. He dropped his hands to his lap before Eleanor could see and kept them there until she turned and walked away. Sweat stung into his eye. He wiped at it. There was no ‘before’ to it, no past. It was still all so damned present. Kids dead again.
Just like before.