Rigg started calling around for Jerome Glet at seven-thirty.
It was another morning that had come too early, after a night that had ended too late, staying up thinking of a cabbie, a diner and a flop.
And then the cage came at five o’clock.
It never varied – just a wall of thick bars, like prison bars, but thicker and flatter, too close together for him to reach the slender arms that beckoned to him in the mist just beyond. Judith’s arms, though he could never see her hands, her wedding ring.
Her beckoning was clear. Her killer had never been caught. She wanted him to find who’d shot her; she wanted justice. But, in Chicago, that was impossible. Fewer than a third of the city’s murderous shooters were ever identified. And her killing had been unintended – a shot fired by a punk firing at someone else, or maybe just up in the air, in anger at the world. Almost certainly, the shooter never knew his bullet had found Judith’s neck.
The cage brought his only dream of Judith, though he went to sleep every night praying she’d come to him – young, dark-haired, beautiful – to touch, to kiss, to whisper or laugh or murmur or yell or anything at all. But, in the interminable months since she was killed, only her pale, slender arms came, unreachable beyond flat, black bars.
Glet’s cell phone gave him only voicemail. He called the sheriff’s headquarters, but was told Deputy Glet was not expected in for some time. He called the Dead House, thinking Glet might have drifted over there, but the woman who answered the main number said it was too early for anyone important to be in, except the dead, ha ha.
He gave up on Glet, decided to look for Richie Fernandez directly. The Cook County Jail had no normal hours, since booking killers and cons, pervs and peepers was a twenty-four-hour-a-day proposition. It was where Lehman would have brought Fernandez. Rigg knew plenty of people to call there, from when he reported real news.
He asked first for Lehman, but, no surprise, was told the sheriff was not there. Then, those who didn’t hang up when they recognized his voice gave him the same three responses: ‘You working crime again, Rigg?’ and, ‘Nope, ain’t seen Lehman,’ and, ‘Never heard of Richie Fernandez.’
Several times, there were additional responses. ‘You still banging that Henderson woman, Rigg?’ two asked. And four others stayed on the line long enough to express their delight at having heard he’d been bounced from reporting crime and out to the Pink. They remembered the drubbings he’d given law enforcement at their failure to solve the Stemec Henderson killings.
But one, a night officer just getting off his shift, was polite.
‘I heard the sheriff personally made an arrest in the Graves case,’ Rigg said.
‘What?’ The officer’s surprise sounded genuine.
‘A guy, Richie Fernandez. Lehman himself made the grab.’
‘You got a bum tip. Klaus Lanz was the only real arrest, the only booking, and he was released. Lanz is a bobble-head, damaged upstairs,’ the night man said.
Rigg supposed that word might have gone out to keep mum, for whatever reason, about the Fernandez bust, but he doubted the lid on the arrest could have been kept on for a whole week.
And something else nagged. Lehman knew the value of good publicity. He’d trumpeted his grab of Lanz. A personal bust of a solid prospect in the Graves case would have been golden publicity. He should have made sure news of Richie Fernandez’s arrest got out.
But he hadn’t.
Rigg called the sheriff’s office again. The same secretary he’d spoken to earlier said the sheriff was still out.
‘Out to me, or out to everyone?’ Rigg asked.
She hung up.
He took a chance. He called back one of Lehman’s senior deputies who’d hung up on him just moments earlier.
‘Lehman’s gone underground – why?’ Rigg said fast, before the man could hang up on him again.
‘Where the hell did you hear that?’
‘Everywhere. Lehman’s gone underground.’
‘No attribution on this, Rigg?’ the cop whispered, lowering his voice.
‘Fine, fine,’ Rigg said.
The cop laughed, loud, and hung up.
The Dead House was on the south side of Chicago, in a block just past a tattoo parlor, a bar and a hock shop. During the worst of Stemec Henderson, Rigg had gone there so often to pester Medical Examiner McGarry for updates that driving there became an unthinking routine.
This day, like those days, he drove the distances and took the turns like he was on rails. But, after he parked at the curb, his hand froze on the car door handle. Images from inside the building across the street came flashing back in a staccato-like slide show: the frantic echoing footfalls of the families pounding down the beige-tiled corridor; the steel doors banging open; the dank chill and gloom of the morgue; the almost gentle sagging of Anthony Henderson Senior, collapsing over the beaten body of his youngest son, Anthony Junior.
He pulled hard on the door handle, pushed out and hurried across the street.
The same receptionist sat at the rounded, black laminate desk. Her name was Jane, and her skin and her hair were the same beige as the glazed tiles lining the floor and the walls of the hallway, as if the colors of her life had been leeched away by the dead being refrigerated down the hall.
‘Long time no see, Milo,’ she said in a monotone voice. The morgue leeched away inflection, too.
‘Happier stuff, now. School boards, pet parades, zoning battles.’
She nodded. Like everyone on his old beat, she knew he’d been bounced from the Bastion.
‘I’m looking for Glet,’ he said.
‘Here?’ She shook her head. ‘He hasn’t been by.’
‘Is McGarry in?’
‘Him, neither.’
‘I’ll go up and talk to Doris, then.’ Doris was the medical examiner’s secretary.
‘No press, Milo.’
‘What’s going on?’ Never had the press been shut out of the morgue by McGarry.
‘Ask McGarry at the next press brief.’
‘When’s that?’
‘Days, weeks, months. Who knows?’
Or never, Rigg thought. Everybody seemed to be going clam. Except maybe the CIB’s most favorite young man. ‘How about Corky Feldott?’
‘Cornelius Feldott,’ she corrected, with just the barest twitch of a smile. ‘Our assistant M.E. thinks “Corky” lacks respect.’
‘How about him, whatever his name is?’
She gave him an exaggerated sigh, pushed a phone button and cupped her free hand around the mouthpiece to make sure no unauthorized word escaped. A moment later, she waved a liver-spotted hand toward the tiled stairwell.
Doris was at her desk. Like Jane, downstairs, she was another grim veteran of the cold halls of the dead. He gave her a smile, which she didn’t return. She remembered the thrashing he gave McGarry.
Feldott’s office door was open, and Feldott himself adorned the threshold, smiling. Primed for success, he wore natty, chalk-striped charcoal suit pants, a white shirt that likely had never seen a wrinkle, and, in an attempt to show he was as common and careless about color as most men, a loosely-tied, inch-wide purple necktie, which most common men would never wear.
‘Mr Rigg,’ he said, holding out his hand.
‘Cornelius,’ Rigg said, holding out his own.
Feldott smiled more broadly. ‘I see you’ve been given the word about my appellation.’
‘“Cornelius” does have a certain gravitas.’
Still smiling, Cornelius gestured Rigg inside and they sat at a desk arranged neatly with four small stacks of Manila folders and a yellow legal pad. A laptop computer was on the back credenza, below an antique-looking drawing of Northwestern University.
‘How can I help?’ Cornelius asked.
‘What’s being learned about the Graves case?’
‘And about Stemec Henderson?’ Cornelius gestured toward one of the stacks of folders. ‘I’ve just reread all your pieces in the Examiner. Lots and lots of outrage, but well deserved.’
‘Always Stemec Henderson,’ Rigg said.
‘We’ve not forgotten.’
‘You weren’t involved.’
‘I’d only been here for a couple of months. So, the Graves girls?’
Rigg nodded.
‘We defer to the sheriff. You should ask him.’
‘I can’t get through to him. I heard he made a major bust last week.’
Feldott frowned. ‘There’s been no news of that.’
‘The suspect’s name is Richie Fernandez.’
‘Where did you hear it?’
‘Street talk, a name, a mention,’ Rigg said.
‘A source you can’t divulge?’
Rigg shrugged.
‘Well, I don’t know anything about a Richie Fernandez,’ young Feldott said. ‘And nothing about anyone else, unfortunately. The sheriff’s investigation is still evolving, as they say.’
It could have been a lid, it could have been truth.
‘So far, only Klaus Lanz,’ Rigg said.
‘Everybody knows about him. A quick arrest, a quick release.’
‘For show,’ Rigg said.
‘You must understand, the reporting last time …’ He let it slip away, that gentle accusation. ‘Maybe your Mr Fernandez was simply another catch-and-release, though you’re saying he was released without anyone knowing he’d been caught?’
Rigg gave it up. ‘When will there be a more conclusive autopsy on the girls?’
‘You mean, more than the three wise men?’ Feldott said of the three doctors who’d found nothing except that the girls had been frozen. ‘Anything more is up to Mr McGarry.’
‘He’s not around, like Lehman.’
‘Off the record again?’
‘All of this is,’ Rigg said.
‘The girls haven’t fully thawed, but we don’t want that released.’
‘Too long frozen?’
‘We’re being more meticulous than last time. Surely you of all people can understand why.’
‘Any chance either of the girls was violated?’ Rigg asked, giving Feldott the opportunity to lie.
‘No chance I’d tell you something like that until we do complete examinations. Please do not speculate.’
‘I’m hearing McGarry wants out,’ Rigg said, to keep them talking.
‘We’d go on, regardless,’ Feldott said. It was interesting. He hadn’t denied the possibility of McGarry’s bailing out when his term was up.
‘You’re his assistant. You’d run?’
‘Gosh, no. Most, including me, think I’m too young, too new at the job.’
‘Who, then?’
‘An outsider, I imagine.’
‘You’re an outsider, sent over by the Civilian Investigation folks.’
Feldott smiled. ‘I meant a seasoned man from outside. What else do you know about this Richie Fernandez?’
‘Nothing beyond a name,’ Rigg said, standing up.
‘Maybe that’s more than anyone else knows,’ Feldott said, walking him to the door.
‘Except Lehman,’ Rigg said.