The cage came again, well before dawn. Again, he was trapped behind the flat black bars, helplessly watching Judith’s bare arms beckon for what he could not do.
He got up. Sleep never came after the cage.
He’d just gone into the kitchen to make coffee from instant granules when Carlotta Henderson called.
‘I got something,’ she said.
She’d gotten so many letters and whispered phone calls – tips, threats and fanciful revelations from the heavens – that Rigg often thought a normal person would give up and flee, but there was nothing normal about losing sons to murder and a husband to grief. Carlotta stayed, resolute, praying that one letter, card or phone call would point to whoever killed her boys.
‘Milo?’ she asked. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘Another letter, Carlotta. Yes, I heard.’
‘This is different – not a letter. This is real.’
‘Just tell me.’ He’d raced over to her place so many times, so many dawns. Even after the photos.
‘No. You’ve got to see for yourself.’
‘What came, Carlotta?’
‘Somebody was here, Milo. Someone came up to my house.’
‘When?’
‘This night, last evening; I don’t know. You’ve got to come.’
‘I work in the morning.’
‘Those girls?’ she said.
‘Of course, those girls.’
‘What about the boys?’
‘Always the boys, Carlotta. You know that.’
‘Come.’
‘Later, after work.’
‘Later?’ Her voice rose an octave. ‘Like, really, really after dark, when you think you won’t be seen?’ She tried to force a laugh. ‘Nobody’s taking pictures anymore, Milo. Nobody gives a damn. I want them to watch my house. I want them to care, but they don’t, not anymore.’ She began crying softly.
‘Give me an hour,’ he said.
He showered to get the stupor out of his head, gulped down half a cup of the coffee and got to her street while the dawn was still an hour away.
Even in a night lit only grudgingly by a sliver of the moon and veiled further by sparsely falling snow, there was no missing the morbidity of her place. Once an immaculate, happy suburban home on a cul-de-sac five miles north of O’Hare International Airport, a gutter now hung down loose above the front door, and a pushed-through window screen lay against the side of the garage. The unshoveled snow on the driveway and front walk was boot-pitted by peddlers and mail people. A red Toyota RAV4, the battlewagon of so many middle-class moms, sagged on a flat rear tire in the driveway.
He sat in his car for a moment, remembering how she’d tried to keep up appearances at first, refusing to accept the horrors that had come to her. In the first weeks after her boys were found and her husband had collapsed dead on the body of the youngest of them, she’d left the boys’ bicycles lying on the front lawn where they’d last dropped them, ready to be picked up again when their lives resumed. Right up until they’d been stolen.
And she’d tried to keep up her dark Latin beauty. The frowners made much of the pictures of her in the first weeks. Even numbed with grief, she looked spectacular. Sickos said she was keeping up her looks for any male that might stop by; she was Latin, after all, with hot Latin needs.
Letters and phone calls came. She read and listened to them all. For a time, the cops and the other reporters did, too, but they dropped away as new horrors and new victims demanded their attention. Except for Milo Rigg, Chicago’s most prominent crime reporter. He came to the house on the cul-de-sac, daytimes, night-times, it didn’t matter. He read the letters, he listened to her recount the whispered phone calls. He chased down every new lead and passed the more credible of them to whoever in law enforcement would listen. He bought Carlotta’s pain because, some said, it tugged him from his own fresh grief.
And he raged. By God, he raged. He raged at the cops and the medical examiners, in print and on the web and on the phone, for doing nothing, until nobody in law enforcement would pick up the phone if they knew it was Rigg on the line.
For months and months, he kept coming to that once-happy house on the cul-de-sac, until at last he’d come too many times in the middle of too many nights. Primer, of the rag, the Curious Chicagoan, got tipped, falsely, that more linked Carlotta Henderson and the Examiner’s respected crime reporter than a hunt for justice. He had Carlotta’s house staked out, published photos of Rigg leaving the home in the wee hours of a couple of those too-many mornings – proof, he said, that Rigg had been spending his nights doing something more than sifting through information that might lead to killers. The city’s other queens, the Trib and the Sun-Times, reluctant at first, finally had to report the rumors, though both refused to run Primer’s photos.
Primer offered up another bonanza. He published other, older photos. Carlotta Henderson, a beautiful woman seemingly mismatched to the portly building contractor who’d collapsed over the gurney of his youngest son, had been an exotic dancer in New Orleans, and had once been arrested in an escort sting. No matter that she’d quit that life when she’d taken up with Mr Henderson and come north to bear and raise two sons in what appeared to be a loving home. The past is never past, wags write, and Carlotta Henderson’s past became her present and her future. She became white-hot, untouchable, a hussy who deserved no sympathy.
Rigg kept on raging, but his readers began looking at his columns with changed eyes, until finally they looked away. Rigg’s credibility was shot.
Luther Donovan wearied of it all. The publisher of the Examiner was besieged by declining circulation and plummeting revenues – problems more immediate than Carlotta Henderson’s tawdry history and Milo Rigg’s relentless hammering of seemingly every law-enforcement officer in Chicagoland. He sent his crime columnist to the Pink to work part-time, writing suburban stories under Harold Benten’s byline.
By then, Rigg had wearied of himself as well and wanted only to retreat to the dunes. He welcomed the part-time assignment as much as he could welcome anything in the wake of Judith’s death. He could stretch her life-insurance proceeds for a couple of years by writing innocuous piffle for the Pink three days a week and spend the rest of his time hunkering down in the dunes.
Except, now, he was no longer writing piffle. He was back on Carlotta’s cul-de-sac, chasing murderers. He got out of the car and walked up.
She opened the door before Rigg got to the threshold, as had become her custom after the first of the photos had been published in the Curious Chicagoan.
‘I thought you said nobody was watching,’ he said, trying for a joke as he stepped into the stifling heat of her home. He remembered how she kept her thermostat set at eighty degrees. The murders that had taken her children and husband still chilled Carlotta Henderson.
She looked at him with dead eyes and nodded.
She’d lost weight, more even than him. Deep furrows bracketed her mouth and a dozen new wrinkles ribbed her forehead. No one would ever think of her as having being voluptuous or the object of any man’s desire.
They walked to the dining room, which was where they always sat when he came over. Cardboard file boxes, identical to those Rigg had stacked against the long wall in his living room, still surrounded her table in a ragged sort of semicircle. No doubt she knew the contents of each box as well as he knew his own.
A box of purple hospital latex gloves was placed at one end of the table, next to two Ziploc plastic bags. One contained a plain white envelope without any postage or other marking. The other held a single, pale yellow index card, printed in what looked like computer-generated lettering.
He sat down in front of the bags and put on the gloves. ‘That’s why you called?’ Rigg asked, pointing to the index card.
‘First, the envelope,’ she said. ‘As you can see, it has no address or postage. The card was inside. It had to be dropped off here sometime between last evening and two hours ago, when I noticed it. Do you understand?’
‘You’ll probably never be rid of the cranks, Carlotta. Even after all this time, they still come – now, right up to your door.’
He leaned over the table to read the computer-printed yellow index card in the second bag. ‘Tiny purplish birthmark, below right ear … crossed toes, right foot … one large freckle, actually three, behind her knee … one-inch scar, left ankle.’
‘There’s nothing on the other side,’ Carlotta said.
Rigg leaned back. ‘Any idea what these body identification marks mean?’
‘The first one is Anthony’s. He had a tiny purplish birthmark below his right ear. No one would have noticed except family. Only a mother and a father would see.’
‘And the killer,’ he said.
‘Obviously.’
‘The other three – the toes, the freckles and the ankle scar?’
‘Not on my boys.’
‘Perhaps on other victims,’ he said.
She took a larger plastic Ziploc bag from behind her and placed the bags containing the plain envelope and the yellow index card into it.
‘Keep me out of it, Milo,’ she said, handing him the bag.