Rigg turned at the peeling, painted sign that showed a grinning horse and an even happier horseman, and drove up the rutted gravel alley behind the Walgreen’s drug store. The Happy Times Stables had once occupied all the land at the intersection just north of the Kennedy Expressway and east of the Des Plaines River, but real-estate values gone exponential had prompted the sale of the choicest part at the corner. Now, the stables were invisible from the road. He pulled into the clay parking lot and parked next to the only other vehicle there – a dusty green Ford 150 pickup truck.
The wide, central door was closed against the cold. Nobody was riding that day. But the side door was unlocked. Rigg went in and stopped. And, for an instant, he could not breathe.
A framed, full color newspaper page hung on the rough-planking wall inside. He knew the picture. He’d seen it a long time ago. And he’d seen a part of it for hundreds of horrible nights since … well, he didn’t know when it started, but it must have been at least a year.
It was a page from an old issue of the Examiner Sunday Magazine, run when the paper still had a Sunday magazine. It showed a teenaged girl, in full horse-riding regalia, holding a silver trophy. But it wasn’t the girl or the trophy that stopped him now. It was the wrought iron door in the background. He was looking into a nightmare. His nightmare.
The bars on the door were the bars of the black cage.
He clenched his fists to keep his hands from shaking. He leaned closer. The photo had been published six months after Rigg joined the Examiner. He read everything in every issue of the paper in those rookie days. He’d read the article about the young equestrienne. He’d seen the picture.
And, years later, those iron bars in that picture had emerged from his subconscious, to try to nudge him to a name in a file he’d once thought to write down, but never to think of again. A name only Aria could find. It hadn’t been Judith’s arms beckoning from beyond those iron bars. They’d been the arms of one of the murdered boys, begging him to see the wrought-iron door, begging him to see the Happy Times Stables. Begging him, perhaps, to see Peter Tanson, a kid, Rigg once noted, who knew something about horse rides.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Rigg said, and then he laughed at the relief of it.
‘What the hell?’ a man’s voice said. Rigg spun around. A man had come up to stand ten feet away.
He was wearing worn Levis, a fleece-lined, dirty suede jacket and a black cowboy hat. He could have been the buckaroo pictured in the sign out front, except nothing about him looked happy.
‘I was just enjoying your article,’ Rigg said. He supposed he very much would, from that instant on.
‘What do you want?’ the unhappy cowboy asked.
‘I was hoping to see Peter Tanson about horse rides,’ Rigg said.
The cowboy offered up only confusion.
‘A kid who comes here?’ Rigg said, because he didn’t know anything about Tanson.
‘Don’t know the name, mister. I’m just watching the place, temporary. Best you beat it.’
Wilcox’s notoriety would have shut the place down, at least for a time. Rigg took the man’s advice and beat it back to his car, but he whistled the short two miles to the home address he’d gotten from the Internet for a Peter Tanson, Senior.
A woman in her mid-forties answered the door. ‘I know who you are,’ she said, after he introduced himself. ‘I thought you got fired.’
‘Then you can see how deeply I’m still committed to finding the killers of Peter, Junior’s classmates.’
‘I remember how disgusting your behavior was, taking liberties with the bereaved,’ she said.
‘You can’t always trust what you read in the papers,’ he said.
Her face cracked with a frown. ‘Besides, only one was a classmate, and they weren’t really friends.’
‘I’d like to talk to your son about that,’ he said. ‘In your presence, of course.’
‘My son’s not home from school yet, and my husband is not home from work. You can come back at six tonight, for ten minutes and ten minutes only, Mr Rigg.’
He thanked her and left.
He found a Walmart, bought a multiple-meat sandwich that looked to have been made recently, and killed an hour eating it at one of the small scratched tables in the five-booth dining section. He got back to the Tanson place at six sharp.
They sat in the living room. The kid’s father was a big fellow, six foot and at least 250 pounds, who leaned forward on his chair as if ready to pounce if Rigg stepped out of line. The boy looked to be sixteen, and was almost as big as his father. Mrs Tanson sat farthest away. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said.
‘Football?’ Rigg asked the kid.
The kid nodded. ‘Right guard.’
‘I’m one of the reporters that has been following the investigation of your friends’ killings for the past fifteen months.’
‘I didn’t know the other two boys,’ Peter said. ‘Just Bobby. We were in the same homeroom.’
‘Do you know if Bobby ever went to the Happy Times Stables?’
‘I don’t work there anymore.’
‘You worked there?’ Rigg cursed the sloppy note he’d made about the boy, months earlier. The kid could have been questioned thoroughly then, for sure.
The boy looked at his father. The father nodded.
‘Bobby would come around to the stables, sometimes by himself, sometimes with other kids. I was allowed to let kids work for an hour of riding.’
‘By Kevin Wilcox?’
‘He was the boss.’
‘He was always around?’
‘I hardly ever saw him. He stayed up in the office.’
‘Were the boys there the weekend they went missing?’
The father moved closer to the edge of his chair. ‘Peter was sick that weekend.’
‘We made him quit right after, because it was so near where the boys were found,’ Mrs Tanson said.
‘Did Bobby Stemec ever bring the Henderson kids around to work for free rides?’ Rigg asked Peter.
‘Bobby brought kids around, but I didn’t pay attention to them so long as they did the work. I didn’t recognize the Hendersons from their pictures in the paper.’
‘It’s been ten minutes,’ the father said, standing up. ‘You will not give out our names.’
‘Under no circumstances. One last thing,’ Rigg said, still sitting, because it was the most important thing. ‘Has anyone from law enforcement ever come around to question you?’
‘Never,’ the father said.
‘What about your friends, anyone at school?’
‘Not for over a year,’ the boy said.
‘Time’s up,’ the boy’s father said.
Rigg called Glet from the car. He didn’t answer, so Rigg talked to his voicemail. ‘I know something you’ll want to trade for.’
Glet called back in a minute. ‘What?’
‘Wilcox confess yet?’
‘Soon, real soon.’
‘And his DNA matching to Bobby Stemec and Johnny Henderson?’
‘What do you want, Rigg?’
‘I don’t think you’re solid on Wilcox, Jerome. You don’t have his DNA on the boys.’
‘Horse shit.’
‘Quite apropos,’ Rigg said. ‘But I think you’re having a problem proving he did the boys.’
‘Don’t you worry about the DNA.’
‘You overlooked something last time, big time,’ Rigg said, ‘but you’ll have to trade for it.’
‘Trade what?’
‘Trade for that phone call I asked you to make.’
Glet sighed. ‘Whatcha got?’
‘Happy Times Stables,’ Rigg said.
‘The former employer of our murder suspect and gun peddler. I’m ahead of you on that one, pal.’
‘Do you have witnesses who’ll testify that kids, including Bobby Stemec, worked there for free rides? I just talked to one who said Bobby brought other kids around.’
‘What’s this kid’s name?’
‘I promised I wouldn’t say, but you can find him and probably others by interviewing Bobby’s homeroom classmates. How the hell did you miss this last time?’
‘I didn’t know we had. Lehman coordinated all that. I was responsible for sightings. But I’ll make sure your classmates angle gets chased.’
‘Do it yourself.’
‘I got other things working at this minute.’
‘What’s so big you couldn’t show up at the Tana Damm discovery site?’
Glet dodged. ‘Your witness puts boys inside the stable with Wilcox?’
‘No. He just puts Bobby inside. But there’s no doubt Wilcox was there. He ran the stables. Interview the classmates, Jerome.’
‘Lehman was a damned fool. You won’t put this in the paper yet?’
‘Only if you do me that favor I already asked you for,’ Rigg said. ‘What do you think about McGarry taking off?’
‘Taking a vacation from the heat, or maybe not. Him and Lehman, they’re both crooked.’
‘Did he tell you there were problems with the DNA recovered from the boys, or was it Feldott?’ It was a shot in the dark.
Glet laughed, loud.
It wasn’t the response Rigg expected. ‘You’re not worried?’ he asked.
‘Here’s what you need to know for now: McGarry’s a moron.’
‘He’s not that something you’re chasing that’s more important than the boys and the girls?’
‘Off the record on this for now, Milo?’
‘Of course,’ Rigg said.
‘I’m chasing enough fireworks to set the whole county ablaze.’
‘We have a deal, Jerome. My tip about Bobby’s classmates in return for that phone call I’ve been asking you to make.’
‘Get your pencil sharp, Milo; hell’s going to pay,’ Glet said. ‘But I’ll make your call.’