He called Corky first thing, when he got to the Pink, Monday morning. ‘Have you examined Glet?’
‘Soon.’
‘I thought you’d be in a rush,’ Rigg said.
‘We’re being careful. And I’m in no hurry to release results that characterize Deputy Glet as unstable.’
‘I already reported your belief that he was troubled, even if I disagree.’
‘So I saw, yesterday,’ Feldott said. ‘This is off the record?’
‘Isn’t most everything, these days?’
‘I can’t understand why he stole Johnny Henderson’s foreign DNA.’
‘It makes no sense,’ Rigg said. ‘Like suicide makes no sense.’
‘He got very upset when I called to confront—’
Rigg cut him off. ‘You said he hung up on you, I know. Forget the mystery of why he took Johnny Henderson’s foreign DNA, for now. Forget that Bobby Stemec’s foreign DNA doesn’t match to Wilcox. Glet was working other angles to Wilcox, witnesses that could place the boys in the stables. And don’t ignore the grand prize – those fireworks Glet was so secretive about.’
‘What the hell are those fireworks?’
It was the first time Rigg had heard Corky Feldott swear.
‘I’ll find them,’ Rigg said, like he believed he could.
He killed the rest of the morning and half the afternoon working the fillers that he’d owed Aria for days. He wrote up the telephone interview he’d conducted about a new car wash, the repair of the long-leaking swimming pool, and the pothole repair program.
He was about to call the organizer of a Fourth of July pet parade when, most mercifully, Till called. ‘Sheriff Lehman phoned me this morning about your piece yesterday.’
‘Enraged that I reported you’re doing what he should have done fifteen months ago?’
‘No,’ Till said. ‘He was very controlled, very polite, almost timid about us looking to find kids that could place Kevin Wilcox close to those boys.’
‘And you are?’
‘And we did, at least to Stemec, from the three kids you told us about. And, as you damned well know, one actually worked at the stables. His mother was furious. All three kids were very respectful, and very certain. The one who worked there said Bobby Stemec occasionally showed up with other kids to work in return for free horseback rides. The other two kids said they each worked at Happy Times Stables twice for free rides. I just messengered the sworn statements to Lehman.’
‘I’m amazed he wasn’t furious.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want to get called out for screwing up, this time around,’ Till said.
‘Or he doesn’t want to invite attention that might lead to other scrutiny.’
‘Richie Fernandez?’ Till said. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
Investigators for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced today that they have secured eyewitness testimony tying slain Bobby Stemec, 14, to the Happy Times Stables, where Kevin Wilcox was manager. One witness stated that Bobby Stemec and his friends occasionally worked at the stables in exchange for riding horses. Wilcox is now in federal custody, charged with illegally selling hundreds of firearms. Stemec and two other boys were found murdered less than two miles from the stables. The case remains unsolved.
‘No Fernandez? No McGarry?’ Aria said. ‘Well, this won’t excite Donovan. He’s convinced your mentions of McGarry show you want to keep thumbing your nose at him.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That I’d quit if he reined you in, and that would be a shame because I just booked advertising for a local supermarket and a used car lot, demonstrating my potential to rescue the Examiner from its financial woes all by myself.’
He looked at her, surprised.
She laughed. ‘No chance,’ she said, fingering her pearls. ‘Our ad revenue barely covers our rent here.’
‘Did you mention we suspect Donovan is tied to McGarry financially?’
‘I reminded him that Stemec Henderson and the girls’ cases are heaters, and that your nose is good and Richie Fernandez fits in somewhere. And maybe, I said, so does McGarry, and we need to stay on top of it all.’
‘If the paper doesn’t go down next week,’ Rigg said.
‘I told him the Trib and the Sun-Times would soon sniff out the fact that McGarry left the country.’
‘He was concerned?’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘The man has no taste for news.’
‘You seem unconcerned,’ he said.
‘About my job?’ She sighed. ‘There is that, yes.’
‘My goodness, the phantom returns!’ Blanchie said, bringing water to his booth. Things at the diner had improved, hubbub-wise. Three other booths and four of the tables were occupied.
‘Busy times,’ he said.
‘I’ve been reading your posts,’ she said, pointing to the laptop he’d set on the table. ‘Are they going to get him?’
‘Wilcox, for Stemec Henderson?’ He nodded.
‘And that missing Fernandez, for the girls?’
‘I wish I knew,’ he said, instead of saying Fernandez was likely a dead patsy, like Glet.
She left and he opened his laptop to puzzle again over the piece posted that evening on the Examiner’s website.
As the Cook County sheriff’s investigation into the deaths of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves, Jennifer Ann Day and Tana Damm drags on with no discernible results, hopes are turning to Cornelius Feldott, Cook County’s acting medical examiner. Sources say he has begun carefully examining all the previous evidence collected in the Stemec Henderson murders of a year ago, the more recent killings of the girls, and the untimely death of Cook County Deputy Sheriff Jerome Glet. He’s released no new findings but his methodical assembling of previously verified facts offers the best hope that all of these cases will be brought to successful conclusions.
It might have been the damndest piece of worshipful essaying he’d ever read in the Examiner, but Aria was cunning. She was nudging the Citizens’ Investigation Bureau, the heavies who’d installed Feldott at the M.E.’s office, to get cracking at the sheriff’s department as well, to push Lehman out of the way and put someone else in charge, even a pup like Feldott, to direct a full team of aggressive, intelligent investigators in all three cases.
He looked through the large front window, out at the parked cars and the railroad station beyond. A slim figure stood across the street and seemed to be looking in, straight at him.
He got up quickly and hurried to the door, but, when he got outside, the figure was gone.
‘You all right, Milo?’ Blanchie asked, clearly alarmed, when he came back in.
‘Just peachy,’ he said, of his frayed nerves.
But, of course, his nerves weren’t peachy at all.