They came for him before dawn, beating on his door, yelling for him to open up.
He found his pants on the floor, his shirt in the living room. He opened the door barefoot.
Four uniforms stood outside. Two Cook County sheriff’s deputies, one Winthrop County deputy and Winthrop County Sheriff Olsen.
‘Milo Rigg,’ Olsen said.
‘What the hell?’
‘I’d like you to accompany us.’
Rigg rubbed his eyes, unsure if he was dreaming.
‘Milo?’ Aria appeared ten feet behind him, wearing one of his shirts and, most obviously, nothing else. Except her pearls. Always her pearls.
She was no dream. He turned back to Olsen. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘With or without handcuffs?’ Olsen said.
Aria walked up to stand next to Rigg. ‘What’s the damned charge?’
Olsen met her stare. ‘You are?’
‘An editor of the Chicago Examiner, in charge of making sure travesties get posted online immediately. What’s the damned charge?’
‘No formal charges yet,’ Olsen said to Rigg, ‘but, if we do file, it will be for arson, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence – and those are just for openers.’
‘Whose fire?’ Rigg asked, but it was for show. Now he understood the previous night’s call.
‘Cuffs, or no cuffs?’ Olsen said.
‘I need clothes,’ Rigg said.
Aria, challenging, taunting, confronting, tousled and so obviously naked beneath Rigg’s shirt, didn’t step back from the cops when Rigg turned to go into the bedroom. The two Cook County deputies and Olsen stayed put – the deputies grinning, Olsen remaining taciturn. Only the Winthrop County deputy frowned, when he was directed to leave the view to follow Rigg.
Rigg found socks, shoes, a clean shirt and the small digital recorder he carried everywhere, and came back to the living room in two minutes.
There were two police cars parked down in the parking lot, neither with bubble lights flashing. Olsen gestured for Rigg to get in the back of the Winthrop County car, and then got in the front beside his driver. They followed the Cook County car around the building and on to the street.
‘What fire?’ Rigg asked again, because he supposed he should.
‘Not without recording your statement,’ Olsen said.
The drive was short. They parked in back of a Cook County sheriff’s branch office and went inside. One of the Cook County uniforms pointed to a door and Olsen led Rigg inside. It contained a small laminate table pushed against one wall, and three plastic chairs. Rigg took one, Olsen another, and they were alone, except for whomever was watching behind the mirrored glass on the wall.
Olsen took a small digital recorder from his pocket, identified himself, Rigg, the date and time, and began. ‘Mr Milo Rigg has voluntarily agreed to be interviewed. Is that correct, Mr Rigg?’
Rigg took out his own digital recorder, switched it on and set it on the table. ‘What fire?’
‘Where were you last night?’ Olsen asked.
‘At my apartment, with a guest who will testify to that.’
‘Let me be more precise. Where were you last evening, in the early evening hours before ten o’clock?’
Rigg smiled at the small camera mounted on the ceiling and turned back to Olsen. ‘A muffled voice called, telling me to drive to McGarry’s estate and wait. I did. I parked so I could see the ground where you couldn’t find McGarry unassisted.’
‘No idea who called?’
‘The fire was at McGarry’s, right? A fine, destructive fire?’
‘You were seen at the property.’
‘I saw none of your officers driving by, as you said they would, nor did I see the private security Corky Feldott hired. Whoever buried Fernandez, if indeed he remains buried on McGarry’s estate, could have been working a bulldozer and your people would have missed the abduction of evidence.’
‘You’re not very observant. One of my deputies was pulled off, down the highway.’
‘Then he can attest to my being parked along the side road for forty minutes, and that I then left without doing anything.’
‘Just two outbuildings were torched,’ Olsen said.
‘Obviously not to destroy Richie Fernandez.’
Olsen nodded. ‘No corpse was found.’
‘Whoever killed Fernandez – think Lehman – wouldn’t need to burn buildings to destroy the corpse. He’d already know where Fernandez’s body was, there or somewhere else. There was another motive for last night, which was to get me spotted out there immediately before the fire was noticed – but you knew that, Sheriff.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, Rigg?’
‘How to do your job, to begin with. Don’t wait for the snow to melt. Find Fernandez’s body or satisfy yourself that he’s not there. If he’s not, be on the alert for a John Doe corpse to show up somewhere. And then find proof that Lehman killed him.’
‘You used to be hell-bent on getting us to dig for Fernandez at McGarry’s. Now you’re telling us he’s not there?’
‘McGarry’s emergence from the ground changed my thinking. He had to be silenced. He was put where Fernandez had been, but Fernandez could be more useful if he was discovered somewhere else. His DNA will match to something placed on Bobby Stemec’s foreign DNA in the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Fortunately, that won’t let Kevin Wilcox off the hook for the boys’ murders. There’s testimony that places Stemec, at least, at the stables, where he traded work for rides.’
‘So Lehman wasn’t your caller?’
‘It was someone else, someone with different motives.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m getting close,’ Rigg said.
‘Close to what?’
‘Traces.’ There was no doubt: the word was growing on him.
Olsen gave it up. He and his deputy drove Rigg home in silence. As Rigg got out, Olsen powered down his passenger window. ‘Keep an eye out,’ he said.
Rigg nodded. ‘I think the killings of the girls have stopped. They served their purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘I don’t know, but I am sure their murderer wants no more risk. He wants things tidied and done.’
‘That’s you, Rigg. He wants you tidied and done,’ Olsen said.
‘Not if there are traces,’ Rigg said, voicing what was growing stronger in his mind.
‘What are these traces you keep mentioning?’
‘Glet must have left traces of what he knew.’
Olsen signaled his deputy to pull away.
Two hours had passed. Aria was gone, but traces of her remained. She’d made his bed and tossed his old shirt in the hamper, but the shirt she’d worn so fetchingly that morning was carefully laid out on the bedspread, as if to signal that she expected to return soon.
He felt a flicker of joy, the first he’d felt since before Judith was killed. But then he felt guilty. Feeling joy was disloyalty.
The chant of an old Beatles song began playing in his head, something about life going on. Now it came mockingly, asking him to choose between memories of the past or hopes for the present. He pushed the song away.
He set water on the stove to boil and opened the cabinet for a cup. They’d bought a set of six, each in a different color, right after they married. It occurred to him now that he’d only ever used the yellow one and Judith had only ever used the green. The rest – the red, the orange, the blue and the white – had always been pushed against the back of the cabinet, unnecessary and unneeded, because they’d never had anyone over to their apartment. Always, they were each other’s best company.
Aria had tidied the cups. She’d pulled them all forward, the used among the never used, and aligned them neatly in a row with their handles pointed outward. He reached up, pushed the green one, Judith’s cup, to the back of the shelf where it could not be seen. The day was to be the first day of his exile from the Examiner, and so, perhaps, it should be a day of other new beginnings.
The kettle whistled. He reached past his usual yellow cup and took down the orange one. New beginnings. He took the coffee to the love seat to consider again what he’d hinted to Feldott, Aria and now to Olsen. Surely there must be traces – notes or documents – of what had excited Glet. Almost certainly there’d been the Richmond Labs’ DNA confirmation of Wilcox as the boys’ murderer. It had made Glet confident that Wilcox was the boys’ killer. But if Glet had left any trace or proof of that, it had not yet surfaced.
And then Glet had brought in a soda pop can and a paper cup for later analysis. And that was what puzzled. Rigg had searched Glet’s house and his car, but found nothing, though that might have meant only that Lehman had found things and that they were now locked away. Traces of those might be impossible to find.
But nobody needed to know that.
He finished his coffee and went down to his car.