He called the Pink before he got on the expressway.
‘Milo, I … I …’ Eleanor stammered.
He managed what he hoped was a reassuring laugh. The word of his exile was out, though he doubted Aria had tipped anyone that he’d been snagged for questioning that morning.
‘A mere pebble on the rocky road of life,’ he said, and asked to speak to Aria.
She picked up immediately. ‘Arson?’
‘Two of McGarry’s outbuildings were torched last night.’
She inhaled sharply. ‘Lehman, destroying evidence of Richie Fernandez?’
‘No. Even if Richie Fernandez is still buried at McGarry’s, Lehman would know exactly where and wouldn’t need to torch multiple buildings to destroy the body. Plus, he wouldn’t want to draw new attention to the site.’
‘You still believe Lehman took Fernandez away.’
‘To resurface later. His DNA can still be compared to the Stemec slide.’
‘Who set the fires?’
‘Somebody who panicked. I have no motive to torch anything. I got hauled in this morning only because Olsen wanted to know what I know.’
‘You’re sure you have no idea who called you?’
‘Only that it was the girls’ killer, desperate to divert attention.’
‘About what?’
‘Traces I’m uncovering,’ Rigg said. It was not yet a lie.
‘You keep saying “traces”. What traces?’
‘Just pass that on to Donovan,’ Rigg said, shamefully sure that she had to be used like everyone else. Everyone had to be played to get one person to believe. ‘Tell him I’m going to make Glet speak from the grave.’
‘He won’t publish you, because of the Curious Chicagoan photos.’
‘Someone else will. Tell him that, too.’
‘Damn it, Milo. What have you got?’
‘Not until it’s all exposed.’
‘Give it up, Milo, for your own safety,’ she said, her voice rising.
‘It’s almost over,’ he said, because, for the first time, he thought he knew just how to make that happen.
He drove to the Kellington Arms, not so much because he expected to find new witnesses to the Fernandez bust, but because he wanted to kill what was left of the afternoon without thinking anymore of what he planned to do.
A new desk man was dozing at the counter, two new denizens slept upright on the two lobby chairs. Rigg headed upstairs. Just Wally was long gone, likely to another of the flops in Chicago. Rigg peeked in his room anyway, but it was empty except for the stained mattress and box spring leaned against the wall, and whatever lived within them.
He worked the floors, spent the afternoon and the first part of the evening going up and down the halls, tapping gently on doors and asking those who answered if they knew Richie Fernandez. He struck out, door after door. In the vernacular of the neighborhood, nobody knew nothing.
He hadn’t eaten all day. He drove to the Rail-Vu.
‘Trouble?’ Blanchie asked, thirty minutes later. ‘You’ve been frowning at your laptop the whole time.’
‘Always trouble, Blanchie,’ he said. He’d combed the Internet for any fresh mention of the girls’ murders, but the cases had gone as cold as Fernandez. With Glet dead and Corky Feldott not yet started up, the case was in a dead zone.
She took away his untouched hamburger. There was always trouble enough to go around. He headed home.
Turning down the one-way street to come into the parking lot from behind, he caught movement on his top-floor landing. He killed his lights, pulled to the curb and leaned forward to see through the windshield. The new exterior light bulbs were too dim to illuminate much beyond creating faint, long shadows, but it was enough. One of the shadows outside his apartment door was moving.
He eased his car door open, got out and ran in a crouch to the parking lot and the car parked closest to the back of the central staircase.
Footsteps padded softly, coming down, and then they went silent. The shadow had gone through the walkway to the front and out to the sidewalk.
Rigg followed to the front and peeked out. A hunched figure was hurrying away. Rigg got to the sidewalk just as the shadow turned into the darkness of the next side street. He ran down the sidewalk, his footsteps muffled by the thin blanket of snow still covering the cement, and got to the next corner just as headlamps appeared from midway down the block. He ducked into the shadows of the building on the corner. The car came up, blew through the stop sign and drove east, toward the city. It was a dark car, a four-door Chevrolet Impala sedan. It had no markings on its doors, no extraneous trim on its side, but it was the sort of sedan that was used by Cook County officials.
Like a cop’s.
Traces. Someone might already have believed.
He went back to his building and up the stairs. His door was locked, but a cop would know how to pick a lock and then to remember to reset it.
The place looked as it always did, stripped of almost everything that reminded him of Judith. It would have been easy to search without leaving a trace – search for the traces Rigg had begun saying that Glet left behind. He’d told it to Feldott, who would have passed it on to Lehman and any number of other co-workers and cops. He’d told it to Sheriff Olsen, who could have passed it along, unknowingly, as well. He’d even told it to Aria. Any number of people now knew about the traces Rigg was supposedly on the verge of discovering. It was his hope. And now someone had come, risking exposure to find out what Rigg had found. That had been his hope, too.
He hurried through his apartment to be sure. His dresser, his socks, underwear and white shirts looked undisturbed. His suit and black tie hung neatly in their usual place – orphans, not used since his wife’s funeral.
The kitchen was as he’d left it. The four mugs that Aria had so neatly aligned remained as they’d been, up front, their handles in perfect symmetry. The green cup – Judith’s cup – was farther back, where he’d pushed it, out of sight. The orange cup he’d used that morning was where he’d left it on the counter.
It was the living room that had changed. The top two rows of file boxes were too neatly aligned, resting too precisely on top of the ones below. They’d been searched, for traces. Nothing had been found. That did not mean that someone would not come again, someone who knew how to beat information out of people.
And there was something else. His visitor had come out just as Rigg was approaching the parking lot. Such a close escape could have been lucky timing.
Or not.
His apartment was no longer safe. He threw clothes in a duffel, drove to a Walmart that was open all night, and sat in his car in the parking lot to think, and maybe to sleep.