Carlotta’s first yellow card nagged during the night. That it listed the marks on all four girls was necessary to establish the credibility of the sender as their killer. But Anthony Henderson was from another time, another killer. His birthmark didn’t belong on that list, except to link the murders of the boys to the killings of the girls. The sender had wanted credit for both sets of murders, but the sender hadn’t known about Wilcox when he delivered the first card to Carlotta.
Rigg could only think that pointed to Lehman and McGarry; McGarry had had access to both the boys and the girls in the morgue. They’d set off to frame Fernandez first for the boys, and likely then for the girls.
Unless it pointed to someone who set out to frame them.
He worked that theory on and off during the night but could make no sense of it.
He’d thought of other things that night, too – things he could make more sense of, things he could plan. By eight o’clock the next morning, Rigg was sure there was only one next step. He called Pancho Rozakis and then he drove into the city.
He knew the war zones south of the Congress Expressway from years of reporting. He knew about the eyes beneath the hoodies on the corners and the other eyes behind the drawn curtains in the houses that still remained. He knew that all those eyes would take him for law; stupid law to be coming so early. It couldn’t be helped. What he was seeking was gotten best in the dark, but that wasn’t one of his options. Things had accelerated; traces were feared. What he needed, he needed fast, without paperwork, identification – and without questions.
He bought it at a corner, a kid’s personal piece. A nine-millimeter Glock with two extra clips. The kid, no more than fifteen, but wiser to the ways of the neighborhood than Rigg could ever be, gave him a hard look. ‘Ever shoot one of these, man?’
‘Sure,’ Rigg said, but it had only been once, and that was for a story. It had scared him.
‘Don’t make no difference,’ the kid said. And that was the truth of the transaction, the way of so many such transactions in Chicago, the way so many bullets got fired so easily and so randomly, sometimes finding people merely laughing on an expressway, hundreds of yards away.
He called Greg Theodore before he walked across the street to the Dead House. ‘Glet was murdered,’ Rigg said.
‘Who did it?’
‘Not quite ready to say,’ Rigg said, like he knew.
‘But you know?’
‘Glet was chasing something huge.’
‘So he kept saying. Do you know what that was?’
‘Not quite ready to say about that, either,’ Rigg said.
‘But bigger than Stemec Henderson, the girls, and that Richie Fernandez you’ve been harping about? Why are you calling me?’
‘I lost my trumpet. I’m done at the Examiner. Donovan won’t publish me.’
‘Those pictures of you in this morning’s Curious Chicagoan at the hot Mrs Henderson’s? You were set up. Maybe we could give you a freelance trumpet here at the Trib.’
‘I think McGarry had money in the Examiner,’ Rigg said.
‘I heard that,’ Theodore said, sounding not surprised, ‘but I can’t get confirmation.’
‘Not important. Glet’s the story. He left traces.’
‘Of his fireworks case?’
‘People are already coming after me for what I know. Yours to use, Greg, just not until after noon.’
‘I’m being used?’ Theodore asked.
‘More to follow,’ Rigg said, and clicked him away. He crossed the street.
‘I think Mr Feldott is in conference,’ Beige Jane at the front desk said.
‘Try him anyway,’ he said.
She checked and told Rigg the department secretary said he could go up. Rigg moved toward the stairs, but got snagged by a thought before he got to the first step. He turned around. Jane at the desk was busy on the phone. He walked straight ahead, went through the swinging doors and took the stairs down to the basement.
He’d never been down there. The morgue was on the first floor, the offices were on the second. But the basement was reserved for storage. All sorts of storage.
A corridor ran down the center, lined on both sides by the same beige cinderblocks that lined the first floor. The doors in the basement were much more utilitarian, made of gray steel with identifications stenciled in red letters, all connoting what was being kept behind them. Most had ordinary, key-locking doorknobs, but the one marked Specimen had a hefty bronze keypad lock attached to it.
‘Help you?’ a male voice asked, irritated and sounding not at all eager to help.
Rigg turned. A short, bald man in a white lab coat, black trousers and gray athletic shoes had come up.
‘Cornelius Feldott,’ Rigg said.
‘You’re two floors too low,’ the man said. ‘Take the stairs you came down on. Keep going up.’
‘That door marked Specimen – is that for DNA storage?’
‘Take the stairs you shouldn’t have come down on. Keep going up.’
Rigg took the stairs he came down on and kept going up.
Feldott met him at the top of the stairs. A slender, bright orange necktie descended down his blue, spread-collared shirt.
‘I was getting worried, Mr Rigg,’ he said. ‘I was told you’d be right up.’
‘Curiosity got the better of me. I went down to the basement.’
‘Not very comfortable down there.’
‘That door marked Specimen – is that where the DNA samples are kept?’
‘Have I heard right, that you’re done at the Examiner?’ Feldott asked as he led them down the hall.
Word had indeed traveled. ‘I’m tidying up,’ Rigg said. ‘That Specimen door?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Feldott said, stopping at a different door. He’d moved into McGarry’s old office. Rigg had only been in the office three or four times, but what he remembered most was its barrenness. No papers had lain on the mahogany back credenza. No papers, pens or pencils lay scattered on the matching desk. It had been the office of a man with nothing to do except wait for better opportunities, and, as McGarry had undoubtedly learned, to do as he was told.
Feldott was waiting for nothing. Two leather cups held pens and pencils, four piles of papers were neatly stacked on his desk. A laptop computer was open on the back credenza, below the antique Northwestern University print.
‘You cleaned him out quickly,’ Rigg said.
‘Sadly, there wasn’t much to clean out, though I doubt we’ll ever completely clean away the stain of him.’ He sat behind the desk, Rigg sat opposite. ‘Sheriff Olsen called me yesterday morning. Woke me up, actually. He told me about the fire at Mr McGarry’s estate. He wanted to know if you were capable of such a thing, but he didn’t sound serious.’
‘I got an anonymous phone call to go out there. I parked, waited, and was noticed by one of Olsen’s deputies staying in my car, doing nothing. The fire started right after I left.’
‘By whoever called you?’
‘It was a clumsy, desperate attempt to get me blamed for destroying evidence of killing Richie Fernandez, I suppose, put in play by someone who fears what I know. I didn’t notice any of your security personnel.’
‘There was a mix-up. They didn’t work that night,’ Feldott said. ‘Anything new on those traces from Glet?’
‘I found three pages of scribbled shorthand, torn from a wirebound notebook, taped beneath a drawer. I have to decode them.’ He’d decided to keep the lie vague. Specifics might trip it up.
‘What do they say?’
‘As I said, they’re coded – some numbers, some jumbled letters, no whole words,’ Rigg said.
‘Want me to have a look at it?’
‘I’m headed to my dune to try to figure it all out. Glet was a simple man. It shouldn’t be hard.’ He paused, then said, ‘I suppose you’ll have to tell Lehman.’
‘He’s in charge. He’ll want those pages.’
‘I’ll hand them over when I come back.’ Rigg stood up, looked around the office. ‘Folks wondered why a hugely wealthy fellow like McGarry would leave his money machine to become county medical examiner. I guess he was after power, aiming for a seat on the county board, and, from there, the mayor’s office or the state house.’
‘He thought wrong, poor fellow,’ Feldott said, standing too.
‘The CIB has put you in motion toward the sheriff’s department, Cornelius. Be careful of Lehman.’
‘I may be starting my own investigation, but he’s still the sheriff. I have to tell him about those notes you found.’
Rigg wondered, now, if Corky understood. It was why he had come.
Pancho Rozakis had texted while Rigg was in Feldott’s office: Three units in the trees, motion-activated by larger, human-sized shapes. Batteries good for three days. Recorder underneath the caboose. Driving back now.
He’d lied a little to Greg Theodore and a lot to Corky Feldott. There was one more lie to make. He called the sheriff’s headquarters. ‘Milo Rigg for Sheriff Lehman,’ he said, not expecting to be put through, because the sheriff would already be on the phone, taking Feldott’s call.
But Lehman, and perhaps Feldott, by not calling him right away, surprised him. Lehman picked up. ‘Arson, these days, Rigg?’
‘I’ll bet Sheriff Olsen had more to say than that, Sheriff.’
‘He told me you think I killed some mysterious witness—’
‘Richie Fernandez, to be precise,’ Rigg interrupted.
Lehman tried a laugh. ‘A mysterious witness that nobody has heard of but you.’
‘And everybody who’s read me in the Examiner. And Olsen – I also told him you killed McGarry, but I’m not calling for a comment. I want to give you a heads-up for what Feldott will confirm. Glet left traces.’ Rigg was beginning to love the word. It was so perfectly innocuous and vague.
‘Traces of what?’
‘Actually, they’re more than traces. He left behind coded notes.’ He hung up. Lehman would call Feldott.
And he’d hear of the dunes.