Rigg got the text message while he was still in Illinois, stuck in traffic heading eastbound on the tollway. Theodore’s piece had posted on the Trib’s website. Rigg exited the snarl to read it.
Milo Rigg, the Chicago Examiner’s on-again, off-again premier crime reporter, is apparently off-again, suspended following the Curious Chicagoan’s publication of purportedly licentious photographs showing Rigg leaving the home of Carlotta Henderson in the wee hours of a couple of recent mornings. Mrs Henderson is the mother of brothers John and Anthony Henderson, who were found murdered, along with Bobby Stemec, in a forest preserve along the Des Plaines River fifteen months ago. Kevin Wilcox, manager of the nearby Happy Times Stables, is currently under federal arrest for gun charges, but is expected to be charged with the boys’ murders soon.
Rigg, viewed by many as overzealous in his criticism of the murder investigation back then, was transferred a year ago from the Examiner’s downtown offices to its supplement’s suburban outpost following the scandal that ensued over the Chicagoan’s publication of almost identical photos of him leaving the Henderson house. Rigg, very recently widowed back then, was rumored to have wasted no time in carrying on with the comely Mrs Henderson. In a brief phone interview this morning, Rigg stated that he’d never had an affair with Mrs Henderson and that now he’d been set up to be silenced about what he’s learned of recently deceased Cook County Deputy Sheriff Jerome Glet’s investigation into the Stemec Henderson murders and of other matters of corruption and county foul play—
His phone chirped before he was done reading. ‘Greg Theodore just posted a piece on the Trib’s website,’ Aria said.
‘“Rumbles, tumbles, fumbles and crumbles”?’ Rigg forced a laugh to sound unconcerned. ‘I’m reading it now.’
‘Theodore says you’ve got secret documents that will crack all sorts of things wide open.’ She was in her car. He could hear traffic noise.
He held his phone out the window so she could hear his traffic noise, too.
‘Cornelius Feldott said you’re heading to your dune to decipher them,’ she said.
‘Why are you talking to Corky?’
‘I’m doing a piece on him,’ she said. ‘Bring the notes in. We’ll figure them out together.’
‘I had a visitor, a surreptitious sort in the kind of car cops drive. He searched my apartment.’
‘Lehman?’
‘I don’t think my apartment’s safe,’ he said.
‘Bring those damn notes in, Milo. We’ll decipher them and then you’ll be safe.’
‘Maybe tomorrow. I need to figure them out, and I need to think.’
‘Think? Think about what?’
‘Basement door locks,’ he said.
‘You’re not making sense. Lehman will come for you. It will be bombs away. You understand, right? Bombs away?’
‘Bombs away, indeed,’ he said, for it was what he hoped, but it was to a dead phone. She’d hung up.
He pulled back on to the tollway, slogged through another forty minutes of early rush-hour congestion into Indiana, and exited on to Route 12. He and Judith had always loved the way the old, narrow, two-lane blacktop followed the curve of the dunes and the tall grass beneath the southern edge of Lake Michigan. They’d marveled at the change of colors in the trees, season to season, and laughed at how they had to dodge and weave along the ancient bumpy surface that only rarely got repaved, and then only in spots. They’d delighted in imagining the history of that long-ago bootleggers’ route, the fear drivers must have felt almost a hundred years before, running hootch in the darkness from Canada into Chicago, eyes peeled for hijackers hiding in the tall grass. But, most of all, they loved the anticipation of getting to their odd little caboose some dreamer had seen fit to drag up on to a dune. It had been well over two years since Judith had been cut down by a random bullet, two years since he’d felt nothing but despair as he drove along the old route, accompanied only by memories that blurred his eyes with tears, two years of being sure he’d never feel hope again.
And then had come Aria, and now, doubts about yellow cards miraculously discovered, and basement door locks on specimen freezers, and paper coffee cups and soda pop cans left at a DNA lab. Now, he wasn’t sure about anything.
He arrived while it was still light enough to see. He’d been gone just over two weeks, but January had changed the landscape as it changed into February. The dunes were thawing. The ice running inward across the frozen water of the small lake at the base of his dune still looked to be thick, but now there was a small hole in the center. And the snow that had cast a pristine blanket over the dunes was turning to heavy slush, toppling branches into tangled litters on the ground, unremoved because there was nobody left to remove them. It was what the ecologist sought when they’d scraped away the old cottages to revert the dunes to their natural marshland.
Their dune was just beyond the eastern edge of the Great Marsh Project and they’d taken comfort in that, believing that the caboose would be theirs for a long lifetime. They’d figured wrong, then. Now, as the sun was beginning to sink behind the trees, Rigg supposed he might have been figuring wrong about all sorts of things.
He left his car at the sweep-out at the base of the ancient, railroad-tie stairs, where it would be easily seen, and climbed up to the caboose. He took little time inside. He wouldn’t run his generator to power the lights to show that he was home. It would make too much noise and he needed to hear. He refilled their six oil lamps, lit them and placed them by windows, so they would light the ground around the caboose enough to be seen by Pancho’s cameras. He only needed a snippet of video, a fast clip of breaking and entering, coming for Glet’s traces.
The ramshackle woodshed was twenty feet from the door. It was small, the size of a privy, but he and Judith had spent an entire weekend strapping it together from fallen tree limbs and branches, laughing at its crooked rusticity when they were done. They filled it with more fallen wood they cut to fit the tiny pot-bellied wood-burning stove that heated the caboose. They’d joked they had enough to heat the caboose for a lifetime.
The shapes of the surrounding trees were now smudging into blackness, darkening the road below the dune into invisibility. He hurried to pull out the wood at the very back, the first that he and Judith had cut, and began restacking it toward the front. It took but a few minutes to create enough space at the back to hide. He was cold, despite the three layers of fleece beneath his down jacket. He would get colder, waiting. It was the only thing left to do.
An automobile engine sounded somewhere far off. Headlights flickered through the trees and then switched off, but the engine grew louder. The car was being run without lights – dangerous in the deserted, branch-littered roads. No benign driver would take that risk.
The engine stopped. He strained to listen, but heard no car door open and ease shut. The car was likely too far away, down by the shore of the mostly frozen lake.
He hurried to slip behind the stacks of wood, moving a few more pieces so he could see out. The glow from the oil lamps cast the ground around the caboose in light bright enough to see. Two of Pancho’s three cameras were aimed at the door. With luck, the break-in would be quick, a fast look around to see that there was nothing inside, but the image would remain in Pancho’s cameras, damning enough to expose.
The dune had gone silent. No bird chirped, no raccoon rustled. The creatures knew that someone was on the move at the base of the dune.
He took the Glock from his pocket and rested it in his hand on top of the wood. With luck, he would not be seen. With no luck, he would have to fire.
Footfalls began beating slowly up the slush on the railroad-tie steps. The climb was long. It took a couple of minutes. And then shadows reached into the light cast from the caboose.
They were two, both shrouded, both wearing hoodies and long coats. It was no surprise, not after seeing the solid keypad lock on the specimen-room door, not after accepting that his intruder had not been merely lucky to get out of his apartment just in time. There’d been an accomplice, a lookout who’d spotted Rigg pulling up. They’d gotten nothing from Rigg’s apartment. Now they’d come to his dune.
He crouched lower behind the stacked wood. Pancho’s cameras would record their faces as they tried the door, found it locked. They’d knock. There would be no answer. They’d have to break in. It would all be caught by the cameras.
They stepped farther into the light. He’d feared them for having drawn guns, but their arms were low at their sides. He sucked in his breath. Each was carrying two red plastic, five-gallon gasoline cans. Soft thuds sounded as they set them down in the snow.
Twenty gallons of gasoline would turn the caboose into a pyre that would burn to nothing in minutes. The dunes were deserted, the surrounding cottages scraped and gone. Even if somebody did spot the fire through the barren trees from a distance, it would take at least a half-hour for the fire department to respond, and that would be futile, anyway. The caboose was high up. No fire nozzle from a truck had force enough to reach the top of the dune.
The Glock shook in his hand. The caboose was Judith’s, the only place where he could still smell her perfume, the only place from which he could retrace their steps to Lake Michigan to hear her laughter in the sound of the waves.
They bent to uncap the gasoline. They thought he was inside. It would go down as murder by arson, by nameless perpetrators who would never be found. They would get away long before anyone came to those deserted dunes.
They splashed the gas against the aged wood by the door, the stench fouling the air. Rigg pushed his way out of the rickety shed, aiming his gun at the taller of the two.
‘Damn you!’ he shouted.
They both spun to the sound of his voice. The hand of the taller reached into a coat pocket.
The other jumped in front of the taller shadow.
The taller’s gun fired, and fired once more. The smaller shadow slumped.
Rigg fired once, and again, and again, each pull of the trigger kicking the Glock up wildly until the clip was empty and the night went silent.