The next morning, after seeing Carolina off to work, I set out toward the lake for a quick three-mile run. The sun was out in all of its glory, and finally the breeze coming off the water was warm, a welcome change from the punishing winter winds. The running path was busier now, which meant navigating all of the distractions—most importantly, avoiding slower runners and being hit by passing cyclists. I turned up my earbuds, ran a moderate first mile, then kicked up the pace. My watch buzzed with a message, but I was in full stride and didn’t want to break focus. I had one mile left, and my lungs were starting to burn. I took a few deep breaths, then lost myself in the familiar mechanics of my stride, arms pumping, and my heart racing to keep up with the increased work of my lungs. The last quarter mile I had mapped out so that it would be slightly downhill, and I could give it a full kick. I stopped my watch at eighteen minutes and twenty seconds.
I walked back toward my apartment, enjoying the post-run high, which was typical after a strong run like this. I looked down at my watch and read the message that I had ignored earlier. It was from Emily Kantor, asking if I could meet her for tea at the Peninsula sometime that afternoon. I had a meeting with Darryl Wolcott at noon to talk about Bishop Thompson, so I texted her back and told her I could meet up with her at two.
I had read what little I could find on Emily Kantor, the youngest of the Kantor children. She kept an extremely low profile. I found only one picture of her, from many years ago, and that was at some charity event where she made a million-dollar donation to an Alaskan wildlife conservation group. I couldn’t find any extensive biographical information other than that she was thirty-nine years old, went to Yale for her undergraduate studies, and had gotten her pilot’s license when she was twenty-five. There was no mention of her ever being married or having children. She had never participated in the family’s business and now lived on a 130,000-acre ranch in Montana.
My phone rang as I walked into my apartment. It was Carolina.
“How was your run?” she said.
“Strong,” I replied. “A quick three miles.”
“I would never put ‘quick’ and ‘three miles’ in the same sentence without also including ‘airplane.’”
We both laughed. Carolina despised running as much as I loved it. She was the living embodiment of what it meant to have great DNA.
“Anyway, I’m calling about Thompson,” she said.
“You already found something?”
“Not the case report, but I put in a call to my friend in the ME’s office. She told me Thompson’s going on the table today.”
“Today? What took so long? It’s been over four days!”
“The family didn’t want an autopsy. Their lawyer put up a big fight. They lost. First cut happens in a couple of hours.”
“Why were they fighting it?”
“She didn’t know. But that doesn’t feel right to me. Wouldn’t you want to know why your husband, who didn’t have any medical problems, suddenly died?”
“Assuming he didn’t have any medical problems. He was only forty-five.”
“And most forty-five-year-olds don’t just drop dead.”
Carolina’s point was well-taken. Families of younger people who suddenly died typically were aggressive in their push for autopsies. They wanted to know how it was even possible their loved ones could suddenly just die without warning. Then there were those who declined to have an autopsy performed. They typically refused on religious grounds or because they already had an idea of the cause of death and didn’t want that information exposed. My suspicions about the Thompson family favored the latter.
“Who’s doing the autopsy?” I asked.
“St. John,” she said.
Margot St. John had been the chief medical examiner for the last several years. She had been an assistant medical examiner for many years before that. She had been hired to clean up the department literally and figuratively after an embarrassing scandal where hundreds of neglected bodies were discovered in the morgue. It was rare for her to do cases. Most of the autopsies were performed by the other doctors.
“If anyone will get to the bottom of what happened, she will,” I said. “Anything someone’s trying to hide will come out on her table.”
“No stone uncovered,” Carolina said. “As soon as I finish my morning admin meeting, I’ll check into his case file and see what I can find.”
I thought about cluing Burke in on my suspicions, but I didn’t feel like I had enough information to convince him one way or another. Right now, my best evidence was the becket bend and good old-fashioned statistics. It was simply a game of statistics. What were the chances that within the span of a couple of weeks, two very wealthy men had been found dead, tied up in beds with the same knots, wearing women’s clothes?
“Something’s missing,” I said. “I’m heading to meet the photographer. Maybe he can fill in some of the blanks.”
Darryl Wolcott had agreed to meet me at a Starbucks on Stony Island Avenue, one of the major arteries on the South Side, where Black people lived and white people dared to enter only when they needed to reach the toll road that led to Indiana.
I spotted him the second he walked through the door in his green Chicago State hoodie. I hadn’t expected him to be so tall or so young. He looked like he should be playing forward on a college basketball team. His hand wrapped around mine like a catcher’s mitt. We took a seat by the window.
“All of the so-called experts never thought a Starbucks would work in this neighborhood,” he said, looking at the long line of cars queued up at the drive-through. “Too many gangbangers and drug dealers.” He smiled again. “They were all wrong. This is one of the highest-grossing Starbucks in the entire city.”
“‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny,’” I said.
“‘But in ourselves,’” Wolcott finished. “That’s one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes. Should be a mantra for our people. Would do a lot of us some good.”
“True, but mantras are useless if people don’t believe in them,” I said. “We need more believers.”
“And more of us looking out for each other. Too many people only thinking about themselves. Sometimes we gotta think about the bigger picture.”
“Is the bigger picture why you didn’t release those photos of Bishop Thompson?” I asked.
Wolcott smiled. “I can’t take full credit for that, but I agreed with Mr. Allen’s decision. It made sense when you do the cost-benefit analysis.”
“Which is?”
“What greater good would be served by publishing compromising pictures like that of a well-known Black preacher? He was on his own time, doing his own thing. It would get tons of downloads and shares and clicks, but at the end of the day, who really benefits?”
“Those pictures could get a lot of money on the open market.”
“Of course they could. Another Black man being torn down. Enough already. Look at what those pictures would do to his legacy and his family’s memory of him. At some point, we have to start choosing principle over money.”
“Honor is a rare quality these days.”
“I don’t know if it’s honor or the times we’re living in. George Floyd’s murder wasn’t just a wake-up call for racial and social justice. It was also a call to our people that we need to do better, have higher expectations, be more unified. One way they try to keep us down is by dividing us. We don’t need to sow our own divisions.”
I liked this guy. He represented the real promise of the younger generation that had driven the social unrest over the last couple of years that had given birth to a greater sense of pride in who we were as a people and a fearlessness to stand up and challenge old norms steeped in inequity and systemic racism. These biases had been so interwoven into the societal fabric that those who perpetuated them were often unaware that they were doing so. Thoughtful, determined young people like Darryl Wolcott were the fresh faces and voices for change. I couldn’t help but think about the shortcomings of my generation and how the progress of our people had stalled on our watch as we mistook false societal gains for real social change.
“Tell me what you think was going on in that apartment,” I said. “I’m interested in your perspective.”
Wolcott shook his head and stared out the window. “It was obvious the man was getting his freak on,” he said. “He was tied up, half naked, ladies’ shoes next to the bed. No doubt he was gettin’ it in. Then, I don’t know, but something must’ve gone wrong. Really wrong. The sex got too rough. Maybe he took something that didn’t vibe with his system. I don’t know what happened, but nothing about what I saw looked natural.”
“Such as?”
“I didn’t have a long time in there with him, but the place seemed too perfect, almost like a hotel room. It was really clean. Too clean, especially for a guy’s apartment. And I know lots of people get into all that tying-up bondage shit, but the way he was stretched across the bed didn’t look comfortable. I don’t see how that could feel good.”
“Did you see any blood or any signs in the apartment that there might’ve been a struggle or that he was attacked?”
Wolcott shook his head. “Nope. Everything was orderly. It even smelled nice, like someone had burned scented candles.”
“Drugs or drug paraphernalia?”
“Nothing I could see.”
“Clarence said you heard the call over the police frequency.”
“I monitor it from time to time to see if there’s anything going on. Usually, it’s just a bunch of chatter, but that night when I heard the call, it sounded like it could really be something. Plus, I was already in the neighborhood visiting my girl, who stays over at Lake Meadows, a few blocks away. So I grabbed my camera and hustled over there.”
“And Boyd, the tenant who found him, just let you in?”
“I think he thought I was the police. I knocked on the door, and he opened it. He looked really upset. I walked in and asked him what happened. He asked if I was with the police. I told him I wasn’t, but the police were on the way. I could tell he had been crying. His eyes were red. The guy was really jacked, muscles everywhere. I asked him what happened. He said he came home from work and found a guy in his bed, and he was dead.”
“What time was it?”
“A little after nine.”
“Then he took you to the body?”
“I asked him if he was sure the person was dead. He said he was sure. The guy wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t breathing. I told him to let me see the body to make sure. He took me upstairs to the apartment. The bedroom is straight off the living room. I walked in, and the guy was lying there in the middle of the bed, all strapped up.”
“Did you say anything to Boyd when you saw the body?”
“What was I gonna say? It was a really bad situation. I couldn’t say anything to make it better.”
“How was Boyd acting?”
“What do you mean?”
“What was his temperament like?”
“He was scared as shit. Most people don’t come home and find people tied up in their beds, dead.”
“You believe that’s what happened?”
“Which part?”
“That he just came home and found one of the country’s biggest preachers sprawled out in his bed, dead.”
Wolcott raised his hands. “Listen, man. I ain’t the detective. You are. I just listened to his story. My job wasn’t to do an investigation. I wanted to get the pictures and get outta there before the police came.”
“Did it seem like he knew it was Thompson in his bed?”
“If he did, he wasn’t showing it. He kept saying how he didn’t know how the hell this could happen to him, and he didn’t understand what had happened.”
“Were those his exact words?”
“Verbatim.”
“A strange response from someone who says he walked in on a dead body.”
“I thought the same thing,” Wolcott said. “But once again, I ain’t the detective. You are.”