Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  She offered without being asked, “I know the data on the building because I helped research the property before it was purchased. RB Electric went bankrupt in 2013. A lighting company based out of the Netherlands bought the building from the bankruptcy court to use as warehouse space for their US division. They added the fencing, updated the security, but then their needs changed and the building has sat unused. The Lewis Group bought the building from them in late December.”

  “You found the remains, Ms. Nesbitt?” David asked.

  “Yes. And please, call me Lori.”

  He nodded. “No one else was in the building?”

  “Security was downstairs. They’d let me in around five this morning. I had a meeting with the site foreman scheduled for six to prioritize today’s work—multiple crews would have started at seven.”

  David perched on the edge of a tall stool. “Okay. Lori, what were you doing with a hammer slamming into drywall at five this morning?”

  She gave him a faint smile. “Curiosity is a stubborn trait.” She glanced at Nathan, than back to David. “I’m new on this job—I’ve worked for The Lewis Group since mid-November. It’s my first community rehab, and a lot of buildings in these four blocks are now ours . . . I mean, his. It’s rather interesting work, and Nathan, for some reason he didn’t explain, has put me in charge of this building, made me the arbiter between the architect and the foreman. I was here early, putting in some of my own time working on the details.

  “It’s been bugging me, that lady’s washroom, every time I used it. It felt awfully cramped, certainly not wheelchair-accessible. I’d seen the schematics of the building, and there were no heating or cooling ducts running through that area to explain why the dimensions were so tight. I figured the building had been remodeled so many times that there might be an old staircase or something back there. It paced off about that amount of offset. If that was the case, we needed crews focused there today since it would be significantly more demo work than we’d originally anticipated.

  “The wall was going to come out soon anyway, so I figured I would take a look. I punched a hole in the drywall, and there was his face looking back at me, the jaw and teeth still kind of smiling. Freaked me out, let me tell you. I screamed so loud I probably sent every mouse and rat in the building fleeing.”

  Nathan lightly laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure they were already far away just from your hammering.”

  She chuckled. “I don’t mind the things that run, Nathan. It’s the spiders the size of quarters that give me the shudders.”

  Evie smiled at the humorous way the woman worded it. The sight of a skull would have freaked anyone out, and a woman mostly alone in a building under construction—she’d been fully within her rights to yell. “If you could share copies of that building research with us, it would help us out considerably,” Evie put in.

  Lori looked toward Nathan and got a nod, looked back at Evie. “Sure. If you don’t mind copies of copies, there’s a folder of building research materials in the office downstairs—everything from when this building was built, its various owners, to blueprint changes and the permits issued for electrical and mechanical work. You can take it all with you. I’ve got a duplicate folder at The Lewis Group building.”

  “Perfect,” Evie said.

  Lori turned her attention to David, considered him for a long moment before observing, “You know who he is—the man in the wall. They called you in because you know. They wouldn’t tell me his name.”

  “Saul Morris was a private investigator who’s been missing for six years.”

  Knowing what was coming, Evie kept an eye on Nathan. David had timed things well. Nathan went pale, and then anger surged into his face. He stepped away from Lori, swung toward the windows. “Well, that burns it.”

  “Who’s Saul Morris?” Lori asked, bewildered.

  “A private investigator looking into my wife’s death,” Nathan replied abruptly. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, shook his head. “This can’t be related, Detective. Nothing he was working on for me would have had Saul this far south. Caroline was killed up in Freemont.” Evie watched his anger, fascinated by the quickness of it, along with the rapid way he’d reined it in, dealing with such an astonishing fact.

  “We have a sense of what he was working on, what likely brought him here, and it wasn’t your wife’s murder,” David said.

  Nathan seemed marginally relieved at that news. “Still, it’s not only beyond sad to realize he’s been dead, hidden here all these years, but you know better than I do that it incriminates me. I could have bought the building, hoping to permanently cover up the scene when I heard about the new missing-persons initiative. And now my newest employee rather steps in it, finds the body, and calls the cops before calling me.”

  Lori laughed. It sputtered out of her so that she slapped a hand over her mouth as she shook her head. “Sorry,” she gasped, but still laughed around it. She caught her breath. “If you could hear and weigh what you just said. You sound rather foolish, Nathan. My boss or not, you’ve got an inflated way of viewing your importance. Some of the time at least, like now.”

  Nathan started to smile. “It’s nice to know you have a healthy respect for the guy who signs your paycheck.”

  The tension in him had broken. Evie studied Lori, more interested now than ever in this woman who’d discovered the missing PI. When Lori glanced over, Evie offered a brief smile. Oh, yeah. Ann’s chosen well, she thought.

  David said into the pause, “Nathan, would it help to simply clear the question? Did you have anything at all to do with Saul’s death?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll figure this out. I’ve seen more odd coincidences than this in a case, though you now being the owner of this building is certainly unexpected. Give me some facts. When did you start looking at doing work in Englewood?”

  “Jordan Lake with Helping Hands, Inc., started mulling around the idea of a community rehab here about a year ago. I’m basically his banker on projects like this. The concept didn’t gain traction for this calendar year until Governor Bliss won the election. He’s hoping Helping Hands can double the number of its employees over his four-year term, and a project of this scale is one way to rapidly ramp up hiring.

  “I gave the project to Lori to pull together. If building owners see me on the other side of the table, they know I’ve got deep pockets and can make the decision to meet their price. They see Lori across the table, she tells them she might like to agree to that higher price for the building but can’t, they tend to stay more reasonable in the negotiations. I watched her acquire seventeen buildings with cash left under the cap she was working with, where I would have struggled to acquire fourteen for the same dollars. She did an incredible job.”

  “Thanks,” Lori said softly. Then, “So I’m not fired?”

  Nathan gave her an amused look. “You do too good of work to fire you, though the price of a crime scene is going to need some reconsideration. I’m still not sure how you got Tyson Fenny to sell. The property at the end of the block,” he explained for their benefit. “Adult entertainment and liquor. It was critical to acquire if we were going to change the atmosphere of the neighborhood.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Evie asked, curious.

  Nathan shared a look with Lori. “Probably a roller rink, give kids a place to work out some aggression in a well-padded way. But a church wants a footprint in the neighborhood, and that place has got the sizable parking lot required. What goes in where—that’s the next issue on Lori’s plate. It’s time I moved her off demolitions.”

  They all chuckled at the comment.

  “It sounds like quite an opening project with your new job, Lori,” David remarked. “You said you started working for The Lewis Group in November. Were you working for a real-estate firm prior?”

  “No. The accent tends to give me away. I worked for Estate Services, Ltd., out of their Houston office for the last decade.
If beneficiaries live in several different states, or you’ve got a complex family situation—exes and steps—you’d hire the firm as executor of your will. I’d arrange appraisals, liquidate assets, handle transfers of ownership, according to what the client had outlined. I spent a significant amount of time traveling and I was ready to settle in one place. That happened to be Chicago.”

  “Something I’ve come to appreciate more with every passing week,” Nathan added.

  David tucked his notebook away. “I appreciate you both staying around for this.”

  “We’ve been shifting people to work at other sites, moving deliveries of materials to later dates,” Lori replied, nodding to paperwork in front of her. “I need to talk with Scott downstairs, the security guard who was with me. We’ve been told this will be a crime scene for at least forty-eight hours, that someone is likely to remain on-site even after we resume work.”

  David glanced around. “I imagine the odds are good if a body is on the second floor, there’s going to be one on the first floor.”

  Nathan grimaced.

  “Sorry about that,” David said.

  “Well,” said Lori, “at least it will solve one question we’re debating between the architect and foreman. We’re definitely gutting this entire place.”

  Evie caught David’s attention and held up her phone. “Sharon is here. Lori, if you can get the building history info from the office downstairs, I’ll start on the next piece of this puzzle. You have Detective Jenkins’s number?” Evie handed over business cards for herself and David.

  “Yes.” Lori gathered together an elegant-looking portfolio and slim leather briefcase. “I’d rather avoid that end of the building if you don’t mind, so let’s use the north stairs.” Nathan headed that way with her.

  “Let’s regroup downstairs after you speak with Sharon,” Evie suggested to David. “If you want to head to the lab or stay on-site while they do a preliminary search of the building, Sharon can give me a lift back to the office.”

  David nodded. “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll get a sense of the politics unfolding and then we’ll see what makes the most sense.”

  The press corps was settled in for the long term, most of them walking around with insulated coffee mugs, talking on cells. An enterprising assistant had rounded up some portable heaters and arranged for the brewing of gallons of fresh coffee, enough to fill several large thermoses. The anticipation of someone on the second floor discreetly capturing a photo of the skeleton in the wall would have any self-respecting reporter hanging around with a roll of hundred-dollar bills in hopes of scoring such a scoop.

  Evie unwrapped a sweet-tarts roll as she scoped out the neighborhood. Plywood covering broken windows and faded For Rent signs told an all-too-familiar story. Manufacturing businesses disappearing, gone either to bankruptcy or relocation, had collapsed local incomes, with that impact then rippling through the restaurants, clothing shops, hair salons, drugstores, and on and on.

  Six years ago, Evie mused as she looked around, this would have been an odd place to hold a card game, with Englewood already on a downward slide. But it likely had an organized-crime connection already entrenched, preying upon the community’s desperation—payday loans, get-rich-quick schemes, liquor sales, petty crimes. In such an environment, “RB Electric” would have been a good front for what really went on here.

  A good-sized building, she thought. A night of gambling, with booze and music and women, could have been hosted here when Saul came around with his camera. Saul could easily have gotten himself killed for interrupting a moneymaking enterprise. No panic, just kill him, cover it up, and go on with business.

  “Standing out here in the cold?” David asked as he joined her.

  “Watching interesting dynamics,” Evie replied in verbal shorthand. She nodded to where Nathan was holding a passenger door open for Lori. “You missed most of it. When Nathan Lewis stepped outside with Lori, between the press hollering for a statement and his own people wanting to be recognized as the most helpful employee, there was a near stampede.”

  David smiled. “Sorry I missed it.”

  “He’s not letting her drive herself back to the office. So she finally passed the keys to her car to the site foreman and suggested Nathan should buy her breakfast then, but she has to be at the office for a scheduled ten o’clock call with someone whose name I didn’t catch. I think Lori protested mostly so he could have a polite fight with someone.”

  David laughed. “I’m going to lay odds you just told me all that just so I’d have a reason to be distracted too.”

  With a smile, Evie said, “We all need a little levity after such a grim morning. I know it’s hard on you finding Saul this way, knowing he got zero dignity in death.”

  “It is.”

  “Let’s go figure out who murdered him. We can give this case the day, get the details sorted out for homicide, who’ll be taking it over.” Evie considered him. “But breakfast first. I’m thinking silver-dollar pancakes.”

  “Enough maple syrup, I’ll eat twenty dollars’ worth.”

  “How about that local version of the Pancake House over by the hotel?”

  “Works for me.”

  She waited until they were in the car and David had maneuvered back onto the open street before she said, “Ann has someone working at The Lewis Group. I’m thinking we just met her.”

  David nodded. “Lori Nesbitt. I’ve been wondering the same thing. Did you read ‘cop’ in her demeanor?”

  “Something more interesting. She knew where the body was.”

  David drove in silence for a block. “I didn’t want to go there. She’s a forty-something woman in an expensive suit, working for the last decade in Houston. How does she know where a private investigator gets buried six years ago in Chicago?”

  “I’ve got a few thoughts on that.” Evie figured her idea would go down better over food, when David was occupied and had to hear her out. “But we need coffee first.”

  David glanced her way, amused. “All right. Then we’ll shift the subject for a minute. What happened last night? If you slept, it wasn’t much.”

  “Let’s not go there either.” She turned on the radio. “We’ll find the local news or something.”

  “You’re just stacking up questions for me to come back to later.”

  “Women like to be mysteries.”

  He laughed. “Point taken. We’ll eat first.”

  “So what’s your theory on Lori Nesbitt and Saul’s remains?” David asked as he cut into a stack of pancakes.

  Evie set down her second cup of coffee, considered how to word her speculation. “Lori buys seventeen buildings, including this one? She’s the one who finds the body? She knew there was a body there. Either someone told her the body was there, or she heard a secondhand rumor that he was. She opened up that wall intentionally. It’s easy enough to realistically scream, it would still have been a startling sight.”

  “I’ll concede her reason for taking a hammer to the wall at five a.m. was unusual, but it’s the odd kind of truth that often is exactly what really happened.”

  “David . . . work with me here. She found a body. Whack whack with a hammer and there’s a skull looking at her. Come on. You’re not wondering?”

  He considered the problem. “She said she worked at Estate Services in Houston, and I’m fairly sure she wasn’t lying about that. Easy enough to check it out. Maybe a client says, ‘Hey, want to know a secret? I’m dying, so it doesn’t matter if I tell it. I buried a guy in a wall in Englewood, Illinois, six years ago.’ Or maybe, ‘I heard about a corpse that’s hidden in a wall in Englewood.’”

  “If her job connects her up with information like that, she picks up the phone and calls the cops to check it out,” Evie replied.

  David thought about it, nodded. “What are the odds she was in fact an attorney at that firm, not simply a staff executor of somebody’s will? She handled seventeen building purchases without breaking a sweat—sounds
like a full-blown attorney to me. You know Ann and the friends she tends to collect. Stands to reason Lori is more than she appears. She knows something but she can’t legally tell anyone, so instead she uses the information and gives cops the body.”

  “She’s got the demeanor and self-assurance to be a lawyer, I’ll give you that,” Evie agreed. “But if she’s a lawyer, why underplay what she did for Estate Services with Nathan? Why not tell him she’s a lawyer? There are ways around attorney-client confidentiality; she’s not required to cover up a crime.”

  “So, you’ve got a dying client who tells you about a hidden body. Maybe Lori doesn’t know precisely which building—the client didn’t give her an address, just described the place and said it was in Englewood. She mentions the problem to Ann, and Ann says, ‘Hey, I know someone who’ll be working in that neighborhood and I need a favor to solve what happened to his wife. Come to Chicago and help me out. You can look at solving your mystery while you’re here.’ Lori goes along, seeing Ann’s request as a valid reason to come to Chicago. As to Nathan, Lori didn’t tell Nathan she’s an attorney because he would stick her in legal affairs and Ann wanted her in a job closer to him—searching to find someone who had caused him problems and ultimately killed his wife.”

  “That fits. I rather like it, in fact.” Evie reached for more maple syrup for her pancakes. “Now, who went from Chicago to Houston who would have information about a body concealed in a wall?” she asked idly.

  David narrowed his eyes at the question.

  Evie smiled. “Come on, go there too.”

  David picked up on her subtle point and immediately protested it. “No way was I looking at someone with knowledge of the Witness Protection Program.”

  “C’mon, the building fits—an old warehouse, a rough neighborhood? Card game. Gambling. Body in a wall. I’m thinking gangsters, organized crime. You said yourself it was likely a client who told her about the body. Somebody in Chicago who knew about that body went into WITSEC in the last six years, and got relocated to Houston. And that somebody in WITSEC told Lori about it. She used that knowledge and went whack whack with her hammer, gave cops the body.”